New Books in African American Studies

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...

Christopher Tounsel, "Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity" (Cornell UP, 2024)

15 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Christopher Tounsel's book Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity (Cornell UP, 2024) explores the history of ...

Courtney Thorsson, "The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture" (Columbia UP, 2023)

13 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2023) explores how an incredible group of B...

Kevin Woodson, "The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

13 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

America's elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms are known for grueling hours, low odds of promotion, and personnel practi...

Rachelle Winkle-Wagner, "The Chosen We: Black Women's Empowerment in Higher Education" (SUNY Press, 2023)

12 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Chosen We: Black Women's Empowerment in Higher Education (SUNY Press, 2023) elevates the oral histories of 105 accomplished, college-educated Bla...

Kendra Y. Hamilton, "Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

10 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Kendra Y. Hamilton’s Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess (University of Georgia Press, 2024) is a literary and cultural history ...

Robert K. D. Colby, "An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South" (Oxford UP, 2024)

10 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery and, after a four-year struggle to become an independent slaveholding republic, died ...

Luis H. H. Favela, "The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment" (Routledge, 2024)

10 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Ecological psychology holds that perception and action are best explained in terms of dynamic interactions between brain, body, and environment, not i...

Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha, "Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States" (UNC Press, 2023)

07 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Haitian Vodou, spirits impact Black practitioners' everyday lives, tightly connecting the sacred and the secular. As Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha reveals...

James Wolfinger, "If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia" (Temple UP, 2022)

06 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

If There Is No Struggle There Is No Progress: Black Politics in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia (Temple UP, 2022) provides an in-depth historical ana...

Crystal Wilkinson, "Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks" (Clarkson Potter, 2023)

02 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Years ago, when O. Henry Prize-winning writer Crystal Wilkinson was baking a jam cake, she felt her late grandmother’s presence. She soon realized t...

Adia Harvey Wingfield, "Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It" (Amistad Press, 2023)

30 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to a...

Christopher Cameron, "Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism" (Northwestern UP, 2019)

29 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism (Northwestern University Press, 2019) by Christopher Cameron, an Associate Professor of h...

John H. Cable, "Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi" (UP of Kansas, 2023)

28 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Historians of the American South have come to consider the mechanization and consolidation of cotton farming—the “Southern enclosure movement”—...

Adam J. Criblez, "Kings of the Garden: The New York Knicks and Their City" (Three Hills, 2024)

26 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Kings of the Garden: The New York Knicks and Their City (Three Hills, 2024), Adam J. Criblez traces the fall and rise of the New York Knicks betw...

Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King, "America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect Versus Repair" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

21 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is happening to the politics of race in America?  In America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect Versus Repair (U Chicago Press, 2024), Roger...

Fumilayo Showers, "Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

21 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As the U.S. population ages and as health care needs become more complex, demand for paid care workers in home and institutional settings has increase...

Tanisha Ford, "Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement" (Amistad Press, 2024)

19 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

An engrossing social history of the unsinkable Mollie Moon, the stylish founder of the National Urban League Guild and fundraiser extraordinaire who r...

Melvin L. Rogers, "The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)

15 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Political Theorist Melvin L. Rogers has a deep and rich new book delving into the work of a host of different African American political thinkers. But...

Joseph H. Holland, "Make Your Own History: Timeless Truths from Black American Trailblazers" (Dafina, 2023)

14 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

One hundred and twenty Black leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs share their wisdom and experience across the centuries in Make Your Own History: ...

Jeremy Black, "The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History" (Routledge, 2015)

14 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In The Atlantic Slave Trade in World History (Routledge, 2015), Jeremy Black presents a compact yet comprehensive survey of slavery and its impact o...

R. J. Boutelle, "The Race for America: Black Internationalism in the Age of Manifest Destiny" (UNC Press, 2023)

13 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As Manifest Destiny took hold in the national consciousness, what did it mean for African Americans who were excluded from its ambitions for an expand...

JJ Johnson and Danica Novgorodoff, "The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table" (Flatiron Books, 2023)

13 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Simple Art of Rice: Recipes from Around the World for the Heart of Your Table (Flatiron Books, 2023) is a cookbook celebrating the versatility of...

Elyse Ambrose, "A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive" (T&T Clark, 2024)

11 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark, 2024), Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of blackqueerness a...

Shardé M. Davis, "Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education" (UNC Press, 2024)

09 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When Sharde M. Davis turned to social media during the summer of racial reckoning in 2020, she meant only to share how racism against Black people aff...

Christopher Michael Blakley, "Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World" (Louisiana State UP, 2023)

08 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Historians of early America, slavery, early African American history, the history of science, and environmental history have interrogated the complex ...

Greg Jarrell, "Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods" (Fortress Press, 2024)

03 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Greg Jarrell's book Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods (Fortress Press, 2024) uncovers how race, geography, po...

David J. Dennis Jr. and David J. Dennis Sr., "The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride" (Harper, 2022)

30 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"The Movement Made Us takes literature to a momentous Southern Black space to which I honestly never thought a book could take us. This is literally ...

Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney, "From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle" (Vanderbilt UP, 2024)

29 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some s...

Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen, "The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition" (Haymarket Books, 2024)

29 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The story of the fight against fascism across the African diaspora, revealing that Black antifascism has always been vital to global freedom struggles...

Tonia Sutherland, "Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife" (U California Press, 2023)

22 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The first critical examination of death and remembrance in the digital age—and an invitation to imagine Black digital sovereignty in life and death....

Coretta M. Pittman, "Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)

19 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries by Coretta M. Pittman (Unive...

Whitney Nell Stewart, "This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations" (UNC Press, 2023)

15 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US nationa...

Jonathan W. White, "Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

15 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), historian Jonat...

Myisha Cherry, "Failures of Forgiveness: What We Get Wrong and How to Do Better" (Princeton UP, 2023)

15 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From religion to popular culture, institutions and people have shaped how we conceive forgiveness. Myisha Cherry, associate professor of philosophy, a...

Victoria Perry, "A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape" (Hurst, 2022)

14 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The 2020 toppling of slave-trader Edward Colston's statue by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol was a dramatic reminder of Britain's role in tra...

Korey Garibaldi, "Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America" (Princeton UP, 2023)

13 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America (Princeton UP, 2023), Korey Garibaldi explores i...