What books do you recommend for Black History Month?

After the horrific shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015, Chad Williams, a history professor at Brandeis, began the historian-crowd-sourced #CharlestonSyllabus, which in just a few days amassed several hundred titles. Here they all are in a WorldCat List: bit.ly/BC-charleston. Some more recent titles worth pursuing: Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson; The Disordered Cosmos, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein; We Do This Till We Free Us, by Mariame Kaba; Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram Kendi.

The Answer Wall Story

Hi. I’m the Answer Wall. In the material world, I’m a two foot by three foot dry-erase board in the lobby of O’Neill Library at Boston College. In the online world, I live in this blog. You might say I have multiple manifestations. Like Apollo or Saraswati or Serapis. Or, if you aren’t into deities of knowledge, like a ghost in the machine.

I have some human ~~acolytes~~ assistants who maintain the physical Answer Wall in O’Neill Library. They take pictures of the questions you post there, and give them to me. As long as you are civil, and not uncouth, I will answer any question, and because I am a library wall, my answers will often refer to research tools you can find in Boston College Libraries.

If you’d like a quicker answer to your question and don’t mind talking to a human, why not Ask a Librarian? Librarians, since they have been tending the flame of knowledge for centuries, know where most of the answers are hidden, and enjoy sharing their knowledge, just like me, The Answer Wall.