Featured Books Archive at Pardee Library

The first Black woman Harvard MBA tells the remarkable story of how she achieved the American dream.

Besides providing a penetrating glimpse into the world of Black entrepreneurship both past and present, this book urges African Americans to gain financial independence as entrepreneurs.

Lauren Araiza examines the dynamics of race, class, labor, and politics in twentieth-century freedom movements. The lessons in this eloquent and provocative study apply to a broader understanding of political and ethnic coalition building in the contemporary United States.

Mary Ellen Pleasant. Robert Reed Church. Hannah Elias. Annie Turnbo-Malone. O. W. Gurley. Madam C. J Walker. Black Fortunes illuminates as never before the birth of the Black business titan.

Quincy T. Mills traces the lineage from nineteenth-century barbers to the bustling enterprises of today, demonstrating that the livelihood offered by the service economy was crucial to the development of a Black commercial sphere and the barber shop as a democratic social space.

Looking through the lens of Black business history, Beauty Shop Politics shows how Black beauticians in the Jim Crow era parlayed their economic independence and access to a public community space into platforms for activism.

A biography of Anthony Overton, a son of enslaved people who became one of the leading African American entrepreneurs of the twentieth century, whose Chicago-based empire ranged from personal care products and media properties to insurance and finance.

This second edition provides both a history of Black entrepreneurship in America throughout all periods of American history and a roadmap that explains the steps that prospective entrepreneurs must take to achieve success in business in light of America's legacy of slavery, segregation, and rampant discrimination against Black Americans.

Juliet Walker's award-winning book provides a detailed study of the continuity, diversity, and multiplicity of independent self-help economic activities among African Americans. This new, updated edition covers African American business history from the Civil War to the present.

Uniting the latest scholarship on race, labor, and civil rights, The Black Worker aims to establish the richness of the African American working-class experience, and the indisputable role of Black workers in shaping the politics and history of labor and race in the United States.

Offers an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce. Queer Career shows how LGBT history helps us understand the recent history of capitalism and labor and rewrites our understanding of the queer past.

A long-overdue study of the workplace movement, Raeburn's analysis focuses on the mobilization of lesbian, gay, and bisexual employee networks over the past fifteen years to win domestic partner benefits in Fortune 1000 companies.

David K. Johnson tells the story of the physique magazine produced by and for gay men to show how gay commerce was an important catalyst for the gay rights movement. He offers a vivid look into the lives of physique entrepreneurs and their customers.

Out at Work identifies the important parallels between the labor and gay rights movements and their shared work of foregrounding human rights and embracing the full range of sexual expression. There is much to be gained from a partnership between these movements.

In a hard-hitting book that refutes conventional wisdom, Katherine Sender explores the connection between the business of marketing to gay consumers and the politics of gay rights and identity.

Beginning with the founding of the profession in the late 1920s and continuing into the post-September 11 era, Plane Queer examines how this heavily gay-identified group of workers created an important place for gay men to come out and advocate for LGBT civil rights.

Social change is far more complicated than building a new app. Lean Impact offers bold ideas to reach audacious goals through customer insight, rapid experimentation and iteration, and a relentless pursuit of impact.

Janet Mock recounts how she built a career in the highly competitive world of magazine publishing--within the unique context of being trans, a woman, and a person of color. Hers is a timely glimpse about the barriers many face--and a much-needed guide on how to make a way out of no way.

Legal scholar Carlos Ball tells the story of how LGBT rights activism during the 20th century helped turn major companies into reliable movement allies. The Queering of Corporate America complicates the narrative of corporate conservatism, and provides insights into the future of the legal, political, and cultural implications of this unexpected relationship.

Chronicles the evolution of labor politics with queer activism and identity formation, showing how unions began affirming the rights of LGBT+ workers in the 1970s and 1980s. She documents coming out on the job and in the union as well as issues of discrimination and harassment, and the creation of alliances between unions and LGBT communities.