New Books in African American Studies

Nicola Rollock, "The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival" (Penguin, 2022)

05 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Why do racial inequalities persist? In The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival (Penguin, 2023), Nicola Rollock, a Professor of Social Po...

Hilbourne A. Watson, "Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Independence Period, 1966-1976" (U West Indies Press, 2020)

04 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Hilbourne A. Watson's Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Independence Period, 1966-1976 (U West Indies Press, 2020)...

Thomas Aiello, "Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947-1979" (U Tennessee Press, 2019)

03 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947-1979 (U Tennessee Press, 2019), Thomas Aiello considers the cultural functio...

Marcus Rediker, "The Slave Ship: A Human History" (Penguin, 2008)

03 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British...

Damien M. Sojoyner, "Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums" (U California Press, 2022)

01 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This highly original story reflects on how the carceral state shapes daily life for young Black people--and how Black Americans resist, find joy, and ...

Lerone A. Martin, "The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism" (Princeton UP, 2023)

01 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On a Sunday morning in 1966, a group of white evangelicals dedicated a stained glass window to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director was not an evangelica...

Celeste Vaughan Curington et al., "The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance" (U California Press, 2021)

01 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance (U California Press, 2021) is the first comprehensive look at "digital-sexual racism,...

Saida Grundy, "Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man" (U California Press, 2022)

28 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

How does it feel to be groomed as the "solution" to a national Black male "problem"? This is the guiding paradox of Respectable: Politics and Paradox...

Helena Hansen et al., "Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America" (U California Press, 2023)

28 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the past two decades, media images of the surprisingly white “new face” of the US opioid crisis abounded. But why was the crisis so white? Some...

Leslie M. Alexander, "Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

27 Feb 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 stud...

Jonathan W. White and Lydia J. Davis, ed., "My Work Among the Freedmen: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of Harriet M. Buss" (U Virginia Press, 2021)

26 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Between 1863 and 1871, Harriet M. Buss of Sterling, Massachusetts, taught former slaves in three different regions of the South, in coastal South Caro...

Mitchell Schwarzer, "Hella Town: Oakland's History of Development and Disruption" (U California Press, 2022)

26 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Oakland grew up on the shadow of the dynamo of the nineteenth century West, always the "other" city on San Francisco Bay.  But as Mitchell Schwarzer,...

Mary Crossley, "Embodied Injustice: Race, Disability, and Health" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

26 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Black people and people with disabilities in the United States are distinctively disadvantaged in their encounters with the health care system. These ...

Ian C. Hartman and David Reamer, "Black Lives in Alaska: A History of African Americans in the Far Northwest" ( U Washington Press, 2022)

24 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The history of Black Alaskans runs deep and spans generations. Decades before statehood and earlier even than the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, Bla...

Jeffrey J. Matthews, "Colin Powell: Imperfect Patriot" (U Notre Dame Press, 2019)

24 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Until he passed away in 2021, Colin Powell was revered as one of America's most trusted and admired leaders. Jeffrey J. Matthews' Colin Powell: Imper...

Ashley Brown, "Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson" (Oxford UP, 2023)

24 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career...

Chris Bongie, trans. and ed., "The Colonial System Unveiled by Baron de Vastey" (Liverpool UP, 2014)

21 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Long neglected in mainstream history books, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as an event...

Gerald F. Goodwin, "Race in the Crucible of War: African American Servicemen and the War in Vietnam" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)

19 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

When African American servicemen went to fight in the Vietnam War, discrimination and prejudice followed them. Even in a faraway country, their milita...

Nicholas Mirzoeff, "White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness" (MIT Press, 2023)

19 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

From the author of How to See the World comes a new history of white supremacist ways of seeing—and a strategy for dismantling them. White suprema...

Philip Nel, "Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books" (Oxford UP, 2017)

16 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A signific...

Lauron J. Kehrer, "Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance" (U Michigan Press, 2022)

14 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapp...

Lee D. Baker, "From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954" (U California Press, 1998)

13 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On today’s podcast we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Dr. Lee D. Baker’s book From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and ...

Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago, "Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing" (Leuven UP, 2022)

12 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago's edited volume Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (Leuven ...

