New Books in African American Studies
Episodes
Benjamin Y. Fong and Paul Prescod, "Rustin's Challenge" (2026)
04 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
There was no more trenchant and substantive critic of the Left from the Left in the 1960s and 1970s than Bayard Rustin. Some liberals and leftists t...
Alice Echols, "Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic" (Oxford UP, 2026)
03 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A rich history of cross-racial coalitions and alliances of the Sixties' freedom movement, acclaimed historian Alice Echols's Black Power, White Heat r...
Jason R. Young, "The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2026)
01 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the early twentieth century, a group of white writers, artists, and performers from the cultural hub of Charleston, South Carolina, created and cur...
The Lost World of African American Cantors 1915–1953
28 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Histories of Black-Jewish cultural interaction often focus on how Jews adopted and adapted Black vernacular music—ragtime, jazz, swing, R&B, blues—...
Emely Rumble, "Bibliotherapy in The Bronx" (Row House, 2025)
18 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Bibliotherapy in The Bronx (Row House, 2025) by Emely Rumble, LCSW, is a groundbreaking exploration of the healing power of literature in the lives ...
Rawlston Williams, "The Caribbean Cookbook" (Phaidon Press, 2026)
15 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
An exploration of Caribbean cuisine and culinary history, featuring more than 380 authentic home cooking recipes from across the region Caribbean cuis...
Voices from a Century of Struggle: Writings of the Jim Crow Era
14 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Tuesday, April 7, 2026—Confronting disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and terrorist violence in the aftermath of the Civil War, Black Americans ...
Cedric de Leon, "Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity" (U California Press, 2025)
09 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Our guest today is Cedric de Leon, author of Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity (U California Press, ...
Michael W. Tuck, "The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River: A Creole Community in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World" (Brill, 2026)
08 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River: A Creole Community in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (Brill, 2026) historian D...
Danielle Bainbridge, "Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive" (NYU Press, 2026)
03 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive (NYU Press, 2026) is a bold and incisive reconsideration of the relationship...
Tyesha Maddox, "A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
31 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A Home Away from Home: Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) examines the signif...
Why Did Langston Hughes's "Troubled Lands" Go Unpublished for Nearly a Century?: A Conversation with Ricardo Wilson
27 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Why did Langston Hughes's translations of Mexican and Cuban stories go unpublished for nearly a century? A landmark book—the first complete publica...
Hsuan L Hsu, "Olfactory Worldmaking" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
24 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Smell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking (University of Minnesota Pres...
Katharine Gerbner, "Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica" (Duke UP, 2025)
23 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 1760, following the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Empire, the Afro-Caribbean word Obeah first appeared in British coloni...
Prolepsis
23 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of High Theory, Gloria Fisk talks to Kim about Prolepsis. Defined by Gerard Genette in the 1970s, prolepsis is a flash forward, the op...
Lisa Nakamura, "The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
18 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Inattention Economy: How Women of Color Built the Internet (U Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Lisa Nakamura challenges the widespread myth that the...
Antwain K. Hunter, "A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865" (UNC Press, 2025)
16 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Spanning the 1720s through the end of the Civil War, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865 (UNC Press, 20...
Ethelene Whitmire, "The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram" (Viking, 2026)
15 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
On the eve of World War II, a handsome young scholar arrived in Paris. The queer, Black son of a housecleaner, who had nevertheless been decorated in ...
Jessica Ann Levy, "Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
13 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics, (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026), traces the rise of Black...
Austin McCoy, "Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made" (Atria/One Signal, 2026)
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For fans of Dilla Time and The Chronicles of DOOM, a culturally connected celebration of the groundbreaking hip-hop group De La Soul, and how they...
Michelle Adams, "The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North" (FSG Press, 2025)
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across...
Selina Nwulu, "Black Climates: Notes on Race, Our Environment, and Visions for Equitable Futures" (Chatto & Windus, 2025)
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Brought to you by the BISA Environment and Climate Politics Working Group. Globally, Black people are among the most affected by the climate crisis,...
