Here are 100 books that The Ground Breaking fans have personally recommended if you like
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I taught for more than 26 years in classes ranging from first grade through college. No matter the age of the students, I used children’s books to introduce topics in history. I never shied away from using a picture book with older students and often found they were more engaged in a picture book than in an article. I also used historical fiction as a hook to lure students into picking up a related non-fiction book. In fact, historical fiction was the gateway that taught this writer of 13 nonfiction children’s books to love non-fiction history.
Weatherford depicts a vibrant and thriving Black Wall Street in Tulsa until one elevator ride brings it all crashing down.
Unspeakable has received numerous starred reviews and awards—all richly deserved for shining a light on this horrifying history and reminding us at the book’s conclusion that it is the responsibility of us all to reject hatred and choose hope. It’s a stunning work from a powerhouse author and illustrator team.
Don’t let its picture book format keep you from sharing this important book with teens and adults. The format makes the difficult subject both more accessible and more relatable.
Winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards for Author and Illustrator
A Caldecott Honor Book
A Sibert Honor Book
Longlisted for the National Book Award
A Kirkus Prize Finalist
A Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book
"A must-have"―Booklist (starred review)
Celebrated author Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrator Floyd Cooper provide a powerful look at the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation's history. The book traces the history of African Americans in Tulsa's Greenwood district and chronicles the devastation that occurred in 1921 when a white mob attacked the Black community.
The Black Experience is my experience. Through living that experience, and with the benefit of education, my passion for storytelling—for sharing oft-neglected Black history from a Black perspective—evolved. Professionally, I am a Harvard-educated attorney who writes, lectures, teaches, and coaches in the general area of the Black experience and in the broader realm of diversity, equity, and inclusion. My ten books focus on aspects of the Black experience in America. I have received many honors and accolades for my professional and community work, including induction into both the Tulsa Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.
Murder in the Streets is a unique, first-person, contemporaneous account of the massacre through the eyes of a Native American (Choctaw) man who was not identifiably Native and lived the life of a white man. The man, Choc Phillips, became a Tulsa police officer and wrote the book as a memoir later in his life. This is a rare, contemporaneous account of one of the low points in American race relations.
The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre occurred over two days, May 30 and June 1, 1921, when a white mob destroyed the African American section of Tulsa, Okla., known as the Greenwood District. As a result, more than 1,250 homes and businesses were destroyed, thirty-five square blocks of Tulsa leveled, and hundreds of innocent people were injured or dead.
There have been numerous book and news articles written about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, but most of the first-person accounts were given by African Americans. However, William C. "Choc" Phillips was part white and part Native American and an eyewitness to…
The Black Experience is my experience. Through living that experience, and with the benefit of education, my passion for storytelling—for sharing oft-neglected Black history from a Black perspective—evolved. Professionally, I am a Harvard-educated attorney who writes, lectures, teaches, and coaches in the general area of the Black experience and in the broader realm of diversity, equity, and inclusion. My ten books focus on aspects of the Black experience in America. I have received many honors and accolades for my professional and community work, including induction into both the Tulsa Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.
Release Me is an anthology that looks at the legacy of Tulsa's Historic Greenwood District through the eyes of various authors tapping a plethora of literary styles and devices. Through Release Me, the voices of the oft-unheard ring out. The legacy of the Greenwood District lives.
“Apparitions roam the Greenwood District, yearning to be free of the day they died…” The story of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, OK (aka Black Wall Street) is more than the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. RELEASE ME, the Spirits of Greenwood Speak anthology focuses on the lives of the citizens of Greenwood. The anthology is a symphony of historic facts about the Greenwood District (before and after the massacre) along with timeless and borderless community building principles wrapped in poetry, short stories, art, essays, and photography. RELEASE ME, the Spirits of Greenwood Speak anthology has contributions from Poet Laureate of…
The Black Experience is my experience. Through living that experience, and with the benefit of education, my passion for storytelling—for sharing oft-neglected Black history from a Black perspective—evolved. Professionally, I am a Harvard-educated attorney who writes, lectures, teaches, and coaches in the general area of the Black experience and in the broader realm of diversity, equity, and inclusion. My ten books focus on aspects of the Black experience in America. I have received many honors and accolades for my professional and community work, including induction into both the Tulsa Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.
