David Levering Lewis

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America, was a towering and controversial personality, a fiercely proud individual blessed with the language of the poet and the impatience of the agitator. Now, David Levering Lewis has carved one volume out of his superlative two-volume biography of this monumental figure that set the standard for historical scholarship on this era. In his magisterial prose,...

In this panoramic history of Islamic culture in early Europe, a Pulitzer Prizewinning historian re-examines what we thought we knew. Lewis reveals how cosmopolitan, Muslim al-Andalus flourished--a beacon of cooperation and tolerance between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity--while proto-Europe made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, religious intolerance, perpetual war, and slavery.--From publisher description.

Acclaimed by leading historians and critics when it appeared shortly after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this foundational biography wends through the corridors in which King held court, posing the right questions and providing a keen measure of the man whose career and mission enthrall scholars and general readers to this day. Updated with a new preface and more than a dozen photographs of King and his contemporaries, this edition presents...

This monumental biography--eight years in the research and writing--treats the early and middle phases of a long and intense career: a crucial fifty-year period that demonstrates how Du Bois changed forever the way Americans think about themselves.

In the 1920s, Harlem, "the cultural capital of Black America," was host to some of America's finest and most daring writers, actors, musicians, and artist. Black artists contributed to Harlem's excitement by creating art which expressed their identity and introduced Black themes into American modernism. Among the artists who achieved international fame during the Harlem Renaissance were the sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, painter and book illustrator...