Dana A. Williams, "Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship" (Amistad, 2025)
10 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon's profound imp...
Danielle Wiggins, "Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
08 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A provocative new history of modern black liberalism Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025...
Nicole E. Trujillo-Pagán, "Detroit Never Left: Black Space, White Borders, Latino Crossings" (NYU Press, 2025)
03 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Detroit seemed to experience an explosive rebirth following its bankruptcy, the largest in US municipal history. It was as if the slate had been wiped...
Clarissa E. Francis, "Black Women's Bodily Autonomy, Sexual Freedom, and Pleasure: Explorations of the Hot Girl Movement" (Routledge, 2025)
28 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Black Women's Bodily Autonomy, Sexual Freedom, and Pleasure: Explorations of the Hot Girl Movement (Routledge, 2025) explores scholarship, practice,...
Sarah Jones Weicksel, "A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era" (UNC Press, 2026)
27 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
During the American Civil War, clothing became central to the ways people waged war and experienced its cost. Through the clothes they made, wore, men...
Stephen Stacks, "The Resounding Revolution: Freedom Song After 1968" (U Illinois Press, 2025)
24 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What happened to freedom singing after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination? Stephen Stacks considers this question in The Resounding Revolution...
John Drabinski, "So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
18 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
What happens if we turn to James Baldwin, not just for the amazing quotations and excellent photos, but as a critical theorist? What if we read his no...
Brian Hallstoos, "Sol Butler: An Olympian's Odyssey through Jim Crow America" (U Illinois Press, 2026)
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A superstar in both football and track and field Sol Butler pioneered the parlaying of sports fame into business prosperity. In Sol Butler: An Oly...
Cassandra Shepard, "Settler Colonialism is the Disaster: A Critique of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina and During the COVID-19 Pandemic" (U Illinois Press, 2026)
15 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Settler Colonialism is the Disaster: A Critique of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina and During the COVID-19 Pandemic (U Illinois Press, 2026) ...
Heather Ann Thompson, "Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage" (Pantheon, 2026)
12 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In this masterful, groundbreaking work Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2...
Nicholas Boggs, "Baldwin: A Love Story" (FSG, 2025)
10 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Baldwin: A Love Story (FSG, 2025) the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relati...
Joshua Clark Davis, "Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back" (Princeton UP, 2025)
10 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back (Princeton UP, 2025) shatters one of the...
Gloria Browne-Marshall, "A Protest History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2026) Revisited
08 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In December 2025, writer, civil rights attorney, playwright, speaker, and Professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Glo...
Ian Smith, "Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
07 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Ian Smith urges readers of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, ...
Garrett Felber, "A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre" (AK Press, 2025)
06 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The first biography of the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism. A Co...
Dianna N. Watkins-Dickerson, "A Black Woman for President: Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris" (UP of Mississippi)
04 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout US history, only three Black women—Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun, and Kamala Harris—have given successfully recognized bids for...
The Caste Question with Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao
01 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
TCP’s inaugural episode features Suraj Yengde and Anupama Rao, two scholars whose academic work and activism have helped to set the parameters of th...
Blair Kelley, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class" (LIveright, 2023)
31 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contr...
Justin L. Mann, "Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculation" (Duke UP, 2026)
29 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculation (Duke UP, 2026) takes Black speculative fiction as a central archive for under...
Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine
29 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Despite reform efforts that have grown in scope and intensity over the last two decades, the machine of American mass incarceration continues to flour...
Mark Anthony Neal, "New Black Man" (Routledge, 2015)
28 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In honor of the twentieth anniversary of Mark Anthony Neal’s pivotal text New Black Man (Routledge, 2015), Mickell Carter interviews Neal abou...
Alaina M. Morgan, "Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora" (UNC Press, 2025)
27 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Alaina Morgan's Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora (UNC Press, 2025) introduces the conc...
Kimberley Johnson, "Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis" (Cornell UP, 2025)
25 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis (Cornell UP, 2025) by Dr. Kimberley Johnson is about how the Black Power movement res...
