A groundbreaking collection of photographs and essays that shed new light on the history of Black America, from the Picturing Black History project. “An astonishing work." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Picturing Black History uncovers untold stories and rarely seen images of the Black experience, providing new context around culturally significant moments. This beautiful collectible volume makes a thoughtful gift and is full of rousing, vibrant essays paired with rarely seen photographs that expand our understanding of Black history. The book is a collaborative effort between Getty Images, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, and the History departments at The Ohio State and Miami Universities. It informs, educates, and inspires our current moment by exploring the past, blending the breadth and depth of Getty Images’s archives with the renowned expertise of Origins contributors and The Ohio State’s and Miami’s History departments, including Daniela Edmeier, Damarius Johnson, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Steve Conn. Created by a growing collective of professional historians, art historians, Black Studies scholars, and photographers and showcasing Getty Images’s unmatched collection of photographs, Picturing Black History embraces the power of visual storytelling to relay little-known stories of oppression and resistance, perseverance and resilience, freedom, dreams, imagination, and joy within the United States and around the world. In collecting these new photographic essays, this book furthers an ongoing dialogue on the significance of Black history and Black life, sharing new perspectives on the current status of prejudice and discrimination bias with a wider audience. Picturing Black History uses the latest academic learning and scholarship to recontextualize and dispel prejudices, while uncovering, digitizing, and preserving new archival materials to amplify a more inclusive visual landscape. "Picturing Black History offers a trove of both famous and unseen photos with brief, poignant accompanying essays to show not only the centrality of Black people to American history but also how African Americans used the photographer’s lens to tell their own stories. The editors, authors, and Getty images have created a beautiful book that stands on its own as a work of art, a veritable museum in print.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

A study of African American identity is the creation of an expert on African-American photography who asked writers, critics, and filmmakers to select a photograph of personal or historical significance and "read" it for insights into the black experience.

Features remarkable portraits of African Americans before and after Emancipation, including images of young African American soldiers in Civil War-era military uniform.

Shows that the history of black photographers intertwines with the story of African American life, as seen through photographs ranging from antebellum weddings and 1960s protest marches, to portraits of contemporary black celebrities.

The visual legacy of Florestine Perrault Collins, who documented African American life in New Orleans Florestine Perrault Collins (1895-1988) lived a fascinating and singular life. She came from a Creole family that had known privileges before the Civil War, privileges that largely disappeared in the Jim Crow South. She learned photographic techniques while passing for white. She opened her first studio in her home, and later moved her business to New Orleans’s Black business district. Fiercely independent, she ignored convention by moving out of her parents’ house before marriage and, later, by divorcing her first husband.  Between 1920 and 1949, Collins documented African American life, capturing images of graduations, communions, and recitals, and allowing her subjects to help craft their images. She supported herself and her family throughout the Great Depression and in the process created an enduring pictorial record of her particular time and place. Collins left behind a visual legacy that taps into the social and cultural history of New Orleans and the South.  It is this legacy that Arthé Anthony, Collins's great-niece, explores in Picturing Black New Orleans. Anthony blends Collins's story with those of the individuals she photographed, documenting the profound changes in the lives of Louisiana Creoles and African Americans. Balancing art, social theory, and history and drawing from family records, oral histories, and photographs rescued from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Anthony gives us a rich look at the cultural landscape of New Orleans nearly a century ago.  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In Nikki Haley's Lessons from the New South, Wanda Little Fenimore traces the resurrection of the phrase “New South” with South Carolina’s former governor, Nikki Haley. Through analyzing speeches, Fenimore demonstrates how politicians use historical terms in new ways that obscure their roots but remain oppressive in the twenty-first century. This book reveals how Nikki Haley manufactured her “New South” as progressive, and forward-thinking, yet the term functions as a form of inferential racism, ultimately, reproducing traditional conservatism rooted in white supremacy. Scholars of rhetoric, communication, political science, and women’s studies will find this book of particular interest.