New Books in African American Studies
Episodes
Hidden No More: A Conversation with Space Suit Technician Sharon McDougle
07 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Who dresses the astronauts for flight? Why are the suits orange? And how are they cared for? Sharon Caples McDougle joins us to talk about her work as...
Ramsey Lewis and Aaron Cohen, "Gentleman of Jazz: A Life in Music" (Blackstone, 2023)
04 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This immersive new autobiography provides insight into the early life and illustrious career of the late great Ramsey Lewis, one of the most popular j...
Monica Huerta, "The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism" (NYU Press, 2023)
04 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The end of the nineteenth century saw massive developments and innovations in photography at a time when the forces of Western modernity—industriali...
Barbara D. Savage, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar" (Yale UP, 2023)
03 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despi...
Chhaya Kolavalli, "Well-Intentioned Whiteness: Green Urban Development and Black Resistance in Kansas City" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
02 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Chhaya Kolavalli's book Well-Intentioned Whiteness: Green Urban Development and Black Resistance in Kansas City (U Georgia Press, 2023) documents ho...
Rachel Stephens, "Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture" (U Arkansas Press, 2023)
01 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists crafted a variety of visual messages about the plight of enslaved people, portraying the vio...
Russ Castronovo, "American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability" (Princeton UP, 2023)
30 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
An incisive critique that examines the origins of contemporary American ideas about surveillance, terrorism, and white supremacy. For more than three ...
Salim Yaqub, "Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
28 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Salim Yaqub's Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945 (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores how Americans from all walks of life – ...
Edward L. Ayers, "American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860" (Norton, 2023)
25 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860 (Norton, 2023) is a revealing history of the formative period when voices of dissent and innovation d...
Mia Mask, "Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
24 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Did you know Sidney Poitier was a western icon? In a genre best known for John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, African American actors and directors have ...
Ian Smith, "Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
24 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Ian Smith urges readers of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, ...
Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine et al., "When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
23 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How do Black women in higher education create, experience, and understand joy? What sustains them? While scholars have long documented sexism, racism,...
Biko Mandela Gray and Ryan J. Johnson, "Phenomenology of Black Spirit" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
22 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Phenomenology of Black Spirit (Edinburgh UP, 2023), Ryan Johnson and Biko Mandela Gray study the relationship between Hegel's Phenomenology of ...
Lama Rod Owens, "The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors" (Sounds True, 2023)
19 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Lama Rod Owens is an author, activist, and authorized lama in the Karma Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. In his new book, The New Saints: From Broke...
Charisse Burden-Stelly, "Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
17 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans’ fear of Black Nationalism an...
Beatriz Nascimento, "The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Beatriz Nascimento (1942-1995) was a poet, historian, artist, and political leader in Brazil's Black movement, an innovative and creative thinker whos...
Jeffrey Scholes, "Christianity, Race, and Sport" (Routledge, 2021)
14 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This book provides a rigorously researched introduction to the relationship between Christianity, race, and sport in the United States. Christianity,...
Musab Younis, "On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought" (U California Press, 2022)
13 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought (U California Press, 2022) examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas t...
Juliet Hooker, "Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss" (Princeton UP, 2023)
13 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can't always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being a...
Jennifer E. Brooks, "Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama" (LSU Press, 2022)
12 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Immigrant laborers who came to the New South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves poised uncomfortably between white ...
Adrien Sebro, "Scratchin' and Survivin': Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
12 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nea...
Ralph H. Craig III, "Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner" (Eerdmans, 2023)
10 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
If you don’t know Tina Turner’s spirituality, you don’t know Tina. When Tina Turner reclaimed her throne as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll in th...
Matthew J. Clavin, "Symbols of Freedom: Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War" (NYU Press, 2023)
07 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the early United States, anthems, flags, holidays, monuments, and memorials were powerful symbols of an American identity that helped unify a divid...
Drew A. Swanson, "A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction" (UNC Press, 2023)
04 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Step...
Sharony Green, "The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Zora Neale Hurston, an anthropologist and writer best known for her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, led a complicated life often marked b...
Melvin L. Rogers, "The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” is notoriously fiery. No doubt part of what’s gripping about it is ...
