New Books in African American Studies
Episodes
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 ...
Keith A. Mayes, "The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
13 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education (U Minnesota Press, 2023) examines the overrepresentation of Black s...
Kris Marsh, "The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
12 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Drawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, Kris Marsh's The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone i...
Donovan X. Ramsey, "When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era" (One World, 2023)
12 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan's war...
Ashley Robertson Preston, "Mary Mcleod Bethune the Pan-Africanist" (UP of Florida, 2023)
12 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This book examines the Pan-Africanism of Mary McLeod Bethune through her work, which internationalized the scope of Black women's organizations to cre...
Zahi Zalloua, "Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
11 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Zahi Zalloua provides the first examination of Palestinian identity from the perspective of Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies. Examining the Pale...
Driving While Black: African Americans and the Automobile
07 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Gretchen Sorin, Director and Distinguished Professor of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York - Oneonta, talks about he...
Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, "Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America" (UNC Press, 2023)
04 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Twentieth-century African American history cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story o...
Tamara J. Walker, "Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad" (Crown, 2023)
04 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Part historical exploration, part travel memoir, Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad (Crown, 2023) reveals poignant histories o...
Olivier Burtin, "A Nation of Veterans: War, Citizenship, and the Welfare State in Modern America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
03 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In examining how the veterans' movement inscribed martial citizenship onto American law, politics, and culture, A Nation of Veterans: War, Citizensh...
Jill L. Newmark, "Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons" (Southern Illinois UP, 2023)
03 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Of some twelve thousand Union Civil War surgeons, only fourteen were Black men. This book is the first-ever comprehensive exploration of their lives a...
Talking Clarence Thomas: A Conversation with Amul Thapar
01 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As the last few months of landmark Supreme Court decisions have showcased, Clarence Thomas is one of the most important men in America. To wrap up our...
Blair Kelley, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class" (LIveright, 2023)
31 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contr...
Adom Getachew and Jennifer Pitts eds. "W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
30 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the most significant American political thinkers of the twentieth century. This volume collects 24 of his essays and speec...
Marzia Milazzo, "Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
29 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power (Northwestern UP, 2022), Marzia Milazzo offers a transnational account of anti-Blackness an...
Rob Eschmann,, "When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age" (U California Press, 2023)
29 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, on...
Anthony Russell Jerry, "Blackness in Mexico: Afro-Mexican Recognition and the Production of Citizenship in the Costa Chica" (UP of Florida, 2023)
26 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Through historical and ethnographic research, Blackness in Mexico: Afro-Mexican Recognition and the Production of Citizenship in the Costa Chica (UP...
African American Women on the American Railroad: A Conversation with Miriam Thaggert
17 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Miriam Thaggert, Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, talks about her book, Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Ra...
Jessica D. Klanderud, "Struggle for the Street: Social Networks and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Pittsburgh" (UNC Press, 2023)
17 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Cities are nothing without the streets—the arteries through which goods, people, and ideas flow. Neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, the c...
Victor Luckerson, "Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street" (Random House, 2023)
17 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, in 1914, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming a national center o...
Kelly Ross, "Slavery, Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature" (Oxford UP, 2022)
16 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Slavery, Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, intercon...
Vivian Nun Halloran, "Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
16 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Vivian Nun Halloran analyzes memoirs, picture books, comic book...
Brianna Holt, "In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So 'Post-Racial' America" (Plume Books, 2023)
16 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Part memoir, part cultural critique, In Our Shoes: On Being a Young Black Woman in Not-So 'Post-Racial' America (Plume Books, 2023) uses pop culture...
Stephen Bright and James Kwak, "The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts" (The New Press, 2023)
15 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Glenn Ford, a Black man, spent thirty years on Louisiana’s death row for a crime he did not commit. He was released in 2014—and given twenty dolla...
Nikki M. Taylor, "Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
15 Jul 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...
Emily Flitter, "The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America" (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2022)
11 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In 2018, Emily Flitter received a tip that Morgan Stanley had fired a Black employee without cause. Flitter had been searching for a way to investigat...
Keisha Ray, "Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People's Health" (Oxford UP, 2023)
08 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Why do American Black people generally have worse health than American White people? To answer this question, Keisha Ray's book Black Health: The Soc...
Katherine C. Mooney, "Isaac Murphy: The Rise and Fall of a Black Jockey" (Yale UP, 2023)
02 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the...
Samuel G. Freedman, "Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights" (Oxford UP, 2023)
21 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From one of the country's most distinguished journalists, a revisionist and riveting look at the American politician whom history has judged a loser, ...
Down Deep in My Soul (with Fr. Maurice Nutt, C.Ss.R.)
15 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Down Deep in My Soul: An African American Catholic Theology of Preaching (Orbis Books, 2023), Father Maurice Nutt, a doctor of pre...
Roy Christopher, "Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism" (MIT Press, 2022)
12 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (MIT Press, 2022), edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, t...
Kathryn Olivarius, "Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom" (Harvard UP, 2022)
10 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the ...
Mark R. Warren, "Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline" (Oxford UP, 2021)
07 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The story of how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline...
J. T. Roane, "Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place" (NYU Press, 2023)
04 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, 2023), author J. T. Roane shows how working-class Black communitie...
Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, "The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States" (Columbia UP, 2023)
04 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Poor Black women who benefit from social welfare are marginalized in a number of ways by interlocking systemic racism, sexism, and classism. The media...
Lorenzo Costaguta, "Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
03 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As the United States transformed into an industrial superpower, American socialists faced the vexing question of how to approach race. Lorenzo Costagu...
Kidada E. Williams, "I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
02 Jun 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...