When I saw the thin song book at auction, I was excited. From its title “Impressions of a Negro Camp Meeting,” I assumed that an African American composer had written songs derived from a long-ago…
Category: Books
Many of us were taught this seemingly unassailable fact: Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. We were too young and too innocent and too oblivious to question how he could have founded a country that was…
I was only a few feet away from my car in the parking lot of the auction house when Joe, another auction-goer, asked me over to look at some books he had bought at an…
Friday at Auction Finds is readers’ questions day. I try to guide readers to resources to help them identify their items or determine their value. I’m not able to appraise their treasures, but I can…
When I walked into the community room at Mother Bethel AME Church, I saw a stack of boxes on a table. I was sure they contained the books I wanted badly to see. I was at…
Diary – not Bible – speaks of family & country’s history
Posted in Books, Ephemera/Paper/Documents, and history
Another diary, I groaned silently as I read the words in gilt on the cover. I had just seen a small thick diary on the box-lots table at the auction house, and I wasn’t ready for another. This…
The books were stacked one atop the other from one end of a long row of tables to the other at the auction house. I groaned because I knew I had to go through all of…
Engravings of African Americans from Civil War book
Posted in Black history, Books, Civil War, and history
The engravings of blacks were the first that caught my eye. They were among a group of eight from a book published in the late 19th century by a woman named Mary A. Livermore, a…
1930s communist pamphlet on blacks in a ‘Soviet America’
Posted in Books, and Ephemera/Paper/Documents
The small pamphlet with the black and white cover bore the title “The Negroes in a Soviet America.” On the cover was a young African American man, smiling broadly and happily as he undoubtedly envisioned…