After the future heavyweight boxing champion dropped out of trade school at the age of fifteen in order to earn money, Louis’ mother arranged half a dozen lessons, perhaps in the hopes of distracting her son from gang lifestyle in which she worried he was becoming involved. Yet Louis was not a musician; he played only long enough for him to master a few scales and incur the skepticism of his streetwise friends. “A violin felt small in my hands,” Louis said later, but those hands were just the right size for the left jabs and hooks he would soon be learning.

In Joe Louis: Hard Times Man, Randy Roberts traces Louis’ remarkable biography from these early days to the nearly twelve years he spent as a world champion, and beyond to the financial troubles and drug use of his later life.  During a period where America was very much in need of hope, Louis was not only a powerful athlete, but a touchstone for African Americans and the nation as a whole, receiving “more column inches of newspaper coverage during the 1930s than FDR” with his “New Deal for boxing.”

When, on September 24, 1935, Louis knocked out white boxer Max Bauer, the reigning heavyweight champion, there were thirty-five thousand African Americans at the fight, for whom Louis’ victory was a much-needed symbol for black pride in a harshly segregated society. In the words of Richard Wright, who listened to the fight from a tavern on the South Side of Chicago, he was “the concentrated essence of black triumph over white;” his victory against Bauer offered proof that blacks were just as good as whites—and better.

Yet Louis’ quick jabs were not only a source of inspiration to African Americans. In an era where boxing was, along with baseball, America’s most important sport, Louis was a phenomenon throughout the U.S.; his famous rematch with German boxer Max Schmeling was understood as an assertion of national strength and identity when the world stood on the threshold of WWII. Indeed, Roberts makes it clear that Louis in his prime was among the best of the best American athletes, a “champ,” a “hero,” a “king of the world.”

Here’s our Presidents’ Day Quiz:

1. What crop did Jefferson notably compete with neighbors to produce the first seasonal harvest, accompanied by a community dinner feat of the winning crop?
2. In what year did Jefferson begin his “Garden Book”, meticulously documenting notes, measurements, and figures about his observations of vegetables at his boyhood home of Shadwell? (Hint: He started on today’s date: February 20.)
3. Who was the first scholar to transcribe Jefferson’s sixty-six page “Garden Book?”
4. What type of vegetable was among “the most valuable garden plants” in the Monticello Garden, even though Jefferson’s “discovery” of this “new” species has not withstood the scientific classification of later studies?

Send us your responses by Friday, March 2 for your chance to win a highly coveted advance copy of the new book, just in time for gardening season!

In her inaugural episode, Harris-Perry covers Mitt Romney and campaign psychology for candidates—including “Daddy Issues”, the GOP progress with Southern voters, union memberships and the middle class, women on the idea of dating Chris Brown, women’s rights to their bodies, same-sex marriage bans, and the legacy of Whitney Houston. She is just getting started…

For our part, we’ve synthesized the two excerpts out there from Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America—including Harris-Perry’s “Crooked Room” thesis and the section of her book discussing Michelle Obama, her marriage, and the “Sapphire”/angry black woman stereotype typically associated with the First Lady. Celebrating both Black History and Women’s History Months in February and March, the free download is available from Yalebooks.com until March 31. Stay tuned for more updates on Harris-Perry’s appearances and discussions about politics, race, and gender.

Reflection (Self-Portrait) 1985

The people portrayed in Lucian Freud’s portraits are not passive, flawless models, stuck in the imagined world of a framed canvas. They have lived—endured—with evidence of years past in their rough, wrinkled, worn, and scarred skin. Like his psychoanalyst grandfather Sigmund Freud, Lucian Freud explores his subjects’ inner troubles and longings. As Freud himself recognized, “There has to be a living presence for my paintings to be successful.” His subjects are not simply models, but individuals that come rippling to life through the artist’s fluid paint strokes.  Many of the individuals who sat for Freud were interviewed for the fascinating February Vanity Fair article about Freud, his paintings, and his subjects.