This photographic history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre recounts a compelling event with an equally compelling pictorial narrative. Dr. Hill, who leads the African and African American studies program at the University of Oklahoma, shares this curated look at a catastrophic moment in time with a view toward acknowledging our full history and shaping our collective vision for an inclusive future.
On the evening of May 31, 1921, and in the early morning hours of June 1, several thousand white citizens and authorities violently attacked the African American Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the course of some twelve hours of mob violence, white Tulsans reduced one of the nation's most prosperous black communities to rubble and killed an estimated 300 people, mostly African Americans. This richly illustrated volume, featuring more than 175 photographs, along with oral testimonies, shines a new spotlight on the race massacre from the vantage point of its victims and survivors.
I grew up on my family’s land run farm north of Enid before coming to the OKC metro for school, giving me a view of the quiet rural spaces and the hopping city life Oklahoma pushes for today and more!
It wasn’t until HBO’s Watchmen that most people learned of the Tulsa Race Massacre, though a few of us who paid attention in tenth-grade history remember a line or two about a “riot” back in Tulsa before the book moved on to talk about something else. This book gives chilling firsthand accounts, both from the author as well as other survivors, who experienced the demolition of an entire community strictly out of prejudice, fear, and hate. It’s a good reminder that it can happen anywhere, any time if we let it.
Mary Parrish was reading in her home when the Tulsa race massacre began on the evening of May 31, 1921. Parrish's daughter, Florence Mary, called the young journalist and teacher to the window. "Mother," she said, "I see men with guns."
The two eventually fled into the night under a hail of bullets and unwittingly became eyewitnesses to one of the greatest race tragedies in American history.
Spurred by word that a young Black man was about to be lynched for stepping on a white woman's foot, a three-day riot erupted that saw the death of hundreds of Black Oklahomans…
Michelle Coles is a novelist, public speaker, and former civil rights attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice. As a 9th generation Louisianan, she is highly attuned to the struggles that African Americans have faced in overcoming the legacy of slavery and the periods of government-sanctioned discrimination that followed. Her goal in writing is to empower young people by educating them about history and giving them the tools to shape their own destiny. Michelle, named to the John Lewis Foundation’s 2022 list of Good Troublemakers, lives in Maryland with her husband and their five sons.
Angel of Greenwood is a fantastic young adult novel about two young kids who fall in love in Tulsa, Oklahoma on the cusp of the Tulsa Massacre, a harrowing event in which their prosperous Black community was burnt to the ground by white vigilantes.
By setting a normal teen romance against this backdrop, the reader can appreciate how disruptive racism is to people’s attempts to live a normal life and how lasting the damage can be.
Angel of Greenwood by Randi Pink is a piercing, unforgettable love story set in Greenwood, Oklahoma, also known as the “Black Wall Street,” and against the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
Isaiah Wilson is, on the surface, a town troublemaker, but is hiding that he is an avid reader and secret poet, never leaving home without his journal. Angel Hill is a loner, mostly disregarded by her peers as a goody-goody. Her father is dying, and her family’s financial situation is in turmoil.
Though they’ve attended the same schools, Isaiah never noticed Angel as anything but a dorky, Bible toting…
When my late wife Margo Wilson suggested, over 40 years ago, that we should study homicides for what they might reveal about human motives and emotions, her idea seemed zany. But when we plunged into police investigative files and homicide databases, we quickly realized that we had struck gold, and homicide research became our passion. Our innovation was to approach the topic like epidemiologists, asking who is likely to kill whom and identifying the risk factors that are peculiar to particular victim-killer relationships. What do people reallycare about? Surveys and interviews elicit cheap talk; killing someone is drastic action.
Florida-based historian David Courtwright is best known for his analyses of the history of drug addiction and the drug business in the United States, but this volume is a fact-filled page-turner on America's lethal violence problem. Courtwright describes a frontier culture in which a reputation for violent capability was an essential social asset and persuasively explicates its similarities with the situation that faces single young men in America's underserved inner cities to this day. The interdisciplinary scope of Courtwright's scholarship guarantees that any reader will learn a great deal from his book. I found it unputdownable.
