New Books in African American Studies

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,...

Zara Anishanslin, "The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2025)

07 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists...

Marion Orr, "House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr." (UNC Press, 2025)

06 Oct 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 1...

Meredith L. Roman, "The Black Panthers and the Soviets: A Comparative History of Human Rights Movements" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

05 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The contemporaneous movements for human rights that Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers waged during the 1960s are analysed in a comparativ...

Ashleigh Wade on How Black Girls Use Social Media

29 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Ashleigh Greene Wade, Assistant Professor of Digital Studies with a joint appointment in Media Studies a...

Mary E. Hicks, "Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2025)

26 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From the bustling ports of Lisbon to the coastal inlets of the Bight of Benin to the vibrant waterways of Bahia, Black mariners were integral to every...

Constance Bailey, "Conversations with Kiese Laymon" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

24 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is a very special episode of the New Books Network, as the editor of Conversations with Kiese Laymon (UP of Mississippi, 2025), Dr. Constance B...

Deborah Willis, "The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship" (NYU Press, 2025)

24 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A stunning collection of stoic portraits and intimate ephemera from the lives of Black Civil War soldiers Though both the Union and Confederate armie...

Nicholas Bromell, "The Time is Always Now: Black Political Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2013)

23 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Nick Bromell is the author of By the Sweat of the Brow: Labor and Literature in Antebellum American Culture and Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psyc...

Kenja McCray, "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025)

22 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated a...

Calvin Schermerhorn, "The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made" (Yale UP, 2025)

21 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. J Calvin Schermerhorn is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Hi...

Jonathan White and Lucas Morel, "Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln" (Reedy Press, 2025)

20 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln (Reedy Press, 2025), acclaimed scholars Lucas E. Morel and Jonathan W. W...

Marcus Rediker, "Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea" (Penguin Group, 2025)

20 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Conspiracy, mutiny and liberation on America’s waterfront by the award-winning author of The Slave Ship. Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History o...

Jessica B. Harris, "Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine" (Clarkson Potter, 2025)

16 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Discover the sweeping story of how Indigenous, European, and African traditions intertwined to form an entirely new cuisine, with over 90 recipes for ...

Keisha N. Blain, "Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights" (W.W. Norton, 2025)

14 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Even before they were recognized as citizens of the United States, Black women understood that the fights for civil and human rights were inseparable....

Maria R. Montalvo, "Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

09 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Explores the relationship between the production of enslaved property and the production of the past in the antebellum United States. It is extraordi...

Susana M. Morris, "Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler" (Amistad Press, 2025)

02 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A magnificent cultural biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (Amistad, 2025) charts the life of one of our greatest...

Patrice D. Douglass, "Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence" (Stanford UP, 2025)

29 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence (Stanford UP, 2025) Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between...

Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football

28 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different...

Elaine Weiss, "Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

26 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Elaine Weiss, acclaimed author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, follows that magisterial work with a work of equal scholarly ...

LaShawn Harris, "Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City" (Beacon, 2025)

25 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months beh...

Gregg Mitman, "Empire of Rubber: Firestone's Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia" (New Press, 2021)

25 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of t...

Steve Luxenberg, "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation" (Norton, 2019)

24 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Steve Luxenberg has created an unusual history of the famous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and the 19th century’s segregationist practices i...

Timothy Messer-Kruse, "Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution" (LSU Press, 2024)

23 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution (LSU Press, 2024) unearths a long-hidden factor that led to the Constitutional...

Rima Vesely-Flad, "Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation" (NYU Press, 2022)

22 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Finalist, Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Constructive-Reflective Studies, given by the American Academy of ReligionExplores how Black ...

Shennette Garrett-Scott, "Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal" (Columbia UP, 2019)

20 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard?  Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South.  Shennette Garrett-Scott's n...

Marlee S. Bunch, "Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era"

19 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press, 2025), Dr. M...

Glenn Ligon, "Distinguishing Piss from Rain" (Hauser & Wirth, 2024)

19 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

An expansive volume featuring over two decades of incisive reflections on race, art and pop culture by one of the greatest artists working today This ...

Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson, "Racial Resentment in the Political Mind" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

18 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson challenge the commonly held notion that all racial negativity, disag...

Christopher M. Reali, "Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

17 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to the Roll...

Harriet Jacobs, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (Norton, 2025)

16 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive, detailing her harrowing escape from ens...

Manuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2020)

11 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transat...

Bryon L. Garner, "Black Veteranality: Military Service and the Illusion of Inclusive Patriotism" (Routledge, 2025)

11 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Military service in the United States has long been associated with patriotism. But for Black veterans, this association with patriotism, love for cou...

Kenneth Jones, "African American Males and Video Games: How Gaming Technology Can Motivate and Enhance Learning" (Myers Education, 2025)

10 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

African American males are confronted with formidable barriers in their pursuit of quality education, resulting in stark disparities in academic perfo...

