Looking for a good summer read? We are making ten eBooks available for free during the month of July. These books are among the many titles that are now available in both paperback and digital formats as part of our Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan (SHARP) grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Over the past 18 months, our SHARP grant has supported the expansion of our publications in Latin American and Caribbean studies and African American studies and has increased the accessibility, discoverability, and distribution of this research.
These ten free eBooks invite readers to explore a wide range of topics including alternate views of Haitian and Dominican history, the complex relationship between the space program and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South, and the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum Black literary constructions of selfhood.
You can enjoy the digital versions of these ten books for free on eReaders such as Kobo, Nook, Apple Books, and Kindle through July 31, 2023. To access any of these free eBooks, visit our website or your favorite eBook vendor and navigate to the book of your choice. We hope you enjoy these free reads.
If you would like to order the paperback formats of these books, click the links below to visit our website and use code SHARP for discount prices.
NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement
Brian C. Odom and Stephen P. Waring
Examining the ways in which NASA’s goal of space exploration both conflicted and aligned with the cause of racial equality, this volume provides new insights into the complex relationship between the space program and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South and abroad. Essays explore how thousands of jobs created during the space race offered new opportunities for minorities in places like Huntsville, Alabama, while at the same time segregation at NASA’s satellite tracking station in South Africa led to that facility’s closure, among other topics.
Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora
Bénédicte Boisseron
In Creole Renegades, Bénédicte Boisseron looks at exiled Caribbean authors—Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Maryse Condé, Dany Laferriére, and more—whose works have been well received in their adopted North American countries but who are often viewed by their home islands as sell-outs, opportunists, or traitors.
Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies
April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram
Exploring a variety of topics including European colonialism, migration, citizenship, sex tourism, music, literature, and art, contributors demonstrate that alternate views of Haitian and Dominican history and identity have existed long before the present day. This volume speaks of an island and people bound together in a myriad of ways.
Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination
Toni Pressley-Sanon
Gathering oral stories and visual art from Haiti and two of its “motherlands” in Africa, Istwa across the Water recovers the submerged histories of the island through methods drawn from its deep spiritual and cultural traditions. Challenging the tendency to read history linearly, this volume offers a bold new approach for understanding Haitian histories and imagining Haitian futures.
Digital Humanities in Latin America
Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Carlos Rodríguez
This volume provides a hemispheric view of the practice of digital humanities in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas. These essays examine how participation and research in new media have helped configure new identities and collectivities in the region. Featuring case studies from throughout Latin America, including the United States Latinx community, contributors analyze documentary films, television series, and social media to show how digital technologies create hybrid virtual spaces and facilitate connections across borders.
Cuban Cultural Heritage: A Rebel Past for a Revolutionary Nation
Pablo Alonso González
Cuban Cultural Heritage explores the role that cultural heritage and museums played in the construction of a national identity in postcolonial Cuba. Starting with independence from Spain in 1898 and moving through Cuban-American rapprochement in 2014, Pablo Alonso González illustrates how political and ideological shifts have influenced ideas about heritage and how, in turn, heritage has been used by different social actors to reiterate their status, spread new ideologies, and consolidate political regimes.
Black Well Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature
Andrea Stone
This book highlights the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum Black literary constructions of selfhood. At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized Black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability.
Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature
Erin Michael Salius
Sacraments of Memory is the first book to focus on Catholic themes and imagery in African American literature. Erin Michael Salius discovers striking elements of the religion in neo-slave narratives written by Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Leon Forrest, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Charles R. Johnson, and Edward P. Jones.
The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture
Deanna M. Gillespie
This book details how African American women used lessons in basic literacy to crack the foundation of white supremacy and sow seeds for collective action during the civil rights movement. Deanna Gillespie traces the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), a grassroots initiative that taught people to read and write in preparation for literacy tests required for voter registration—a profoundly powerful objective in the Jim Crow South.
Robert R. Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle
Darius J. Young
This volume highlights the little-known story of Robert R. Church Jr., the most prominent Black Republican of the 1920s and 1930s. Tracing Church’s lifelong crusade to make race an important part of the national political conversation, Darius Young reveals how Church was critical to the formative years of the civil rights struggle.
The digital versions of these ten books can be accessed for free through July 31, 2023.
To view all books funded through our SHARP grant, click here. Use code SHARP for discount prices.
Interested in learning more about our SHARP grant activities? Click the links below to access recordings of webinars we hosted as part of the initiative.
Recent Webinars
African Diasporic Arts and Social Change
Race, Environment, Culture, and Political Ecology across the Americas
Career Paths in Humanities, Public Engagement, and Publishing
The Florida Bookshelf 