New Books in African American Studies
Episodes
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...
Rebeca L. Hey-Colón, "Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds" (U Texas Press, 2023)
30 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Water is often tasked with upholding division through the imposition of geopolitical borders. We see this in the construction of the Rio Grande/Río B...
Chris Campion and Bud Lee, "The War is Here: Newark 1967" (ZE Books, 2023)
28 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
July 1967. After the arrest, beating, and imprisonment of cab driver John Smith by local police, the city of Newark--already a tinderbox, became a hot...
Ed Mitchell et al., "Ed Mitchell's Barbeque" (Ecco, 2023)
26 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ed Mitchell’s journey in the barbeque business began in 1991 with a lunch for his mama, who was grieving the loss of Ed’s father. Ed drove to the ...
Samantha Nogueira Joyce, "Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities" (Lexington Books, 2022)
22 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities (Lexington Books, 2022), Samantha Nogueira Joyce examines representatio...
Rebecca Brückmann, "Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation" (U Georgia Press, 2021)
22 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation (U Georgia Press, 2021) offers a comparative sociocultural and spatia...
Book Talk 60: Cleo McNellly Kearns on Mark Twain’s "Huckleberry Finn"
20 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of Amer...
Meredith Broussard, "More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech" (MIT Press, 2023)
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The word "glitch" implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just bugs in m...
Virginia Jackson, "Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric" (Princeton UP, 2023)
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023) examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth a...
America & Democracy Ep. 5: Brandon Terry on MLK
17 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the final episode of this series, Brandon Terry, political theorist and African American Studies scholar at Harvard discusses the life and work o...
Daniel Ruiz-Serna, "When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories" (Duke UP, 2023)
13 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In When Forests Run Amok: War and Its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories (Duke University Press, 2023) Daniel Ruiz-Serna follo...
Bill Steigerwald, "30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South" (Lyons Press, 2017)
13 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The dangerous, trailblazing work of a white journalist and black leader who struck a shocking early blow against legal segregation In 1948, most white...
Alvin J. Henry, "Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
13 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel (U Minnesota Press, 2021) reinterprets key African American novels from the H...
John Klaess, "Breaks in the Air: The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City" (Duke UP, 2022)
12 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Breaks in the Air: The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City (Duke UP, 2022), John Klaess tells the story of rap's emergence on New York City's air...
Karin Chenoweth, "Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement" (Harvard Education Press, 2021)
09 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement (Harvard Education Press, 2021), long-time education writ...
Kyla Sommers, "When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellion and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation's Capital" (New Press, 2023)
08 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible—or resulted in more p...
Jonathan Eig, "King: A Life" (FSG, 2023)
07 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life (FSG, 2023) is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights ico...
Chad Williams, "The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War" (FSG, 2023)
05 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to "close ranks" and suppo...
Cedric Johnson, "After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle" (Verso, 2023)
04 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it ...
Philip Ewell, "On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
03 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (University of Michigan Press, 2023) by Philip Ewell is an unflinching look at white su...
Mauro Porto, "Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023), Mauro P. Porto examines...
Evie Shockley, "Suddenly We" (Wesleyan UP, 2023)
01 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In her new poetry collection Suddenly We (Wesleyan UP, 2023), Evie Shockley mobilizes visual art, sound, and multilayered language to chart routes ...
Charles Reagan Wilson, "The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South" (UNC Press, 2023)
29 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life--a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the A...
Tatiana D. McInnis, "To Tell a Black Story of Miami" (UP of Florida, 2022)
28 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In To Tell a Black Story of Miami (UP of Florida, 2022), Tatiana McInnis examines literary and cultural representations of Miami alongside the city'...
Paul R. Semendinger, "Roy White: From Compton to the Bronx" (Artemesia, 2023)
26 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Roy White played on the New York Yankees from 1965 through the 1979 season. Roy grew up on the tough streets of Compton and created a successful all-s...
Beth Bailey, "An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era" (UNC Press, 2023)
25 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
By the Tet Offensive in early 1968, what had been widely heralded as the best qualified, best-trained army in US history was descending into crisis as...
Arleen Tuchman, "Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease" (Yale UP, 2020)
23 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Arleen Marcia Tuchman’s book, Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease (Yale UP, 2020), tells the American history of a disease that continues to ...
Rachel Anne Gillett, "At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris" (Oxford UP, 2021)
22 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of ...
Thomas Aiello, "Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
22 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Thomas Aiello joins E. James West to discuss Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott News...
Keith Brian Wood, "Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City,1968-1997" (U Tennessee Press, 2021)
21 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City, 1968-1997 (U Tennessee Press, 2021) tells the story of basketball in Tennessee’s southwester...
Lorgia García Peña, "Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective" (Duke UP, 2022)
19 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Writing Latinos, from Public Books, is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing co...
Nicholas Guyatt, "The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain's Most Terrifying Prison" (Basic Books, 2022)
18 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
After the War of 1812, more than five thousand American sailors were marooned in Dartmoor Prison on a barren English plain; the conflict was over but ...
