Harrisburg served as a refuge and passageway for many African Americans fleeing the South via the Underground Railroad and moving north in search of freedom and a better way of life. African Americans of Harrisburg opens the door to this culturally diverse city of the wealthy, middle class, and poor with every possible race, religion, ethnicity, and lifestyle, which makes the fabric of the community so rich.

In City Contented, City Discontented: A History of Modern Harrisburg, award-winning journalist Paul Beers (1931-2011) reveals how contemporary Harrisburg came to be what it is. In a masterful series of essays, Beers charts the capital's development from a City Beautiful, with its celebrated public spaces and premier educational institutions, through the fractures of race riots and the catastrophic challenges of flood and near-nuclear meltdown. Beers employs the well-honed skills of a veteran reporter to craft fascinating character sketches of prominent leaders and humble citizens alike, intertwining their dramatic personal stories with a compelling survey of the region's society, politics, and culture in the twentieth century.

Bloomberg • Best Nonfiction Books of 2020: "[A] tour de force." The basis of a major PBS documentary by Ric Burns, this “excellent history” (The New Yorker) reveals how the automobile fundamentally changed African American life. Driving While Black demonstrates that the car—the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility—has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Melding new archival research with her family’s story, Gretchen Sorin recovers a lost history, demonstrating how, when combined with black travel guides—including the famous Green Book—the automobile encouraged a new way of resisting oppression.

In 2020, a coalition of citizens, organizers, legislators, and educators came together to commemorate the 15th and 19th Amendments by establishing a new monument in Harrisburg, a memorial dedicated to the capital city's significant African American community and its historic struggle for the vote. The Commonwealth Monument, located on the Irvis Equality Circle on the South Lawn of Pennsylvania's State Capitol Grounds, features a bronze pedestal inscribed with one hundred names of change agents who pursued the power of suffrage and citizenship between 1850 and 1920. This book is a companion to this monument and tells the stories of those one hundred freedom seekers, abolitionists, activists, suffragists, moralists, policemen, masons, doctors, lawyers, musicians, poets, publishers, teachers, preachers, housekeepers, janitors, and business leaders, among many others. In their committed advocacy for freedom, equality, and justice, these inspiring men and women made unique and lasting contributions to the standing and life of African Americans-and, indeed, the political power of all Americans-within their local communities and across the country.One Hundred Voices is an initiative of the IIPT Harrisburg Peace Promenade, sponsored by The Foundation for Enhancing Communities.

"Peter Powers brings together critical sophistication in both theology and cultural history, while also demonstrating superior skills at literary analysis. There are few books that address the role of religion in American fiction, let alone ethnic American fiction. None do so in so profoundly revisionary a way as this."--Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., University of Massachusetts-Amherst In Recalling Religions, Peter Kerry Powers demonstrates the pervasive influence of religion in the literature produced by ethnic women writers in late-twentieth-century America. Through close readings of works by Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Cynthia Ozick, the author shows how particular religious traditions have served as a resource for ethnic women, enabling them to sustain their communities in the face of oppression. Powers's analysis serves as an important corrective to earlier investigations of literature and religion. Too often, he argues, such studies have functioned with an abstract or individualistic notion of religion, thus downplaying the significance of ethnic traditions and practices. Other studies have emphasized the religious traditions of discrete groups but have failed to see the points of contact and common purpose between different ethnic experiences. By examining writers with disparate religious heritages, Powers introduces important new insights. He finds that even as traditions and cultural memories have nurtured ethnic wormen writers, their works have frequently rewritten or recreated such traditions for the present day--seeking, for instance, to overcome or transcend the sexism that may have characterized earlier periods. In its explorations of Walker, Kingston, Silko, and Ozick, Recalling Religions identifies broader trends that further our understanding of both American literatureand religious culture. The Author: Peter Kerry Powers is associate professor of English at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. His articles and reviews have appeared in South Atlantic Review, African American Review, American Literature, MELUS, and other publications.

2020 Miriam Matthews Ethnic History Award from the Los Angeles City Historical Society As Southern California was reimagining leisure and positioning it at the center of the American Dream, African American Californians were working to make that leisure an open, inclusive reality. By occupying recreational sites and public spaces, African Americans challenged racial hierarchies and marked a space of Black identity on the regional landscape and social space. In Living the California Dream Alison Rose Jefferson examines how African Americans pioneered America's "frontier of leisure" by creating communities and business projects in conjunction with their growing population in Southern California during the nation's Jim Crow era. By presenting stories of Southern California African American oceanfront and inland leisure destinations that flourished from 1910 to the 1960s, Jefferson illustrates how these places helped create leisure production, purposes, and societal encounters. Black communal practices and economic development around leisure helped define the practice and meaning of leisure for the region and the nation, confronted the emergent power politics of recreational space, and set the stage for the sites as places for remembrance of invention and public contest. Living the California Dream presents the overlooked local stories that are foundational to the national narrative of mass movement to open recreational accommodations to all Americans and to the long freedom rights struggle.