For several years leading up to his death at age 88 in July 2011, Freud worked with Britain’s National Portrait Gallery to exhibit his world-renowned portraits. The exhibition, which opened with a royal preview for the Duchess of Cambridge on Wednesday, will be open to the public from February 9to May 27. The gallery is showing more than 100 paintings completed over 70 years, featuring the artist’s friends, family, and artistic colleagues such as Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Leigh Bowery, and David Hockney. The exhibition will then move to the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas from July 1 to October 29.

Paintings from this collection are featured in Lucian Freud Portraits by Sarah Howgate, which reproduces each work with all its remarkable texture, and an illustrated chronology and previously unseen documentary photographs place Freud’s works within the context of his remarkable biography.

The volume also includes a series of interviews with the artist, conducted between May 2009 and January 2011 by Michael Auping. Never before published, these interviews reveal Freud’s thoughts on the complex relationship between artist and sitter, the challenges of painting self-portraits—and the unique qualities of his many nudes. “I think the nudes have to do with making a larger, more complete portrait.” Freud told Auping in 2009 interview. “Anyone can put on different clothes. The naked body is somewhat more permanent, more factual.” Of his portraiture in general, Freud said, “I’m not very theoretical,” explaining, “I’m just trying to see and understand the people that make up my life.

Lucian Freud Painting People, also by Sarah Howgate, offers a chronological introduction to the artist’s work. The book includes an essay by critic Martin Gayford in which he discusses Freud’s place in art history and offers personal insights into the artist’s life and approach to portraiture. David Hockney, Freud’s longtime friend and fellow, gives a revealing account of his own experience sitting for a portrait by Freud entitled, “You Can Smoke, But Don’t Tell Kate Moss,” in which he describes gossiping about mutual acquaintances as he mixed the paint in the artist’s “old-fashioned Bohemia” of a studio.

Freud’s work is an autobiography of biographies—a look into Freud’s life through his intimate studies of others. His raw, expressive portraits reveal Freud’s close interaction with his subjects, shedding light to mysterious and private lives of both his subjects and the artist himself.

Check out the trailer to preview one of the book’s lessons, and read the details on how to enter the Forces of Geek contest here.

In fact, Bradley explains, Ellison’s problem was quite the reverse: he could not stop writing. Between his mania for revision and the rapidly changing landscape of American culture, the second novel—an epic work about the assassination of a U.S. senator—was doomed to be forever growing and expanding without ever being contained between the two covers of a finished work.

Bradley, who is also one of the editors of YUP’s  Anthology of Rap, has been studying the work of Ralph Ellison since he fell in love with Invisible Man in a course taught by John F. Callahan at Lewis & Clark College almost two decades ago. When Ellison died the following year, Callahan was named literary executor, and Bradley became his research assistant, carrying boxes of manuscripts from the house where Callahan found thousands of pages of writing and correspondence (along with several unpublished short stories hidden in a briefcase under the dining room table). Working with Callahan, Bradley edited the fullest edition of Ellison’s unfinished second novel Three Days Before the Shooting…, published in 2010, and as a result, is one of the leading experts on the author—and the immense archive encompassing both his personal papers and endless rewritings, which are preserved on paper and the 25-pound laptop computer Ellison purchased in 1982.

Working from these manuscripts, and following Ellison backwards through his career to shed light on everything from his final months to his earliest writings, Bradley demonstrates the way in which Ellison was anything but a one-hit wonder, but rather a writer who was always truly In Progress. Indeed, Bradley writes, “The very things that make Ellison’s second novel imperfect are also what make it such a compelling metaphor for America. Protean, unfinished, grand in vision but often flawed in execution, marked by failures and triumphs, it reflects the complexities of American life in a way that a finished novel could not.”

In a piece for the New York Times’ “Disunion” blog, historian William G. Thomas describes the effects of the railroad on Ballton and others like him in the period surrounding the Civil War. Work on the railroads was grueling, but the chaos which set in with the beginnings of the war also allowed many of the already mobile railroad workers to escape and join the Union troops—Ballton served as an army cook, and may have eventually led his fellow soldiers back to destroy the very tracks he had helped construct in Virginia.