Terence Keel, "The Coroner’s Silence: Death Records and the Hidden Victims of Police Violence" (Beacon Press, 2025)
23 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they’ve sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd’s and Sandra Bland’s, ...
O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight, "We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the spring of 1969, hundreds of workers, all Black and mostly female, went on strike at Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital to ...
Kellen Hoxworth, "Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance (Northwestern UP, 2024) Dr. Kellen Hoxworth presents a sweeping history of racialized performan...
Johanna Lukate, "(Dis)Entangled: Black Hair, Race, and Identity" (Coronet, 2025)
16 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Even before we get to introduce ourselves by name, our hair has already started to tell stories about who we are, where we are from and where we are a...
John Samuel Harpham, "Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2025)
11 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The period from 1550 to 1700 was critical in the development of slavery across the English Atlantic world. During this time, English discourse about s...
Chris Boucher, "Harry "Bucky" Lew: A Biography of the First Black Professional Basketball Player" (McFarland, 2026)
11 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Harry "Bucky" Lew leapt over pro basketball's color wall in 1902 and continued to integrate every single role in the game over the next 25 years. He w...
Kendra D. Boyd, "Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
10 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers a...
Sonya Lea, "American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture" (UP of Kentucky, 2025)
09 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just fou...
Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)
08 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Ol...
W. Ralph Eubanks, "When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land" (Beacon Press, 2026)
07 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country’s economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted fo...
Robert D. Bland, "Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation" (UNC Press, 2026)
05 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The promise of Reconstruction sparked a transformative era in American history as free and newly emancipated Black Americans sought to redefine their ...
Ashley Brown, "Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson" (Oxford UP, 2023)
03 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career...
Andrew S. Curran, "Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson" (Other Press, 2026)
02 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
An engaging investigation of how 13 key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking...
Nicholas L. Caverly, "Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures" (Stanford UP, 2025)
26 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Nick Caverly talks about his new book, Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures (Stanford UP, 2025). For decades, Detro...
Trymaine Lee, "A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America" (St. Martins, 2025)
25 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why,...
Brittany Michelle Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)
24 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in US prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of ...
Karma F. Frierson, "Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz" (U California Press, 2025)
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico. ...
Cupid Jamila and Joell Myescha, "Who's in the Room? A Guide to Public Relations from the Black Professional Perspective" (Kendall Hunt, 2025)
20 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Who’s in the Room?: A Guide to Public Relations from the Black Professional Perspective (Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2025) has been created to serve ...
Amber Day, "Caught in the Crosshairs: Feminist Comedians and the Culture Wars" (Indiana UP, 2025)
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The landscape of comedy has undergone a seismic shift in recent years with an increasing number of female comedians breaking through to mainstream ...
Joseph L Graves, "Why Black People Die Sooner: What Medicine Gets Wrong about Race and How to Fix It" (Columbia UP, 2025)
14 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why Black People Die Sooner is a powerful and rigorous examination of the ways racism shapes health and disease. Joseph L. Graves Jr. demonstrates th...
Caitlin Wiesner, "Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime" (U Pennsylvania, 2025)
11 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning in the 1970s, a series of government agencies established to carry out the federal “war on crime” offered financial and ideological supp...
David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people fo...
Gloria Browne-Marshall, "A Protest History of the United States" (Beacon Press, 2026)
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Exploring 500 years of protest and resistance in US history—and how its force is foundational and can empower us to navigate our chaotic world In t...
Black Girls and How We Fail Them
04 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From hip-hop moguls and political candidates to talk radio and critically acclaimed films, society communicates that Black girls don’t matter and th...
Theresa Delgadillo, "Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
02 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas (U Michigan Press, 2024) offers a new lens for examining diaspora and borderla...
Jonathan Eig, "King: A Life" (FSG, 2023)
27 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life (FSG, 2023) is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights ico...
Christina Cecelia Davidson, "Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation" (Duke UP, 2024)
26 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
H. C. C. Astwood: minister and missionary, diplomat and politician, enigma in the annals of US history. In Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and t...
