New Books in African American Studies
Episodes
Timothy E. Nelson, "Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930" (Texas Tech UP, 2023)
22 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
By most accounts, Blackdom, New Mexico existed from 1900-1930. However, as historian and artist Dr. Timothy Nelson argues in his new book, the Black ...
Joan L. Bryant, "Reluctant Race Men: Black Challenges to the Practice of Race in Nineteenth-century America" (Oxford UP, 2024)
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Activists in the earliest Black antebellum reform endeavors contested and deprecated the concept of race. Attacks on the logic and ethics of dividing,...
Debra Bruno, "A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family" (Cornell UP, 2024)
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family (Cornell University Press, 2024) tells the ...
Christopher Bell, "Walking East Harlem: A Neighborhood Experience" (Rutgers UP, 2024)
20 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
They call it Spanish Harlem or sometimes just El Barrio. But for over a century, East Harlem has been a melting pot of many ethnic groups, including P...
Carrie J. Preston, "Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice" (Oxford UP, 2024)
19 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this incisive critique of the ways performances of allyship can further entrench white privilege, author Carrie J. Preston analyses her own complic...
Domingo Morel, "Developing Scholars: Race, Politics, and the Pursuit of Higher Education" (Oxford UP, 2023)
19 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past fifty years, debates concerning race and college admissions have focused primarily on the policy of affirmative action at elite institut...
Benjamin Barson, "Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons" (Wesleyan UP, 2024)
19 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan UP, 2024) recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orle...
Andrew Stone Higgins, "Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan" (UNC Press, 2023)
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education remains to this day the largest and most ambitious attempt to provide free, universal college edu...
Anthony Kwame Harrison on Cassette Tapes and Hip Hop Culture
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Kwame Harrison, Alumni Distinguished Professor and Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech. Harrison rec...
Ian Miller, "Self-Esteem: An American History" (Polity Press, 2024)
17 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
By the end of the twentieth century, the idea of self-esteem had become enormously influential. A staggering amount of psychological research and self...
Deborah Parker, "Becoming Belle Da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters" (Villa I Tatti, 2024)
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian through Her Letters (Harvard University Press, October 2024), Deborah Parker chronicles th...
We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
14 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s book is: We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, 2024) by Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson. Black resistance to white sup...
Donna J. Nicol, "Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action" (U Rochester Press, 2024)
09 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action (University of Rochester Press, 2024...
Aran Robert Shetterly, "Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul" (Amistad, 2024)
06 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On November 3, 1979, as activist Nelson Johnson assembled people for a march adjacent to Morningside Homes in Greensboro, North Carolina, gunshots ran...
Justene Hill Edwards, "Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank" (Norton, 2024)
03 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank (W. W. Norton, 2024), Justene Hill Edwards exposes how the rise and tragic fail...
Anne M. Whitesell, "Living Off the Government?: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Welfare" (NYU Press, 2024)
03 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Who deserves public assistance from the government? This age-old question has been revived by policymakers, pundits, and activists following the massi...
Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, "The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game" (UNC Press, 2024)
27 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (UNC Press, 2024), Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva offer an existential...
Eve Dunbar, "Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
27 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation (U Minnesota Press, 2024) offers new and insightful readings of Africa...
Steven T. Katz, "The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History, Volume 2" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
22 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Holocaust and New World Slavery: Volume 2 (Cambridge UP, 2019) second volume of the first, in-depth comparison of the Holocaust and new world sl...
Ashawnta Jackson, "Soul-Folk" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
19 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Folk music of the 1960s and 1970s was a genre that was always shifting and expanding, yet somehow never found room for so many. In the sounds of soul-...
Jennifer Chudy, "Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
18 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There is racial inequality in America, and some people are distressed over it while others are not. Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sym...
Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms in James Baldwin’s "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone"
16 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast describes a short history of a man who did something we’ve lost in America. That man was James Baldwin who insisted on telling the trut...
Boris Adjemian, "The Brass Band of the King: Armenians in Ethiopia" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
12 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1924, the crown prince and future emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Täfäri, on a visit to Jerusalem, called on forty Armenian orphans who had survived the...
