New Books in the American South
Episodes
Jason R. Young, "The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2026)
01 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the early twentieth century, a group of white writers, artists, and performers from the cultural hub of Charleston, South Carolina, created and cur...
Constance Bailey et al. "Get It While It's Hot: Gas Station, Roadside, and Convenience Cuisine in the U.S. South" (LSU Press, 2026)
25 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Get It While It’s Hot (LSU Press, 2026) is an innovative collection that examines an increasingly commonplace belief across the U.S. South—that s...
Kasey Jernigan, "Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity" (U Arizona Press, 2026)
19 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The term "commod bod" is used with humor and affection. It also offers a critical way to describe bodies shaped by long-term reliance on U.S. federal ...
Mark A. Johnson, "American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon" (U Georgia Press, 2026)
17 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon (U Georgia Press, 2026), Dr. Mark A. Johnson asks (and answers) a seemingly simple question: How...
Voices from a Century of Struggle: Writings of the Jim Crow Era
14 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Tuesday, April 7, 2026—Confronting disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and terrorist violence in the aftermath of the Civil War, Black Americans ...
Michael W. Tuck, "The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River: A Creole Community in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World" (Brill, 2026)
08 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River: A Creole Community in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (Brill, 2026) historian D...
Lindsay Rae Smith Privette, "The Surgeon's Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)
04 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Between May 1 and May 22, 1863, Union soldiers marched nearly 200 miles through the hot, humid countryside to assault and capture the fortified city o...
Abe Walker, "Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South" (Temple UP, 2026)
17 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
When Volkswagen’s Chattanooga Assembly Plant opened in 2012, the United Auto Workers were excited by the golden opportunity to organize in the anti-...
Antwain K. Hunter, "A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865" (UNC Press, 2025)
16 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Spanning the 1720s through the end of the Civil War, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865 (UNC Press, 20...
Danielle Wiggins, "Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
08 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
A provocative new history of modern black liberalism Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025...
Paul Gillingham, "Mexico: A 500-Year History" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025)
07 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Mexico is among the most unique nations in the world, writes Northwestern University historian Paul Gillingham in Mexico: A 500-Year History (Atlant...
Rebecca Sharpless, "People of the Wheat: Culture and Cultivation in North Texas" (U Texas Press, 2026)
07 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
If you’ve ever wondered where your wheat flour is coming from, who is milling it (and how), or how it came to be such an important staple, then this...
Sarah Jones Weicksel, "A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era" (UNC Press, 2026)
27 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
During the American Civil War, clothing became central to the ways people waged war and experienced its cost. Through the clothes they made, wore, men...
Fred Turner on Countercultures, Cybercultures, and Californian and Texan Ideologies
25 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and guest host, Paula Bialski, Associate Professor of Digital Sociology at University of St. Gallen, talk to Fred T...
Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)
22 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A Histor...
Danielle N. Boaz, "Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur" (Oxford UP, 2023)
01 Feb 2026
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...
Blair Kelley, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class" (LIveright, 2023)
31 Jan 2026
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...
Thomas Aiello, "Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta" (U Nebraska Press, 2025)
30 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta (U Nebraska Press, 2025) tells the story of Muhammad Ali’s return to th...
O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight, "We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the spring of 1969, hundreds of workers, all Black and mostly female, went on strike at Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital to ...
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, "Taco" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
19 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Taco (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a deep dive into the most iconic Mexican food from the perspective of a Mexico City native. In a narrative that moves from...
Caroline Peyton, "Radioactive Dixie: A Nuclear History of the American South" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
17 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How and why did the South’s history, culture, and politics shape the region’s nuclear and energy industries? And how is that history linked to bro...
Sonya Lea, "American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture" (UP of Kentucky, 2025)
09 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just fou...
W. Ralph Eubanks, "When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land" (Beacon Press, 2026)
07 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country’s economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted fo...
T. R. Johnson, "New Orleans: A Writer's City" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
06 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels,...
Robert D. Bland, "Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation" (UNC Press, 2026)
05 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The promise of Reconstruction sparked a transformative era in American history as free and newly emancipated Black Americans sought to redefine their ...
Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025)
18 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
American conservatism as we know it today is a West Texas export, argues College of Wooster professor Jeff Roche in The Conservative Frontier: Texas...
Sylvia D. Hoffert, "Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
08 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town (University of Georgia Press, 2025), Dr. Sylvia Hoffert...
Beau Cleland, "Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
07 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Beau Clel...
Gregory S. Wilson, "Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and Its Legacy" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
07 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1975 workers at Life Science Products, a small makeshift pesticide factory in Hopewell, Virginia, became ill after exposure to Kepone, the brand na...
Gwyneth Mellinger, "Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
06 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“When the civil rights movement began to challenge Jim Crow laws, the white southern press reframed the coverage of racism and segregation as a deba...
Erika Pani, "Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848-1867" (UNC Press, 2025)
26 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Between the late 1840s and the late 1860s, the United States and Mexico had quite a bit in common. Both suffered from reactionary succession movements...
Karen Auman, "The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores some of Georgia’s earliest settlers, the Sal...