Thomas is the author of The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America, a social history of the railroads that reexamines many of our assumptions about the role of this new form of transportation in the conflict between the Union and Confederate Armies. The book expands on many of the ideas found in the “Disunion” piece, drawing on extensive primary source research to tell a fascinatingly nuanced story of the railroad tracks and their role in shaping modern America.

When Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois were graduate students at Harvard, they began to wonder. Although in their English classes they talked about Shelley, on their own time, they spent hour listening to the rappers of the mid- to late-1990s, and found some of the same poetic tropes they analyzed in essays represented in Snoop Dogg’s lyrics. Fast-forward over a decade and Bradley and DuBois are editors of The Anthology of Rap, a groundbreaking presentation of rap lyrics which presents more than thirty years worth of material for scholarly study. According to Bradley, the Anthology has been controversial among those who challenge the artistic value of lyrics that are often known for their crude language and themes; however, he asserts, there is no doubt that the book has served its purpose: to get people talking about the relationship between rap and literature.

Last year, PBS Newshour ran a segment featuring both editors of the Anthology along with rappers Common and Kurtis Blow. A reposting of the video in the college poetry section of the youth-oriented site Insure Success has become quite popular—so maybe there’s hope that this Friday, a few students will stop shouting over the music and start listening to the lyrics when they’ve aside their more traditional poetry books for a night out.

“Integration was one of the worst things to happen to black kids. We lost our community,” said a former student whose segregated Floridian high school closed in 1969. It’s nearly impossible to read that without feeling troubled. Weren’t black communities oppressed during Jim Crow? How could anyone feel nostalgic for his segregated high school? Author Stuart Buck does not agree with the first part of the student’s statement, and in no way does he advocate segregation. His book, Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation, does, however, find evidence to support the second claim.

Before the integration of American schools, freedmen and their descendants found safe havens in black schools and churches. While most other social settings meant encounters with whites who were often offended by the very presence of black people, schools in particular offered a chance for young black people to see principals and teachers as role models who not only had the same color skin but similar experiences. Integration relegated black pastors to menial work, and black educators were often fired altogether. The only two settings that had created a sense of community and protection for young black people became “something controlled by and meant for” whites only.

Desegregation broke up close-knit communities, as black students were bused out to distant white schools. During segregation, black teachers had been respected members of their communities who knew parents and students and pushed their students to succeed. Of segregated schools, one black alumnus remembered, “My teachers would not accept mediocre work, because they knew that I could not function in a racist world being a mediocre person.” Nobody recalled—at least in written record—that their peers in segregated schools thought education was “the province of white people.”

Buck does not, of course, say that segregated schools were a good idea, only that desegregation brought a new set of problems. Sometime after 1965, one of these problems eventually devolved into the criticism by black students of their studious peers: “acting white.” He quotes another scholar as acknowledging that “acting white ‘is’ the most negative accusation that can be hurled at black adolescents.” The accusation, Buck says, is a natural response. With no black role models in their schools and no social outlet entirely free of racism, one (tragic) way to create a cohesive, protective unit was to rebel against the white students and teachers’ example. A black child working hard in school seemed to be collaborating with the institutions that had shattered whatever safety black communities had managed to create during segregation.

Buck quotes the head of Harvard’s Afro-American Studies Department as noting “if anybody had said anything like [“acting white”] when we were growing up in the ‘50s, first, your mother would smack you upside the head and, second, they’d check you into a mental institution.”  He also finds several black valedictorians and honor-roll students who today acknowledge they are accused of “acting white” on a daily basis. It is indeed dangerous to profess nostalgia for the days of white-only and black-only schools, but something of it has to return before the achievement gap between black and white students can close. That “something” is not further segregation, but a better integration: the development of a true community.

Sarah Underwood is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and a former Yale University Press intern. Her column, Lest We Forget, appears on the Yale Press Log.

Neher is accepting contest entries through March 31^st, but the first round of submissions is already online. Take a look at them here, and get to work—although you might not be able to keep up with John Singer Sargent, you could win a volume of his work to inspire you further!