Claire Jean Kim, "Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
30 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Where do Asian Americans fit into the U.S. racial order? How do we understand anti-Asian racism in relation to structural anti-Blackness? Are Asian Am...
Frederick V. Engram, "Black Liberation Through Action and Resistance: MOVE" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
30 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Black Liberation through Action and Resistance: MOVE (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) serves as a call to action for Black millennials and co-conspirator...
Sarah Mayorga, "Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism" (UNC Press, 2023)
29 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Racial capitalism, invisible but threaded throughout the world, shapes our lives. Focusing on the experiences of white, Black, and Latinx residents ...
Nikki M. Taylor, "Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
28 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voice...
James V. Fenelon, "Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790" (Routledge, 2023)
28 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this interview James Fenelon discusses his new book entitled Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 149...
Marisel C. Moreno, "Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art" (U Texas Press, 2022)
27 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Debates over the undocumented migration of Latin Americans invariably focus on the southern US border, but most migrants never cross that arbitrary li...
Christopher P. Barton, "The Archaeology of Race and Class at Timbuctoo: A Black Community in New Jersey" (UP of Florida, 2023)
25 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Archaeology of Race and Class at Timbuctoo: A Black Community in New Jersey (UP of Florida, 2023) is the first book to examine the historic Black...
Decolonizing Praxis
23 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil ...
Danielle N. Boaz, "Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur" (Oxford UP, 2023)
21 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--rea...
Matthew Guariglia, "Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York" (Duke UP, 2023)
21 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse metropolis. In Police and th...
Philip Dray, "A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age" (FSG, 2022)
19 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was lynched by a violent mob. The twenty...
Katherine Jensen, "The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
18 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2013, as Syrians desperate to escape a brutal war fled the country, Brazil took the remarkable step of instituting an open-door policy for all Syri...
The Future of Incarceration: A Discussion with Colleen P. Eren
18 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The United States has long been associated with a very harsh criminal justice system with, in some cases, people serving long sentence for minor crime...
Paul Clammer, "Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean's Forgotten Kingdom" (Hurst, 2023)
18 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How did a Caribbean child, born into plantation slavery, come to defeat Napoleon's armies in battle and crown himself king of the first free black nat...
Orisanmi Burton, "Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt" (U California Press, 2023)
17 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (University of California Press, 2023) boldly and compellingly arg...
Nick Tabor, "Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created" (St. Martin's Press, 2023)
16 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor's Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created (St. Martin's Press, 2023) charts the f...
John D. Garrigus, "A Secret Among the Blacks: Slave Resistance Before the Haitian Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2023)
15 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A bold rethinking of the Haitian Revolution reveals the roots of the only successful slave uprising in the modern world. Unearthing the progenitors of...
Michael Taylor, "The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery" (Bodley Head, 2021)
15 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 1807, Parliament outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire, but for the next quarter of a century, despite heroic and bloody rebellions, more ...
Kristen Green, "The Devil's Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave Jail" (Seal Press, 2022)
14 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The inspiring true story of an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation’s first HBCUs. In The ...
Alejandra Dubcovsky, "Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South" (Yale UP, 2023)
13 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Historian Alejandra Dubcovsky tells a story of war, slavery, loss, remembrance, and the women whose resilience and resistance transformed the colonial...
Helen Rappaport, "In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Black Cultural Icon" (Pegasus Books, 2022)
13 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Raised in Jamaica, Mary Seacole first came to England in the 1850s after working in Panama. She wanted to volunteer as a nurse and aide during the Cri...
Robert Greene and Tyler D. Parry, "Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina" (U South Carolina Press, 2021)
13 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Since its founding in 1801, African Americans have played an integral, if too often overlooked, role in the history of the University of South Carolin...
Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, "Maghreb Noir: The Militant-Artists of North Africa and the Struggle for a Pan-African, Postcolonial Future" (Stanford UP, 2023)
11 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Upon their independence, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian governments turned to the Global South and offered military and financial aid to Black liber...
Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, "The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn" (UNC Press, 2023)
10 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (UNC Press, 2023), award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered...
