Books like East Main Street by Shilpa Davé

Americanah follows Ifemelu, a Nigerian student who moves to the United States for university, exploring her life and love across continents while reflecting on identity, immigration, and cultural belonging.

A Hong Kong immigrant teenager in Brooklyn balances school, a night shift in a Chinatown sweatshop, and family expectations, while learning to translate both language and identity across cultural divides.

Takin' It to the Streets is a comprehensive collection of primary documents covering political, social and cultural aspects of the 1960's. Drawn from mainstream sources, little-known sixties periodicals, pamphlets and public speeches, this anthology brings together representative writings many of which have been unavailable for years or have never been reprinted, from the Port Huron Statement and Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet" to Richard Nixon's "If Mob Rule Takes Hold in the U.S." and Ronald Reagan's "Freedom versus Anarchy on Campus." Introductions and headnotes by the editors help highlight the importance of particular documents while relating them to each other and placing them within the broader context of the decade. While paying particular attention to civil rights, anti-war activity, Black power, the counter-culture, the women's and gay/lesbian struggles for recognition, the authors also take into account the conservative backlashes these sparked and thus present a balanced portrait of a tumultous era. Covering an extremely popular period of history, Takin' It to the Streets stands out as a thorough and accessible collection of documents, an authoritative reader for a decade such as America had not seen before or experienced since.

"The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert a powerful and disturbing influence on American's understanding of race. So argues Linda Williams in this inquisitive book, where she probes the bitterly divisive racial sentiments aroused by such recent events as O. J. Simpson's criminal trial. Williams, the author of Hard Core, explores how these images took root, beginning with melodramatic theater, where suffering characters acquire virtue through victimization."--BOOK JACKET.

Reiss examines P. T. Barnum’s 19th‑century exhibit of the supposedly 161‑year‑old enslaved woman Joice Heth, using her life and death to explore race relations, performance, and the spectacle of death in ante‑bellum America.

Explores how 'hip' evolved from underground culture to a global cultural touchstone, charting its influence on music, fashion, gender, race, and mainstream commerce over the twentieth century.

After Maribel’s life‑saving recovery, the Rivera family seeks a new life in Delaware, but cultural and linguistic hurdles threaten to derail their hopes for the American Dream.

Newspapers today are filled with stories of corruption and strife in America's Chinatowns, reversing the popular view of Chinese Americans as a model minority of law-abiding, hard-working people whose diligent children end up in high-tech jobs. In The New Chinatown, Peter Kwong goes beyond the headlines in a compelling and detailed account of the political and cultural isolation of Chinese-American communities. This new edition offers a revised and updated text as well as a new chapter on Chinatown in the 1990s.