About Diversity Books
For more than three decades, this site has served librarians, teachers, and families looking for serious, well-made reference books on the many cultures that built America.
Our Story
Diversity Books began in 1990 as a small, family-run distributor of multicultural reference books based in Hamilton, New Jersey. The mission was simple and a little stubborn: get substantial, scholarly books about African American, Hispanic, Native American, Arab American, Jewish American, and immigrant history onto the shelves of as many schools and libraries as possible — not just during heritage months, but year-round.
That mission found an audience. Over the years, the reference sets profiled on this site reached thousands of schools, public libraries, and educational institutions nationwide, where they continue to serve students researching ethnic studies, cultural diversity, and American history. Today this site carries that work forward as an evergreen reading guide: a place to learn what these collections contain, how the volumes are organized, and how educators can put them to work.
About the Books
Each multicultural series runs from two to five deluxe hardcover volumes and is balanced between historical narrative and biographical information. Features include hundreds of photographs, charts, graphs, and extensive bibliographies that help readers pursue a topic further. The reading level suits middle and high school students, and the sets are equally valuable as a teacher's resource for elementary grades and home schooling.
- Historical narrative: chronologies, landmark events, significant documents and speeches presented in context.
- Biography: substantial essays — typically about 800 words each — on historical and contemporary figures.
- Research apparatus: name, nationality, and occupation indexes, glossaries, appendices, and subject bibliographies.
- Visual material: photographs, maps, flags, statistical tables, and illustrations throughout.
The sets may be studied individually, or together as the Complete 31-Volume Multicultural Collection, which gathers eight titles into a single curriculum-ready library.
The Biographical Database
Alongside the printed volumes, an online biographical resource grew to more than 3,200 entries profiling notable Americans from every background — jurists and athletes, scientists and artists, activists and entrepreneurs. You can read about how that database was organized, with sample biographical sketches, on our research database page.
The collections profiled here belong to a particular golden moment in reference publishing. Through the 1990s, library publishers invested heavily in multi-volume ethnic-studies sets — almanac-based compilations, signed scholarly essays, serious photo research — because school and public libraries demanded substantial works to support the new multicultural curricula. The sets that emerged from that moment have aged remarkably well: their histories were carefully verified, their scope was generous, and their editorial standards reflected academic review rather than search-ranking incentives.
Why Reference Books Still Matter
In an era of quick searches, a well-edited reference set offers something the open web often cannot: editorial accountability. Every essay in these collections was reviewed, sourced, and indexed. Organizations such as the American Library Association have long emphasized the role of authoritative reference collections in school and public libraries, and librarians continue to recommend printed reference works as a foundation for student research skills — teaching young researchers to evaluate sources, follow bibliographies, and distinguish scholarship from opinion.
Multicultural reference works carry a second responsibility: representation. When a student finds her community's history treated with the same care and heft as any other subject on the shelf, the message is unmistakable — this history matters, and it belongs in the library.
Our Commitment
We believe every culture and people has made a substantial contribution to American history, and that a good library should reflect that fact twelve months a year. The guides on this site are written for working librarians, classroom teachers, homeschooling parents, and curious readers. We aim for accuracy and plain language, and we cite authoritative institutions — from the Library of Congress to the Smithsonian museums — wherever they can take your research further.
Based in Hamilton, New Jersey. For questions about the collections or suggestions for the guide, please use our contact form.