Sharon White Rewires Disco
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At the center of 1970s New York's most iconic clubs—from the celebrity-studded Studio 54 to the premiere lesbian discotheque Sahara—stood a queer ...
Shatema Threadcraft, "Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2025)
22 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Western democracies are haunted. Michael Hanchard suggests that the specter of race is what haunts our democracies, but it may be more accurate to sug...
David Chanoff, "Anthony Benezet: Quaker, Abolitionist, Anti-Racist" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
22 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Wilberforce, Clarkson, Wesley. Britain’s great abolitionist activist Granville Sharp. Each of these consequential figures of the eighteenth-century ...
Rizvana Bradley, "Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form" (Stanford UP, 2023)
15 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford UP, 2023), Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness canno...
Lucy Caplan, "Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera" (Harvard UP, 2025)
15 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Recently, musicologists and others have started writing about Black participation in opera. Lucy Caplan’s Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists T...
Ronald Angelo Johnson, "Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution" (Cornell UP, 2025)
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Entangled Alliances is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of he...
James Brown's War on Disco
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the penultimate episode of season 2 of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares sit down with acclaimed historian Alice Echols, autho...
Joseph P. Viteritti, "Radical Dreamers: Race, Choice, and the Failure of American Education" (Oxford UP, 2025)
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education and demands to desegregate public schools, race and class remain the most reliable predictors of edu...
Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)
09 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relations...
Yunxiang Gao, "Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century" (UNC Press, 2021)
08 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) explores the c...
Martha Biondi, "We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation" (U California Press, 2025)
08 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Explores forgotten solidarity with African liberation struggles through the life of Black Chicagoan Prexy Nesbitt. For many civil rights activists, t...
Diane T. Feldman, "Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi (UP Mississippi, 2025) chronicles...
House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr.
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922–1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to...
Diane T. Feldman, "Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi (UP Mississippi, 2025) chronicles...
Disco's Revenge
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of Disco Demolition Night in 1979—a cultural bonfire that seemed to signal the end of disco—something unexpected began to rise from Ch...
Joshua Clark Davis, "Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back" (Princeton UP, 2025)
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back (Princeton UP, 2025) shatters one of the mo...
Amanda Laury Kleintop, "Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
During the Civil War, the U.S. federal government abolished slavery without reimbursing enslavers, diminishing the white South’s wealth by nearly 50...
Patrick Parr, "Malcolm Before X" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
26 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of ...
Javier Wallace, "Basketball Trafficking: Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams" (Duke UP, 2025)
26 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every year, hundreds of international student athletes arrive in the U.S. chasing their basketball dreams — many on F-1 student visas. But for some ...
Ashley D. Farmer, "Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore" (Pantheon, 2025)
25 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the world of Black radical politics, the name Audley Moore commands unquestioned respect. Across the nine decades of her life, Queen Mother Moore d...
Michael W. Twitty, "Recipes from the American South" (Phaidon Press, 2025)
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The views expressed by the guest are their own and do not reflect those of the New Books Network or its hosts. This episode contains some content that...
Peter D. Blackmer, "Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers" (UVA Press, 2025)
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers (UVA Press, 2025) explores the local dynamics, natio...
Peter C. Zimmerman, "The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
20 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it...
Bill V. Mullen, "James Baldwin: Living in Fire" (Pluto Press, 2019)
19 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the first major biography of Baldwin in more than a decade, James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Press, 2019), Bill V. Mullen celebrates the per...
Darren Mueller, "At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz" (Duke UP, 2024)
12 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and producti...
Melissa M. Matthes, "When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter" (Harvard UP, 2021)
11 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Since World War II, Protestant sermons have been an influential tool for defining American citizenship in the wake of national crises. In the afterma...
Claire Whitlinger, "Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi" (UNC Press, 2020)
10 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Few places are more notorious for civil rights–era violence than Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders. ...
John Minton, "Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1930s, fieldworkers with the Works Progress Administration interviewed about 3,500 formerly enslaved people resulting in approximately 20,...