Winston James, "Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik" (Columbia UP, 2022)

11 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Re...

Hannah Noel, "Deflective Whiteness: Coopting Black and Latinx Identity Politics" (Ohio State UP, 2022)

10 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Deflective Whiteness: Coopting Black and Latinx Identity Politics (Ohio State UP, 2022), Hannah Noel repositions Whiteness studies in relation to...

Kate Masur, "Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction" (Norton, 2021)

10 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that ...

Energy Costs, Poverty, and Race

09 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Destenie Nock, an assistant professor in the Engineering and Public Policy and Civil and Environmental Engineering Departments at Carnegie Mellon Univ...

Dianne M. Stewart, "Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African-American Marriage" (Seal Press, 2020)

08 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

According to the 2010 US census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African...

Michael Lawrence Dickinson, "Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807" (U Georgia Press, 2022)

02 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Beginning in the late seventeenth century and concluding with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in t...

Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh, "Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)

02 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Identity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume tit...

Derrick Darby, "A Realistic Blacktopia: Why We Must Unite to Fight" (Oxford UP, 2022)

01 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the United States, unjust disparities in things like income, opportunity, health, safety, and education tightly track racial categorizations of the...

J. Brent Morris, "Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp" (UNC Press, 2022)

31 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early sev...

Above the Veil: Beyond Segregationism and Assimilationism

29 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The work of Ibram X. Kendi distinguishes between two forms of racism: segregationism and assimilationism. Segregationists argue that some groups are i...

Anthony Reed, "Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production" (Duke UP, 2020)

28 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2020), Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and ...

Shaun M. Anderson, "The Black Athlete Revolt: The Sport Justice Movement in the Age Of #BlackLivesMatter" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

27 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the age of social media, athletes have a powerful influence like never before. Many Black athletes have used that power in positive ways, galvanizi...

Stephen C. Finley, "In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam" (Duke UP, 2022)

27 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

With In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam (Duke University Press, 2022), Stephen C. Finley, Inaugu...

Viola Franziska Müller, "Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South" (UNC Press, 2022)

20 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (UNC Press, 2022), Viola Franziska Müller examines runaways who camouflaged t...

Emily A. Owens, "Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans" (UNC Press, 2023)

19 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In histories of enslavement and in Black women's history, coercion looms large in any discussion of sex and sexuality. At a time when sexual violence ...

We Shall Overcome: Sister Thea Bowman and the Black Catholic Experience

18 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Though we are all one—“there is neither Jew nor Greek,” St. Paul wrote to the Galatians—each of us brings a particular heritage to the mosaic ...

Paulina Laura Alberto et al., "Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

17 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) offers English translations of more than one hun...

Lisa Biggs, "The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation" (Ohio State UP, 2022)

16 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Over the last five decades, Black women have been one of the fastest-growing segments of the global prison population, thanks to changes in policies t...

The History of the Black Urban Working-Class in the United States

16 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Joe William Trotter, Jr., Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Founder and Director of the Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the...

Miguel Valerio, "Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

14 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Sovereign Joy Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) explores the performance of festive black kings and queens ...

Tanya Katerí Hernández, "Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality" (Beacon Press, 2022)

14 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (Beacon Press, 2022) will challenge what you thought about racism an...

Seeing Truth in the Speculative: A Conversation with Dexter Gabriel

12 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Historian and author Dexter Gabriel talks about his relationship to truth and memory in his fiction and non-fiction writing. Come for his thoughts o...

Christopher Loperena, "The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras" (Stanford UP, 2022)

09 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous pe...

Philippe-Richard Marius, "The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)

08 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), Philippe-Ri...

Jonathan W. White, "To Address You as My Friend: African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln" (UNC Press, 2021)

08 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Many African Americans of the Civil War era felt a personal connection to Abraham Lincoln. For the first time in their lives, an occupant of the White...

White Balance: How Do Race and Class Intersect?

06 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Understanding race in America requires understanding its relationship to class. Guests Joshua Bennett, writer and poet Julian Bourg, Professor of Hi...

Roger A Sneed, "The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought" (Ohio State UP, 2021)

06 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought (Ohio State UP, 2021), Professor Roger Sneed illuminates the interplay of Bl...

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero, "She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

03 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how d...