Frank R. Baumgartner, “Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
08 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We recently marked the 50th Anniversary of Terry vs. Ohio, the US Supreme Court case that dramatically expanded the scope under which agents of the st...
Natalie Wall, "Black Expression and White Generosity: A Theoretical Framework of Race" (Emerald Publishing, 2024)
07 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Black Expression and White Generosity: A Theoretical Framework of Race (Emerald Publishing, 2024), Dr. Natalie Wall takes readers on a journey th...
Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s book is: Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action (University of R...
Camille Owens, "Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America" (NYU Press, 2024)
03 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America (NYU Press, 2024) argues that the child has been the key figure giving measure...
Steven T. Katz, "The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
30 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers the first, in-depth comparison of the Holocaust and new world...
Andrew W. Kahrl, "The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
25 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (U Chicago Press, 2024), Andrew W. Kahrl uncovers the history of in...
Wayne A. Wiegand, "In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries" (UP of Mississippi, 2024)
23 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Librarians around the country are currently on a battleground, defending their right to purchase and circulate books dealing with issues of race and s...
Caree A. Banton, "More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
21 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Caree A. Banton's book More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic (Cambridge UP, 2019)...
Sarah Lewis, "The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America" (Harvard UP, 2024)
21 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans ...
David Kroening Seitz, "A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
20 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial pla...
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, "Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde" (FSG, 2024)
19 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-ce...
Michael L. Walker, "Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail" (Oxford UP, 2022)
15 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jails are the principal people-processing machines of the criminal justice system. Mostly they hold persons awaiting trial who cannot afford or have b...
Grant Olwage, "Paul Robeson's Voices" (Oxford UP, 2023)
13 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Robeson's Voices (Oxford UP, 2023) is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage exa...
Tracy Fessenden, “Religion Around Billie Holiday” (Penn State UP, 2018)
08 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Billie Holiday is one of the most iconic jazz performers of all time. Her voice is certainly unmistakable but for many her religious sensibilities may...
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration: A Talk by Isabel Wilkerson
07 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 2010, Isabel Wilkerson spoke to the Institute about the fifteen years she spent reporting and writing her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic...
Sara E. Johnson, "Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2023)
07 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Sain...
Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "Me and My House: James Baldwin's Last Decade in France" (Duke UP, 2018)
06 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The last sixteen years of James Baldwin's life (1971–87) unfolded in a village in the South of France, in a sprawling house nicknamed “Chez Baldwi...
Andy Clarno et al., "Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
03 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Chicago is a city with extreme concentrations of racialized poverty and inequity, one that relies on an extensive network of repressive agencies to po...
How Mechanisms of Psychoanalytic Defense Perpetuate Racism in America
03 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The third podcast in this series focuses on an article written by Dr. Dionne Powell who participated in the 2014 documentary, “Black Psychoanalysts...
Tadashi Dozono, "Discipline Problems: How Students of Color Trouble Whiteness in Schools" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
31 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Angel, a Black tenth-grader at a New York City public school, self-identifies as a nerd and likes to learn. But she’s troubled that her history clas...
Robin Bernstein, "Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
23 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-dri...
Edward Pearson, "The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670-1825" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
22 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670-1825 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Edward Pearson offers...
Devonya N. Havis, "Creating a Black Vernacular Philosophy" (Lexington Books, 2022)
20 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What can philosophy do? By taking up Black American cultural practices, Devonya N. Havis suggests that academic philosophy has been too narrow in its...
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "Haitian History: New Perspectives" (Routledge, 2012)
17 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Despite Haiti's proximity to the United States, and its considerable importance to our own history, Haiti barely registered in the historic consciousn...
Policing and White Power with Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham (JP, EF)
15 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This June 2020 episode, originally part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book's first exploration of police brutality, systemic and pers...
Crystal Wilkinson, "Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks" (Clarkson Potter, 2023)
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Poet Laureate of Kentucky Crystal Wilkinson’s food memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Co...