John Arena, "Expelling Public Schools: How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
09 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Exploring the role of identitarian politics in the privatization of Newark’s public school system In Expelling Public Schools, John Arena explores t...
Sharon Patricia Holland, "an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life" (Duke UP, 2023)
07 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divi...
Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, "Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution" (Polity, 2023)
04 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In their remarkable new book Slavery, Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution (Polity, 2023), Professor Maxine Berg and Professor Pat Hudson “fo...
Rebecca J. Fraser, "Black Female Intellectuals in 19th Century America: Born to Bloom Unseen?" (Routledge, 2022)
01 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Drawing on letters, personal testimony, works of art, novels, and historic Black newspapers, this book is an interdisciplinary exploration of Black wo...
Kiana Fitzgerald, "Ode to Hip-Hop: 50 Albums That Define 50 Years of Trailblazing Music" (Running Press Adult, 2023)
30 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From underground roots to mainstream popularity, hip-hop's influence on music and entertainment around the world has been nothing short of extraordina...
Sara Marcus, "Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis" (Harvard UP, 2023)
30 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Moving from the aftermath of Reconstruction through the AIDS crisis, a new cultural history of the United States shows how artists, intellectuals, and...
Peter Reed, "Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century America: Revolution, Race and Popular Performance" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
28 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
American culture maintained a complicated relationship with Haiti from its revolutionary beginnings onward. In Staging Haiti in Nineteenth-Century Am...
Sirpa Salenius, "An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe" (U Massachusetts Press, 2016)
27 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Parker Remond (1826–1894) left the free black community of Salem, Massachusetts, where she was born, to become one of the first women to trave...
Dylan C. Penningroth, "Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights" (Liveright, 2023)
26 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights...
Jonathan Mael, "Harlem World: How Hip Hop's Super Showdown Changed Music Forever" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
26 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
July 3, 1981, was a pivotal night for the future of America's newest art form: hip hop. In New York's Harlem World Club, the Fantastic Romantic Five a...
Laura F. Edwards, "The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South" (UNC Press, 2009)
25 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Do individuals have the right to “keep and bear” arms? Do “the people” have any collective rights to public safety? Now that the United States...
Zebulon Vance Miletsky, "Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle" (UNC Press, 2022)
22 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and ...
David Cunningham, January 6th and Asymmetrical Policing (JP, EF)
21 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Recall This Book first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week afte...
Lipika Pelham, "Passing: An Alternative History of Identity" (Oxford UP, 2021)
20 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A slave woman in 1840s America dresses as a white, disabled man to escape to freedom, while a twenty-first-century black rights activist is 'cancelled...
Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, "Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap" (U California Press, 2023)
19 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This book shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrificati...
Maria Smilios, "The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023)
19 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
New York City, 1929. A sanatorium, a deadly disease, and a dire nursing shortage. In the pre-antibiotic days when tuberculosis stirred people’s da...
Kimberly Mack, "Living Colour's Time's Up" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
19 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The iconic Black rock band Living Colour's Time's Up, released in 1990, was recorded in the aftermath of the spectacular critical and commercial succ...
Christopher Paul Harris, "To Build a Black Future: The Radical Politics of Joy, Pain, and Care" (Princeton UP, 2023)
15 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When #BlackLivesMatter emerged in 2013, it animated the most consequential Black-led mobilization since the civil rights and Black power era. Today, t...
Chris Molanphy, "Old Town Road" (Duke UP, 2023)
15 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Old Town Road (Duke University Press, 2023), Chris Molanphy considers Lil Nas X’s debut single as pop artifact, chart phenomenon, and cultura...
Jonathan Daniel Wells, "The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War" (Bold Type Press, 2020)
14 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In a rapidly changing New York, two forces battled for the city's soul: the pro-slavery New Yorkers who kept the illegal slave trade alive and well, a...
Jonathan Leal, "Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop" (Duke UP, 2023)
14 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (Duke UP, 2023), Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new fut...
William Darity et al., "The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice" (U California Press, 2023)
12 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project: ...
A Better Way to Buy Books
12 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has alre...
Josephine Lee, "Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater" (UNC Press, 2022)
11 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The history of race in American theater is more complicated than you might think, writes Dr. Josephine Lee in Oriental, Black, and White: The Format...