Shelly M. Jones, "Women Who Count: Honoring African American Women Mathematicians" (American Mathematical Society, 2019)
17 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
African-Americans and women are increasingly visible in professional mathematical institutions, organizations, and literature, expanding our mental mo...
Gregory J. Kaliss, "Beyond the Black Power Salute: Athlete Activism in an Era of Change" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
16 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Unequal opportunity sparked Jim Brown's endeavors to encourage Black development while Billie Jean King fought so that women tennis players could earn...
Joshua Myers, "Of Black Study" (Pluto Press, 2022)
15 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intelle...
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, "Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality" (Pantheon Books, 2022)
15 Apr 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 ...
Cristina Mejia Visperas, "Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory" (NYU, 2022)
14 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theor...
Tina Post, "Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression" (NYU Press, 2023)
12 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production. Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acq...
Celeste Day Moore, "Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France" (Duke UP, 2021)
10 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Celeste Day Moore is a historian of African American culture, media, and Black internationalism in the twentieth century. Her first book, Soundscapes...
Mari N. Crabtree, "My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching" (Yale UP, 2023)
08 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching (Yale UP, 2023), Mari N. Crabtree traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South t...
Bettina Judd, "Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
08 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: i...
Leah Mickens, "In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II" (NYU Press, 2022)
07 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The history and practices of African American Catholics has been vastly understudied, and Black Catholics are often written off as a fringe sector of ...
Jonathan A. C. Brown, "Islam and Blackness" (Oneworld Academic, 2022)
07 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan Brown’s Islam and Blackness (Oneworld Academic, 2022) is a thorough and thoroughly riveting study of the tensions and conceptions of Bla...
Charles Price, "Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity" (NYU Press, 2022)
04 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Misunderstood, misappropriated, belittled: though the Rastafari feature frequently in media and culture, they have most often been misrepresented, the...
Katherine Johnston, "The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World" (Oxford UP, 2022)
03 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Oxford UP, 2022) interrogates how people with an interest in Afr...
Julia H. Lee, "The Racial Railroad" (NYU Press, 2022)
01 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Despite the seeming supremacy of car culture in the United States, the train has long been and continues to be a potent symbol of American exceptional...
Geoff Harkness, "DVS Mindz: The Twenty-Year Saga of the Greatest Rap Group to Almost Make It Outta Kansas" (Columbia UP, 2023)
30 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
99.9% of aspiring rappers never make it in the music industry. So why do we only hear the stories of the ones who do? DVS Mindz might be the greatest ...
Leslie M. Alexander, "Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
27 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander's study ...
David Wright Faladé, "Black Cloud Rising" (Grove Press, 2022)
26 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
By fall of 1863, Union forces had taken control of Tidewater Virginia, and established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer ...
Robin M. Morris, "Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
23 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right (U Georgia Press, 2022) is a statewide study of women’s part in ...
Aaron Spencer Fogleman and Robert Hanserd, "Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936" (APS, 2022)
22 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The importance of published accounts by African slave ship survivors is well-known but not their existence in large numbers. Fogleman and Hanserd cata...
Alvin Hall, "Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance" (HarperOne, 2023)
21 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers encountered locked doors, hos...
Woody Holton, "Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution" (Simon and Schuster, 2021)
21 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A “deeply researched and bracing retelling” (Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian) of the American Revolution, showing how the ...
Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile" (Duke UP, 2009)
18 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-de...
Jessica Wilson, "It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies" (Hachette Go, 2023)
17 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies (Hachette Go, 2023) eating disorder specialist and storyteller Jessica Wilson ...
R. J. M. Blackett, "Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle" (Yale UP, 2023)
15 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817–c. 1869) escaped enslavement and would become a leading figure in the struggle for...
Traveling Black, A Story of Race and Resistance: A Conversation with Mia Bay
13 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Mia Bay, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about her book Traveling Black: A Sto...
Damian Alan Pargas, "Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
13 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Damian Alan Pargas introduces a new conceptualization of 'sp...
Susan J. Stanfield, "Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
12 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (U Georgia Press, 2022) provides an interdisciplinary approach to antebellum...
Brian Harker, "Sportin' Life: John W. Bubbles, an American Classic" (Oxford UP, 2022)
11 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
John W. Bubbles was an actor, singer, comedian, and most importantly, a dancer. Born in 1902, Bubbles was an innovator in the jazz tap style and half ...
Theresa Runstedtler, "Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation That Saved the Soul of the NBA" (Bold Type Books, 2023)
11 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation’s imag...
Robin L. Owens, "'My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole': Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scriptures" (Georgetown UP, 2022)
11 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
US Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is well-known as an interpreter and defender of the Constitution, particularly through her landmark speech during Rich...
Hilbourne A. Watson, "Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Late Colonial Period" (U The West Indies Press, 2019)
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning in the 1920s, Barbadians and other British West Indians began organizing politically in an international environment that was marked by a se...
Joan Flores-Villalobos, "The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West India...
Jovan Scott Lewis, "Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa" (Duke UP, 2022)
05 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke UP, 2022), Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tul...