This book offers a look at violence in America - why it is so prevalent, and what and who are responsible. David Cartwright takes the long view of his subject, developing the historical patterns of violence and disorder in this country. Where there is violent and disorderly behaviour, he shows, there are plenty of men, largely young and single. What began in the mining camp and bunkhouse has simply continued in the urban world of today, where many young, armed, intoxicated, honour-conscious bachelors have reverted to frontier conditions. "Violent Land" combines social science with a narrative that spans and reinterprets…
I have been researching and writing about the era of the American Civil War for something over half a century. My passion for the subject remains strong today, having just published my seventh book. Given the seemingly endless amounts of material from soldiers and civilians alike, I have enjoyed deeply researching neglected subjects and writing about them in a way that appeals to both historians and general readers. For me the Civil War never grows stale, there are always little-used sources to research and fresh ideas to consider. The American Civil is omnipresent in my life—not excluding weekends and holidays!
From its wonderfully apropos title to its cautionary final paragraph, The Calculus of Violence is a deeply thoughtful and original analysis of who was killed and did the killing in the American Civil War—and why.
Aaron Sheehan-Dean argues that a very bloody civil war could have been much bloodier. The book is powerful but never preachy because complex human beings with complex beliefs and motivations are always at the forefront. This superb work forces readers to rethink many supposedly settled questions about the American Civil War.
Winner of the Jefferson Davis Award Winner of the Johns Family Book Award Winner of the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award
"A work of deep intellectual seriousness, sweeping and yet also delicately measured, this book promises to resolve longstanding debates about the nature of the Civil War." -Gregory P. Downs, author of After Appomattox
Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg-tens of thousands of soldiers died on these iconic Civil War battlefields, and throughout the South civilians suffered terrible cruelty. At least three-quarters of a million lives were lost during the American Civil War. Given its seemingly indiscriminate mass destruction, this conflict is…
My first memory of storytelling was as a kid reading Jules Verne’s, The Mysterious Island in the basement of my house in The Bronx where I grew up. It transported me to a world of magic and mystery. The effect of that experience wouldn’t seriously take hold for decades when I realized the acting career I’d pursued for twenty years wasn’t where I was meant to be. Fascinated with mysteries and metaphysics and studying the world of past lives and reincarnation led me to incorporate this vast realm into what I write. The Occurrence, my first novel, took these ideas and thread them through a story of politics and spirituality.
Jessica Stern is a fearless scholar and expert on terrorism. She gets in the den with lions.
Her interviews with extremist members from three world religions aren’t an easy read, but it gives incredible insight into the mindset of violence perpetrated in the name
of God. You will feel her fear, and she does it with an exquisite empathy, but never sympathy.
For four years, Jessica Stern interviewed extremist members of three religions around the world: Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Traveling extensively-to refugee camps in Lebanon, to religious schools in Pakistan, to prisons in Amman, Asqelon, and Pensacola-she discovered that the Islamic jihadi in the mountains of Pakistan and the Christian fundamentalist bomber in Oklahoma have much in common. Based on her vast research, Stern lucidly explains how terrorist organizations are formed by opportunistic leaders who-using religion as both motivation and justification-recruit the disenfranchised. She depicts how moral fervor is transformed into sophisticated organizations that strive for money, power, and attention. Jessica…
I write character-driven thrillers, including my latest novel: Rough Justice. How did I come to write psychological character-driven thrillers? It began years ago when I went to Hollywood in 1977. This was the New Hollywood (1967 -1980), and I worked with writers whose work grabbed viewers viscerally, not with explosions but with multi-dimensional characters that would draw you into a deeply moving story. I spent countless hours working out the stories and shaping the people in them. Working closely with these great screenwriters was a rare opportunity to learn how to create complicated characters and to see how these complex people enriched storytelling.
When I was thinking about the second book I wrote in my trilogy, I knew I had to learn about violence, particularly violence in prison. What causes it, its impact, and why some people hurt themselves in prison. My brother recommended James Gilligan, a prison psychiatrist, and his insights and understanding of it shaped the central character in my book. It’s troubling but fascinating reading for anyone who’s interested in understanding this.
An eye-opening, revisionist analysis of the social and psychological roots of violence argues that violence should be approached as a problem in public health and preventative medicine, rather than one of biological or moral origins, and that shame is the common denominator that links violent perpetrators.
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