Publications

This fully illustrated guide to the Smithsonian's newest museum takes visitors on a journey through the richness and diversity of African American culture and the history of a people whose struggles, aspirations, and achievements have shaped the nation. Opened in September 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture welcomes all visitors who seek to understand, remember, and celebrate this history. The guidebook provides a comprehensive tour of the museum, including its magnificent building and grounds and eleven permanent exhibition galleries dedicated to themes of history, community, and culture. Highlights from the museum's collection of artifacts and works of art are presented in full-color photographs, accompanied by evocative stories and voices that illuminate the American experience through the African American lens.

This stunning gift book accompanies the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. It combines informative narratives from leading scholars, curators, and authors with objects from the museum's collection to present a thorough exploration of African American history and culture. Abundant photographs, sidebars, quotations, poems, and profiles of trailblazers and visionaries round out this rich and engrossing narrative. Dream a World Anew offers the opportunity to explore and revel in African American history and culture, as well as the chance to see how central African American history is for all Americans.

This beautifully illustrated keepsake showcases the extraordinary treasures of the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s collections. Together the objects illustrate the rich complexity of the African American experience. Numerous objects are accompanied by captions explaining their significance and role in our nation’s history. This book, like the museum it represents, uses artifacts of African American history and culture as a lens into what it means to be an American.

For more than a century, the signature sound of New Orleans has been the brass band — at once a source of celebration, collective expression, and community pride. On February 10, 2015, Smithsonian Folkways released the newly-recorded collection New Orleans Brass Bands: Through the Streets of the City, bringing together for the first time in one recording three musical generations that represent three dominant styles of brass bands. Featured are the classic sound of the Liberty Brass Band, the modern-yet-traditional Treme Brass Band, and the funk, rap, and “bounce” influenced Hot 8 Brass Band.

African American Women celebrates portraits and candid photographs of African American women including celebrities, activists, and historic figures who deserve to be better known. This issue portrays the dignity, joy, heartbreak, resilience, commitment, and sacrifice of women of all ages and backgrounds. 

Essays Include: Foreword, by Lonnie Bunch; Picturing Grace, by Kinshasha Holman Conwill; and Ars Poetica, by Natasha Trethewey

Through the African American Lens provides an overview of the photography collection supporting the Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts and encompasses the Museum’s overarching thematic selections – History, Community, and Culture.

Essays include: Foreword by Lonnie Bunch; Self-Representation and Hope: The Power of the Picture by Rhea L. Combs; and America’s Lens, by Deborah Willis.

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment celebrates the seventy-five year history of the Apollo Theater, Harlem's landmark performing arts space and the iconic showplace for the best in jazz, blues, dance, comedy, gospel, R & B, hip-hop, and more since it opened its doors in 1934. This beautifully illustrated book is the companion volume to an exhibition of the same name, organized by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in collaboration with the Apollo Theater Foundation. It offers a sweeping panorama of American cultural achievement from the Harlem Renaissance to the present through the compelling story of a single institution.

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing brings together a diverse group of twenty-four writers to discuss the theater's history and its intersection with larger social and political issues within Harlem and the nation. Featuring more than 300 photographs, this volume brings to life the groundbreaking entertainers in music, dance, and comedy—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Smokey Robinson, Aretha Franklin, The Supremes, James Brown, Moms Mabley, Redd Foxx, Honi Coles, and Savion Glover, to name a few—who made the Apollo the icon that it is today. The Apollo Theater has been the setting for soaring achievement and creativity in the face of enormous challenges. In telling this truly American story, Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing is a celebration of the lasting contributions of African Americans to the nation's cultural life.

Raised in a large, musical farm family in Rappahannock County, Virginia, John Jackson (1924-2002) was the most important black Appalachian musician to come to broad public attention during the mid-1960s. Having learned guitar and his wide-ranging stock of songs as a youth from family and 78-rpm recordings, he enthralled major audiences during more than three decades with his vintage style and repertoire. Culled from hundreds of live concert recordings in the Smithsonian Folkways archives, the twenty tracks of Rappahannock Blues highlight John Jackson the way he most wanted to be remembered—as a bluesman

Nearly a century's worth of Scurlock photographs combine to form a searing portrait of black Washington in all its guises—its challenges and its victories, its dignity and its determination. Beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the 1990s, Addison Scurlock, followed by his sons, Robert and George, used their cameras to document and celebrate a community unique in the world, and a stronghold in the history and culture of the nation's capital.

Through photographs of formal weddings, elegant cotillions, ballet studios, and quiet family life, the Scurlocks revealed a world in which the black middle class refused to be defined or held captive by discrimination. From its home on the vibrant U Street corridor, the Scurlock Studio gave us indelible images of leaders and luminaries, of high society and working class, of Washingtonians at work and at play. In photograph after photograph, the Scurlocks captured an optimism and resiliency seldom seen in mainstream depictions of segregated society.

Luminaries such as Duke Ellington, Ralph Bunche, Mary McLeod Bethune, Alain Locke, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lois Mailou Jones testify to the intellectual and cultural vibrancy that was unique to Washington and an inspiration to the nation. Photographs of a Peoples Drugstore protest and Marian Anderson's Easter morning concert at the Lincoln Memorial remind us that the struggle for equality in black Washington began long before the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Offering a rich lens into our past, The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington is a powerful trigger of personal and historical memory.