Doug MacCash, "Mardi Gras Beads" (Louisiana UP, 2022)
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The first in a new LSU Press series exploring facets of Louisiana’s iconic culture, Mardi Gras Beads (2022) delves into the history of this celebr...
Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)
09 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relations...
Diane T. Feldman, "Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi (UP Mississippi, 2025) chronicles...
Amanda Laury Kleintop, "Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
During the Civil War, the U.S. federal government abolished slavery without reimbursing enslavers, diminishing the white South’s wealth by nearly 50...
Michael W. Twitty, "Recipes from the American South" (Phaidon Press, 2025)
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The views expressed by the guest are their own and do not reflect those of the New Books Network or its hosts. This episode contains some content that...
Kalle Kananoja, "Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
19 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Kalle Kananoja tells the story of how pre-colonial communities throughout the west coa...
Michael T. Bertrand, "Southern History Remixed: On Rock 'n' Roll and the Dilemma of Race" (UP Florida, 2024)
17 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Southern History Remixed: On Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Dilemma of Race (UP Florida, 2024) spotlights the key role of popular music in the shaping...
Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)
12 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fa...
Claire Whitlinger, "Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi" (UNC Press, 2020)
10 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Few places are more notorious for civil rights–era violence than Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders. ...
Constance Bailey, "Conversations with Kiese Laymon" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
24 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This is a very special episode of the New Books Network, as the editor of Conversations with Kiese Laymon (UP of Mississippi, 2025), Dr. Constance B...
Philis Barragán-Goetz, "Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas" (U Texas Press, 2020)
28 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Debates about Ethnic Studies in K-12 and Higher Education have highlighted the importance of culturally inclusive pedagogy in schools. Despite discuss...
Uzma Quraishi, "Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War" (UNC Press, 2020)
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press), Uzma Quraishi...
Marlee S. Bunch, "Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era"
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press, 2025), Dr. M...
Christopher M. Reali, "Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
17 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to the Roll...
Harriet Jacobs, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (Norton, 2025)
16 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive, detailing her harrowing escape from ens...
Matthew R. Sparks and Olivia Sizemore, "Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)
12 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Matthew Sparks and Oliva Sizemore join Jana Byars for a fun, chilling, and thoughtful discussion about about Haint Country: Dark Tales from the Hill...
Stephanie McCurry, "Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War" (Harvard UP, 2019)
09 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War (Harvard UP, 2019), the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning challenges the idea th...
Meredith McCarroll, "Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film" (U Georgia Press, 2018)
09 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If you mention Appalachia to many people, they may immediately respond with the "Deliverance" dueling banjos theme. Unfortunately, this is an example ...
Arianne Edmonds, "We Now Belong to Ourselves: J. L. Edmonds, the Black Press, and Black Citizenship in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Black press provided a blueprint to help Black Americans transition from slavery and find opportunities to a...
Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Random House, 2023)
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil War...
Charlotte Bentley, "New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859" (U of Chicago Press, 2022)
25 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jazz is the music that many people associate with New Orleans. But before there was jazz in New Orleans there was opera. It was the only city in the U...
Ahmad Greene-Hayes, "Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)
18 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orle...
Jeremy Black, "The Civil War" (Saint Augustine's Press, 2025)
14 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The American Civil War may have been more consequential to American history (and its global supremacy) than its Revolutionary War and participation in...
Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth, "Finding the Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia's Mountain Forests" (West Virginia UP, 2023)
09 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
2023 Weatherford Award Finalist, Nonfiction How can the craft of musical instrument making help reconnect people to place and reenchant work in Appal...
Julia Brock, "Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South" (UNC Press, 2025)
06 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In a unique and personal exploration of the game and fish laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi from the Progressive Era to the 1930s, Julia Brock...
John Bardes, "The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930" (UNC Press, 2024)
05 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (UNC Press, 2024) reveals that Americans often assume that ...
Bryan D. Jones, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History" (Oxford UP, 2025)
27 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the under-appreciated div...
Kathryn L. Beasley, "The Proof Is in the Dough: Rural Southern Women, Extension, and Making Money" (University of Georgia Press, 2025)
22 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Proof Is in the Dough: Rural Southern Women, Extension, and Making Money (University of Georgia Press, 2025) examines how rural white and Afri...
Victoria Bynum, "Deep Roots, Broken Branches: A History and Memoir" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
01 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Historian Victoria Bynum turns now to her own history in this multigenerational American saga spanning from 1840 to 1979. Through meticulous historica...
Frank X Walker, "Load in Nine Times: Poems" (Liveright, 2024)
24 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For decades Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry. In this stirring new collection, he reim...
Carrie Helms Tippen, "Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
17 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The cookbook genre is highly conventional with an orientation toward celebration and success. From glossy photographs to heartwarming stories and adje...
Jennifer Lynn Gross, "Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South" (LSU Press, 2025)
16 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Historians have thoroughly documented the vast devastation of the Civil War. In the attention they have paid to aspects of that destruction, however, ...
No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice
29 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering...