Race and Electrical Infrastructure in the Jim Crow South
11 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Conor Harrison, Associate Professor of Geography and the School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina, talks about his ...
Padraic X. Scanlan, "Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain" (Robinson, 2021)
11 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But this claim that the British empire was 'free' and...
Nicole Fabricant, "Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore" (U California Press, 2022)
10 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Industrial toxic emissions on the South Baltimore Peninsula are among the highest in the nation. Because of the concentration of factories and other c...
Isabel Machado, "Carnival in Alabama: Marked Bodies and Invented Traditions in Mobile" (UP of Mississippi, 2023)
10 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Mobile is simultaneously a typical and unique city in the postwar United States. It was a quintessential boomtown during World War II. That prosperity...
Vincent W. Lloyd, "Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination" (Yale UP, 2022)
09 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This radical work by one of the leading young scholars of Black thought delineates a new concept of Black dignity, yet one with a long history in Blac...
Andrew Chan, "Why Mariah Carey Matters" (U Texas Press, 2023)
05 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Why Mariah Carey Matters (University of Texas Press, 2023) examines the creative and complicated evolution of the musical artist. In the 1990s, Carey...
Kristal Brent Zook, "The Girl in the Yellow Poncho: A Memoir" (Duke UP, 2023)
05 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
At five years old, Kristal Brent Zook sat on the steps of a Venice Beach, California, motel trying to make sense of her white father’s abandonment, ...
Kidada E. Williams, "I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
03 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in...
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, "Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality" (Knopf Doubleday, 2023)
30 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly ...
Ana Lucia Araujo, "Museums and Atlantic Slavery" (Routledge, 2021)
29 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ana Lucia Araujo's book Museums and Atlantic Slavery (Routledge, 2021) explores how slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved people are repre...
David Waldstreicher, "The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence" (FSG, 2023)
28 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Thy Power, O Liberty, make strong the weak, And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak. At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley published the first book i...
Beverly C. Tomek, "Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania" (Temple UP, 2021)
27 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In her concise history Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania (Temple UP, 2021), Beverly Tomek corrects the long-held notion that slavery in the Nort...
Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette, "Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls" (Lexington Books, 2022)
27 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette's book Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls (Lexington Books, 2022) examines depictions of...
Vanessa I. Corredera, "Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
27 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Vanessa I. Corredera’s book Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America (Edinburgh Univeristy Press, 2022) looks at how that seventee...
Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin, "Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
26 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. In Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader ...
Hollis Robbins, "Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition" (U Georgia Press, 2020)
26 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As I learned from Hollis Robbins’s monograph Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (U Georgia Press, 2020), th...
Erica O. Turner, "Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
25 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For the past five years, American public schools have enrolled more students identified as Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Asian than white. At th...
Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst, "I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America" (UNC Press, 2023)
25 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Carl Ernst’s and Mbaye Lo’s new book I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America (UNC Press, 2023) is a fascin...
Chesya Burke, "Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
25 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters...
Christopher C. Sellers, "Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
21 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis (U Georgia Press, 2023) turns an envi...
Becoming Justice Thomas
20 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On today’s podcast, we are changing things up a bit. Instead of interviewing the author of a recent book, I am interviewing another podcaster about ...
Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove, "Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
18 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Early childhood can be a time of rich discovery, a period when educators have an opportunity to harness their students’ fascination to create unique...
Bobby J. Smith II, "Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2023)
16 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bobby J. Smith II's book Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2023 )unearths a food story burie...
Jennifer Ritterhouse, "Discovering the South: One Man's Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s" (UNC Press, 2017)
16 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. I...
Lauren S. Foley, "On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies" (NYU Press, 2023)
16 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Diversity in higher education is under attack as the Supreme Court limits the use of race-conscious admissions practices at American colleges and uni...
Earl Cureton and Jake Uitti, "Earl the Twirl: My Life in Basketball" (McFarland, 2023)
16 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Earl Careton about his new book (co-authored with Jake Uitti), Earl the Twirl: My Life in Basketball (McFarland, 2023) Earl "The ...