Felicity M. Turner, "Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America" (UNC Press, 2022)

01 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Felicity M. Turner's Proving Pregnancy: ...

Tommie Shelby, "The Idea of Prison Abolition" (Princeton UP, 2022)

30 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper mora...

Abdul Alkalimat, "The Future of Black Studies" (Pluto Press, 2022)

29 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The marginalisation of Black voices from the academy is a problem in the Western world. But Black Studies, where it exists, is a powerful, boundary-pu...

Jefferson Cowie, "Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power" (Basic Books, 2022)

28 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"History recalls Wallace’s inaugural address as a set piece in the larger drama of defending Southern segregation, which it was. But the speech was ...

Pedro Lebrón Ortiz, "The Philosophy of Marronage" (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021)

25 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Pedro Lebrón Ortis's book The Philosophy of Marronage (Filosofía del cimarronaje) theorizes the broader context behind the notion of "cimarronaje...

Naa Oyo A. Kwate, "White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

25 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community. Today, fast food is disproportionately located ...

Michael Ayers Trotti, "The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South" (UNC Press, 2022)

23 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Michael Ayers Trotti's The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion and Punishment in the American South (The University of North Carolina Press, 202...

Craig Seymour, "Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross" (2017)

21 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

On April 16, 2003, Luther Vandross suffered a near-fatal stroke, and the world held its breath. Inside sources said he might never sing again. He was ...

Lyzette Wanzer, "Trauma, Tresses, and Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives" (Chicago Review Press, 2022)

21 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Black women continue to have a complex and convoluted relationship with their hair. From grammar and high schools to corporate boardrooms and military...

Jacob Kramer, "The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance" (Temple UP, 2015)

21 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance (Temple University Pre...

Quito J. Swan, "Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism, and the African World" (NYU Press, 2022)

20 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colon...

Matthew F. Delmont, "Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad" (Viking, 2022)

18 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregat...

Sonya Y. Ramsey, "Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership" (UP of Florida, 2022)

18 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership (UP of Florida, 2022) examines a life of remarkable achievements and...

Gregory Smithsimon, "Liberty Road: Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism" (NYU Press, 2022)

16 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Half of Black Americans who live in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas are now living in suburbs, not cities. In Liberty Road: Black Middle-C...

Philip Nanton, "Riff: The Shake Keane Story" (Papillote Press, 2022)

14 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Philip Nanton's new book Riff: The Shake Keane Story (Papillote Press, 2022) follows the life and work of Shake Keane, the peripatetic and creative...

Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

08 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Autumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthe...

Virginia L. Summey, "The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism within the Courts" (U Georgia Press, 2022)

07 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Virginia L. Summey's book The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism within the Courts (U Georgia Press, 2022) explores the life and contribution...

Barbara E. Mattick, "Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South" (Catholic U of America Press

07 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South (Catholic University of America Press, 2022) discusses the work of the S...

Barbara Harris Combs, "Bodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-Blackness in U.S. Society" (U Georgia Press, 2022)

06 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Bodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-Blackness in U.S. Society (U Georgia Press, 2022) asserts that anti-Black racism is not better than it used to b...

On James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time"

05 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The writer and activist James Baldwin grew up in a majority white America that saw white American lives as standard and universal, and Black American ...

Ryan Thomas Skinner, "Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

29 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Contemporary Sweden is a country with a worldwide progressive reputation, despite an undeniable tradition of racism within its borders. In the face of...

Sarah Abel, "Permanent Markers: Race, Ancestry, and the Body After the Genome" (UNC Press, 2021)

29 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Over the past twenty years, DNA ancestry testing has morphed from a niche market into a booming international industry that encourages members of the ...

Jasmine Nichole Cobb, "New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair" (Duke UP, 2022)

25 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

From Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, “natural hair” has been associated with the Black freedom struggle. In New Growth: The Art and Texture o...

Gregory Nobles, "The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

25 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The life of Betsey Stockton (ca. 1798–1865) is a remarkable story of a Black woman’s journey from slavery to emancipation, from antebellum New Jer...

Tara T. Green, "Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

25 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist...

Marquis Bey, "Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender" (Duke UP, 2022)

24 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (Duke UP, 2022), Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and c...