Stephanie McCurry, "Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War" (Harvard UP, 2019)

09 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War (Harvard UP, 2019), the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning challenges the idea th...

Irvin Weathersby Jr., "In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space" (Viking, 2025)

08 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly do...

Teacher by Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives

07 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Teacher By Teacher traces the journey of the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education and is a deeply personal love letter to all the teachers in our lives....

Kit W. Myers, "The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States"(U California Press, 2025)

07 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This episode features Dr. Kit W. Myers, associate professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced, d...

Neil Roberts, “A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass” (UP of Kentucky, 2018)

06 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’ birth. It can hardly be said that scholars have neglected Douglass; indeed, he is o...

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, "Classicism and Other Phobias" (Princeton UP, 2025)

30 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton University Press, 2025) shows how the concept of “classicism” lacks the capacity to affirm the aesthetic ...

Arianne Edmonds, "We Now Belong to Ourselves: J. L. Edmonds, the Black Press, and Black Citizenship in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

30 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Black press provided a blueprint to help Black Americans transition from slavery and find opportunities to a...

Foluke Taylor, "Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room" (Norton, 2023)

29 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1977, The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black American feminists issued a statement communicating the harrowing following: “The psycholo...

Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Random House, 2023)

29 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil War...

Shani Adia Evans, "We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

29 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods ...

Asha Jeffers, "Against! Rebellious Daughters in Black Immigrant Fiction in the United States" (Ohio State UP, 2025)

29 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Against! is the first book-length study of Afro-Caribbean and African immigrant and second-generation writing in the United States. In it, Asha Jeffe...

Michael Stauch, "Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

28 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The criminalization of Black youth was central to policing in urban America during the civil rights era and continued in Detroit even after the rise o...

Joseph O. Jewell, "White Man’s Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era" (UNC Press, 2023)

25 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the sam...

Ashley Howard, "Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement" (UNC Press, 2025)

24 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This episode features Dr. Ashley Howard, assistant professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Iowa, discussing her book, ...

The Tug of War: Why Racial Progress Often Meets Resistance and Backlash

23 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Karyne Messina and Dr. Felicia Powell-Williams, the host and co-host of “Psychoanalytic Perspectives of Racism in America” sponsored by The Am...

Katie Mitchell, "Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores" (Random House, 2025)

22 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Traversing teeming metropolises and tiny towns, Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores (Random House, 2025) explores these space...

Dayna Bowen Matthew, "Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America" (NYU Press, 2022)

19 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the United States, systemic racism is embedded in policies and practices, thereby structuring American society to perpetuate inequality and all of ...

Sabrina L. Hom, "Critical Mixed Race Philosophy: Rethinking Kinship and Identity" (Lexington Books, 2025)

19 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What are dominant narratives of mixed race identity? What are those narratives doing, in everyday life and within philosophical discourse? How can att...

Ahmad Greene-Hayes, "Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

18 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orle...

Jeremy Black, "The Civil War" (Saint Augustine's Press, 2025)

14 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The American Civil War may have been more consequential to American history (and its global supremacy) than its Revolutionary War and participation in...

Andrew S. Berish, "Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

10 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Andrew S. Berish. 2025. Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse. (U of Chicago Press, 2025) Some good words ...

Joseph Darda, "Gift and Grit: Race, Sports, and the Construction of Social Debt" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

07 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1998, Bill Clinton hosted a town hall on race and sports. 'If you've got a special gift,' the president said of athletes, 'you owe more back.' Gif...

Michael Amoruso, "Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil" (UNC Press, 2025)

06 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the sprawling city of São Paulo, a weekly practice known as devotion to souls (devoção às almas) draws devotees to Catholic churches, cemeterie...

John Bardes, "The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930" (UNC Press, 2024)

05 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (UNC Press, 2024) reveals that Americans often assume that ...

Angela Katrina Lewis-Maddox ed., "Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline" (SUNY Press, 2025)

03 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Political Scientist Angela K. Lewis-Maddox has pulled together an important and useful edited volume focusing on black women political scientists and ...

Cheryl Thompson, "Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict and Freedom, 1812-1895" (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025)

01 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) traces the origins o...

Sarah Gold McBride "Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America" (Harvard UP, 2025)

29 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Hair is always and everywhere freighted with meaning. In nineteenth-century America, however, hair took on decisive new significance as the young nati...

Bryan D. Jones, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History" (Oxford UP, 2025)

27 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the under-appreciated div...

Is Sinners a New Classic of Political Utopianism?

25 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we analyze the movie Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan, just released on streaming. We address the political themes o...

Judith Weisenfeld, "Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake" (NYU Press, 2025)

24 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans were committed to southern state mental hospitals at higher rates as white psychiatrists li...