The Role of Psychoanalytic Mechanisms of Defense; What They Are and How They Work
07 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Using one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s major ideas as a springboard for their discussion, “The truth will set you free,” the host and co-host...
Race, Gender, and the 2024 Presidential Election Cycle
05 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Vice President Kamala Harris is poised to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. The path to this nomination and the generation electi...
Anne Gray Fischer, "The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification" (UNC Press, 2022)
05 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Anne Gray Fischer speaks about her path to and through research, including how sex workers informed her analysis of policing and state violence, the...
Nadirah Simmons, "First Things First: Hip-Hop Ladies Who Changed the Game" (Twelve, 2024)
04 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This enlightening book reframes the history of hip-hop—and this time, women are given credit for all their trailblazing achievements that have left ...
Nik Ribianszky, "Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865" (U Georgia Press, 2021)
03 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865 (U Georgia Press, 2021), Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender...
Tisha Brooks, "Spirit Deep: Recovering the Sacred in Black Women’s Travel" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
02 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What would it mean for American and African American literary studies if readers took the spirituality and travel of Black women seriously? With Sp...
Jane-Marie Collins, "Emancipatory Narratives & Enslaved Motherhood: Bahia, Brazil, 1830-1888" (Liverpool UP, 2023)
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jane-Marie Collins's book Emancipatory Narratives & Enslaved Motherhood: Bahia, Brazil, 1830-1888 (Liverpool UP, 2023) examines three major current...
Sheila Curran Bernard, "Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
28 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous - as was, according to ...
Prithi Kanakamedala, "Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough" (NYU Press, 2024)
28 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Meet the Black Brooklynites who defined New York City's most populous borough through their search for social justice. Before it was a borough, Brookl...
Musa al-Gharbi, "We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite" (Princeton UP, 2024)
28 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How a new "woke" elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status--without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged. Society ...
Tiffany Gill, "To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism" (U Illinois Press, 2019)
21 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Black women undertook an energetic and unprecedented engagement with internationalism from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. In many cases, th...
Michael J. Douma, "The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700-1827" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
20 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Original and deeply researched, The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700-1827 (Cambridge Un...
Ujju Aggarwal, "Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
20 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actua...
Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit
18 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s book is: Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (U Chicago Press, 2024), by Dr. Robin Bernste...
Jill A. Fisher, "Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals" (NYU Press, 2020)
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,...
Charly Palmer and Karida Brown, "The New Brownies' Book: A Love Letter to Black Families" (Chronicle Books, 2023)
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1920, W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP founders published The Brownies’ Book: A Monthly Magazine for Children of the Sun. A century later, The Ne...
Emily J. Lordi, "The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s" (Duke UP, 2020)
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Soul is one of those concepts that is often evoked, but rarely satisfactorily defined. In The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 19...
Toby Green, "A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Ris...
Theresa McCulla, "Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
11 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor. In Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans (U Chic...
Kellie Carter Jackson, "We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance" (Seal Press, 2024)
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by an...
Racism as Power Relation: A Discussion with Adaner Usmani (EF, JP)
04 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-disc...
Oneka LaBennett, "Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond" (NYU Press, 2024)
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Previously ranked among the hemisphere’s poorest countries, Guyana is becoming a global leader in per capita oil production, a shift which promises ...
Ben Wright, "Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism" (LSU Press, 2020)
02 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ben Wright's Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism (LSU Press, 2020) demonstrates how religion structured ...
Faith Smith, "Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century" (Duke UP, 2023)
02 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century (Duke UP, 2023), Faith Smith engages with a period in...
Kehbuma Langmia, "Black 'Race' and the White Supremacy Saga" (Anthem Press, 2024)
01 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Langmia's book Black 'Race' and the White Supremacy Saga (Anthem Press, 2024) examines the conundrum that has haunted the Black and White ances...
Bayley J. Marquez, "Plantation Pedagogy: The Violence of Schooling Across Black and Indigenous Space" (U California Press, 2024)
30 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, teachers, administrators, and policymakers fashioned a system of industrial education that attempte...