Frederick Knight, "Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
28 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Would there have been a Frederick Douglass if it were not for Betsy Bailey, the grandmother who raised him? Would Harriet Jacobs have written her reno...
Lesley J. Gordon, "Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
09 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Those who fought in the Civil War were expected to overcome their fear of injury or death as they charged into a hail of bullets. Soldiers could expec...
Megan Hunt, "Southern by the Grace of God: Religion, Race, and Civil Rights in Hollywood's American South" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
02 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Megan Hunt joins us to talk about her recent book, Southern By the Grace of God, which was published i...
Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Knopf, 2025)
24 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One historian’s journey to find the end of the Civil War—and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how socie...
Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, "Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2023)
14 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. Prison Capit...
"Steadfast Democrats" Five Years Later: A Conversation with Chryl N. Laird
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today I’m speaking with Chryl Laird, Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. We are discussing he...
Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850" (UNC Press, 2025)
09 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Most US history textbooks contain a familiar map: shaded colors stretch across North America, clearly and neatly demarcating the extent of US expansi...
Jeffrey Thomas Perry, "Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Most Americans today would not think of their local church as a site for arbitration and would probably be hesitant to bring their property disputes, ...
Benjamin Heber Johnson, "Texas: An American History" (Yale UP, 2025)
23 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There's more to Texas than hats, oil, and BBQ, writes Benjamin Johnson in his sweeping new synthesis, Texas: An American History (Yale UP: 2025) - ...
The Soundworld of Harriet Tubman
17 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Just in time for Black History Month, we share an episode we’ve been excitedly working on for a number of months now. Ethnomusicologist Maya Cunning...
The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn
13 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our book is: The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) by award-winning historian ...
Hiroshi Motomura, "Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair, Realistic, and Sustainable Immigration Policy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
08 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex...
Anthony E. Kaye, "Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History" (FSG, 2024)
06 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1831, a group of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, rose up to fight for their freedom. They attacked the plantations on which...
Derek W. Black, "Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy" (Yale UP, 2025)
30 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Few have ever valued literacy as much as the enslaved Black people of the American South. For them, it was more than a means to a better life; it was ...
Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, "America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
24 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values (U Pennsylvania P...
Leonne M. Hudson, "Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln" (Southern Illinois UP, 2024)
24 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth carried out the first presidential assassination in United States history. The euphoria resulting from General Le...
Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy (EF, JP)
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth sp...
Andrew Gomez, "Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945" (U Texas Press, 2024)
13 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How Black and white Cubans navigated issues of race, politics, and identity during the post-Civil War and early Jim Crow eras in South Florida. On Jul...
Jennie Lightweis-Goff, "Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
07 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places...
Joshua D. Rothman, "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America" (Basic Book, 2021)
04 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Joshua Rothman’s The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America was published by Basic Books in 2021, and tells a sprawling h...
Carl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934" (UVA Press, 2020)
02 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As a novelist, short story author, screenwriter, and Nobel laureate, William Faulkner looms large in modern American literature. Yet the very range of...
Kent Michael Shaw, "Missiology Reimagined: The Missions Theology of the Nineteenth-Century African American Missionary" (Pickwick, 2024)
01 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Missiology Reimagined: The Missions Theology of the Nineteenth-Century African American Missionary (Pickwick, 2024), Kent Michael Shaw I examines...
Randy M. Browne, "The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
31 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to sol...
Crystal R. Sanders, "A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs" (UNC Press, 2024)
30 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024) tells the little-known story ...
Susanna Ashton, "A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin" (New Press, 2024)
29 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stay...
Stephen Jackson, "The Patchwork of World History in Texas High Schools" (Routledge, 2022)
18 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Patchwork of World History in Texas High Schools (Routledge, 2022) traces the historical development of the World History course as it has been t...
Brian Martin, "From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War" (ECW Press, 2022)
16 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Despite all we know about the Civil War, its causes, battles, characters, issues, impacts, and legacy, few books have explored Canada’s role in the ...
Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper, "The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai" (NYU Press, 2024)
15 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Emma Mordecai lived an unusual life. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South, and unmarried in a cul...
Ana Lucia Araujo, "Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane ...
Holly M. Karibo, "Rehab on the Range: A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West" (U Texas Press, 2024)
11 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1929, the United States government approved two ground-breaking and controversial drug addiction treatment programs. At a time when fears about a s...
Deondra Rose, "The Power of Black Excellence: HBCUs and the Fight for American Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
07 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From their founding, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) educated as many as 90 percent of Black college students in the United State...
Maria Angela Diaz, "A Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War–Era Gulf South" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
30 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From 1845 to 1865 the Gulf of Mexico was at the center of American expansion and southern imperialism. A Continuous State of War: Empire Building and...
Mary Ellen Curtin, "She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
28 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
During her keynote speech at the 1976 Democratic Party convention, Barbara Jordan of Texas stood before a rapt audience and reflected on where America...
Beverly Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick, "New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization" (UP of Florida, 2017)
24 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization (UP of Florida, 2017) examines the movement to resettle black Americans in Africa, an ...
Benjamin Barson, "Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons" (Wesleyan UP, 2024)
19 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan UP, 2024) recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orle...