Ray Scott, "The NBA in Black and White: The Memoir of a Trailblazing NBA Player and Coach" (Seven Stories Press, 2022)

24 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

“There’s a basic insecurity with Black guys my size,” Scott writes. “We can’t hide and everybody turns to stare when we walk down the street...

Christopher Willoughby, "Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools" (UNC Press, 2022)

24 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Medical science in antebellum America was organized around a paradox: it presumed African Americans to be less than human yet still human enough to be...

Jeanne Theoharis, "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks" (Beacon Press, 2015)

23 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Beacon Press, 2015) is the definitive political biography of Rosa Parks and the basis for a 2022 documentary...

Anna Arabindan-Kesson, "Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World" (Duke UP, 2021)

23 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke UP, 2021), Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity centra...

Rhonda F. Levine, "When Race Meets Class: African Americans Coming of Age in a Small City" (Routledge, 2019)

23 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In When Race Meets Class: African Americans Coming of Age in a Small City (Routledge, 2019), Rhonda Levine provides a 15-year ethnography that follo...

Caroline Grego, "Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South" (UNC Press, 2022)

22 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

On an August night in 1893, the deadliest hurricane in South Carolina history struck the Lowcountry, killing thousands—almost all African American. ...

Paul Barba, "Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

22 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Most of what people think they know about Texas history is wrong, argues Bucknell University history professor Paul Barba in Country of the Cursed an...

Elliott H. Powell, "Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)

21 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

From Beyoncé's South Asian music-inspired Super Bowl Halftime performance, to jazz artists like John and Alice Coltrane's use of Indian song structur...

Psyche A. Williams-Forson, "Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America" (UNC Press, 2022)

21 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America (UNC Press, 2022), Psyche A. Williams-Forson offers her knowledge and experience to illumina...

Riché Richardson, "Emancipation's Daughters: Re-Imagining Black Femininity and the National Body" (Duke UP, 2020)

17 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Emancipation's Daughters: Re-Imagining Black Femininity and the National Body (Duke UP, 2020), Riché Richardson examines iconic black women lead...

Jeffrey Bellin, "Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it Can Recover" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

15 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches per...

R. Isabela Morales, "Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2022)

15 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When Samuel Townsend died at his home in Madison County, Alabama, in November 1856, the fifty-two-year-old white planter left behind hundreds of slave...

Therí Alyce Pickens, "Black Madness :: Mad Blackness" (Duke UP, 2019)

14 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke UP, 2019), Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the ...

Kathryn Gin Lum, "Heathen: Religion and Race in American History" (Harvard UP, 2022)

11 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022), Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the “heathen” has been...

Muggsy Bogues and Jake Uitti, "Muggsy: My Life from a Kid in the Projects to the Godfather of Small Ball" (Triumph, 2022)

10 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Growing up, Muggsy Bogues was always told he should do something else, anything besides basketball. He never acknowledged his many doubters except to ...

David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)

10 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people fo...

On Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

09 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In 1987, Toni Morrison published her fourth novel, Beloved, based on the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery with her child. Garner ...

Todd Meyers, "All That Was Not Her" (Duke UP, 2022)

09 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

While studying caregiving and chronic illness in families living in situations of economic and social insecurity in Baltimore, anthropologist Todd Mey...

Guthrie P. Ramsey, "Who Hears Here?: On Black Music, Pasts and Present" (U California Press, 2022)

07 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is an award-winning musicologist, music historian, composer, and pianist whose prescient theoretical and critical intervention...

Aisha Khan, "The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World" (Harvard UP, 2021)

07 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2021), Aisha Khan explores how colonial categories of ...

Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach, "Dream Books and Gamblers: Black Women's Work in Chicago's Policy Game" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

07 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Ubiquitous illegal lotteries known as policy flourished in Chicago's Black community during the overlapping waves of the Great Migration. Policy "quee...

Christopher Stuart Taylor, "Flying Fish in the Great White North: The Autonomous Migration of Black Barbadians" (Fernwood, 2016)

04 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Canadians are proud of their multicultural image both at home and abroad. But that image isn t grounded in historical facts. As recently as the 1960s,...

4.5 The Best Error You Can Make: Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay

03 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation b...