On Michael Jackson: A Lecture by Margo Jefferson
29 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In September 2006, Margo Jefferson spoke to the Institute about her book, On Michael Jackson (Vintage, 2007). Jefferson received the 1995 Pulitzer P...
Jeremy Schipper, "Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial" (Princeton UP, 2022)
27 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt that Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial (Princeton UP, 2022), Dr. Jeremy Schipper tells the story of...
Frederick Klaits et al., "Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality (Bloomsbury, 2022), Frederick Klaits compares how members of one majority white...
Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, "Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction" (Ohio State UP, 2024)
25 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2024), Jerry Rafiki Jenkins examines four types of human mo...
A Psychoanalytic Overview of Racism in America
24 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The first podcast in this series was inspired by a documentary film made in 2014 called “Black Analysts Speak” as well as some of the findings i...
Paula Marie Seniors, "Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
22 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores the signi...
Sally Stocksdale, "When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate" (McFarland, 2022)
19 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In When...
Duana Fullwiley, "Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science" (U California Press, 2024)
12 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (University of California Press, 2024), Duana Fullwiley has penned an ...
Screwed and Chopped
10 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Since the 1990s, many of Houston’s African American residents have customized cars and customized the sound of hip hop. Cars called “slabs” swer...
Adrienne Brown, "The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership" (Stanford UP, 2024)
09 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Housing experts and activists have long described the foundational role race has played in the creation of mass homeownership. This book insistently t...
Financial Institutions and Enslavement
08 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this special episode, we talk to two authors about the role of financial institutions in enslavement. Sharon Ann Murphy, associate professor of his...
Corey J. Miles, "Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South" (U Mississippi Press, 2024)
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Vibe: The Sound and Feeling of Black Life in the American South (University of Mississippi Press, 2023), Corey J. Miles narrates how southern Bl...
Vince Brown, Caribbean Vectors (EF, JP)
06 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The largest slave uprising in the 18th century British Caribbean was also a node of the global conflict called the Seven Year’s War, though it isn’...
Matthew D. Morrison, "Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States" (U California Press, 2024)
05 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (U California Press, 2024) explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the ...
Kyle Barnett, "Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
02 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smalle...
Richard E. Ocejo, "Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City" (Princeton UP, 2024)
02 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Newburgh is a small postindustrial city of some twenty-eight thousand people located sixty miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley. Li...
Ears Racing
27 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This episode, we talk with Jennifer Lynn Stoever–editor of the influential sound studies blog Sounding Out!–about her new book, The Sonic Color...
Larry Roeder and Barry Harrelson, "Dirt Don't Burn: A Black Community's Struggle for Educational Equality Under Segregation" (Georgetown UP, 2023)
27 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The system of educational apartheid that existed in the United States until the Brown v. Board of Education decision and its aftermath has affected ev...
Jesse McCarthy, "The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
26 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
‘The result is that, at the present time, the world is at an impasse.’ In 1956, Aimé Césaire pronounced the world to be at an impasse while reno...
Benjamin Bryce and David M. K. Sheinin, "Race and Transnationalism in the Americas" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021)
22 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Edited by Benjamin Bryce and David Sheinin, Race and Transnationalism in the Americas (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), highlights the importa...
Danielle R. Olden, "Racial Uncertainties: Mexican Americans, School Desegregation, and the Making of Race in Post–Civil Rights America" (U California Press, 2022)
22 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mexican Americans have often fit uncertainly into the white/non-white binary that has goverens much of American history. After Colorado, and much of t...
Laura Helton, "Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History" (Columbia UP, 2024)
22 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American...
Ryan Reft, "Heroin and Chocolate City: Black Community Responses to Drug Addiction in the Nation’s Capital, 1967-1973" (2024)
20 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ryan Reft is a historian in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, where he oversees collections pertaining to 20th and 21st century dom...
Raven Simone Maragh-Lloyd, "Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age" (U California Press, 2024)
19 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age (U California Press, 2024) explores the creative range of Black digital u...
Adriana Chira, "Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
17 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, the island of Cuba's radical cradle, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative p...