Winner of a 2012 Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction

The first book to cover the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from pre-1492 to the present.
In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to “Publick Universal Friend,”...

"Born in rural Kentucky, Mickey Hess grew up listening to the militant rap of Public Enemy while living in a place where the state song still included the word "darkies." Listening to hip-hop made Hess think about what it meant to be white, while the environment in small-town Kentucky encouraged him to avoid or even mock such self-examination. With America's history of cultural appropriation, we've come to mistrust white people who participate deeply...

"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...

The Information-Literate Historian: A Guide to Research for History Students is the only book specifically designed to teach today's history students how to successfully select and use sources--primary, secondary, and electronic--to carry out and present their research. Expanded and updated, the third edition of The Information-Literate Historian continues to be an indispensable reference for historians, students, and other readers doing history research....

"A funny thing has happened on our way to the digital utopia: we find ourselves increasingly missing reality. In this spirited book, David Sax has found story after story of entrepreneurs, artisans, and creators who make real money by selling real things. And they're not just local craftspeople, either. As paper is supposedly vanishing, Moleskine notebooks---a company founded in 1997, the same year as the first dot-com boom---has grown into a large...

One of jazz's leading critics gives us an invigorating, richly detailed portrait of the artists and events that have shaped the music of our time. Grounded in authority and brimming with style, Playing Changes is the first book to take the measure of this exhilarating moment: it is a compelling argument for the resiliency of the art form and a rejoinder to any claims about its calcification or demise. "Playing changes," in jazz parlance, has long...

"Claude Debussy was the father of the Modern era in classical music. His innovations liberated Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartâok to write their iconoclastic works, and is harmonic inventions are still heard in American jazz. Though he was among the most compelling figures of the Belle âEpoque, his life is little known to all but scholars; and of his considerable musical output, only Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun," La Mer, and "Clair de lune"...

"Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and DJ Yella caused a seismic shift in hip-hop when they decided to form N.W.A in 1986. Suddenly rap became gangsta and relevant on the West Coast. With their hard-core image, bombastic sound, and lyrics that were by turns poetic, lascivious, socially conscious, and downright in-your-face, N.W.A spoke the truth about life on the streets of Compton, California--at the time a hotbed of poverty, drugs, gangs, and unemployment....