New Books in African American Studies

Born in Florida to a religious family, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: She lived with her lover, Paula, first running a summer camp in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and then a magazine devoted to creating a new vision of the South, one that passionately championed equality and integration. Smith published Bl...

For three years in the early 1900s, a serial killer zigzagged across the rice belt region of the United States, using an everyday ax to slaughter Black families living within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset Route. The similarities among the murders were uncanny, yet lawmen in early twentieth-century America had neither the technology nor the vocabulary to identify the serial kille...

The Centrality of Slavery: Empire and Enslavement in Colonial Illinois and Missouri  (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) examines how French and American colonizers used the powers of various imperial regimes to create slave societies in present-day Missouri and Illinois from the 1720s through the 1820s. The first book-length study of slavery and empire in both Illinois and Missouri, it begins with...

A powerful, unsettling, and unflinching exploration that forces readers to confront lynching as a devastating legacy of white childhood conditioning, and to reckon with the corrupting force of a system that trained children to become its willing executioners, Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children with Stacey Patton (Beacon Press, 2026) examines how the lynching of Black...

Kelly Lytle Hernández joins Michael Stauch to discuss how the US immigration system has always been “racist by design.” Many Americans’ understanding of the immigration system begins with the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late nineteenth century. In Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control  (Norton, 2026), Lytle Hernández expands that history by a full century, showin...

In this episode, Lilyanna D'Amato speaks with Rahim Kurwa about his book Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing   (U California Press, 2025), which examines the policing of housing in Los Angeles' northernmost suburb, Antelope Valley. Kurwa traces the suburbs' relationship with Los Angeles from post WWII to the early 2000s and 2010s, when the region saw increased Black m...

David N. Gellman interviews Nicholas P. Wood on Let the Oppressed Go Free: Abolitionism in Colonial and Revolutionary America In Let the Oppressed Go Free, Nicholas P. Wood presents the opponents of slavery who sustained and expanded the antislavery movement during the American Revolution in the face of widespread hostility. These early abolitionists were inspired by antislavery theology: the view...

There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day’s headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movem...

Shows how apocalypticism helped drive anti-slavery abolitionism and inspire progressive social reform in nineteenth-century America In March 1844, Melissa Botsford of Meriden, Connecticut, defiantly left her local Methodist church because it supported slavery and other “sins” that permeated America. Botsford was among one hundred thousand other abolitionists who abandoned their evangelical churche...

In A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt   (St. Martin's Press, 2025), Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered “mixed race.” He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnu...

Celebrated poet, essayist, playwright, and American artist Langston Hughes is one of the few American writers who consistently wrote about democracy from a joyous perspective, and  My America  explores how his work speaks to the political anxieties and crises we face today. Randal M. Jelks deftly examines the themes in Hughes’s work, including creative expression, communal dignity, class...

Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies.  For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality (University of Chicago...

We all love the desserts we grew up with-the ones tied to family, tradition, and the moments we remember most. But as much as we love those recipes, they don't always turn out the way we'd want. That's where this book comes in. From cakes and cookies to pies, breads, and more, each recipe in Better than Grandma's (Rolling Pin Press, 2026) takes a nostalgic classic and reworks it to be more flavorf...

The United States has no hate speech laws; hate speech is generally considered to be free speech under the First Amendment. In Hate Speech: The Legal and Cultural History of an American Dilemma (U California Press, 2026), acclaimed legal historian Samantha Barbas chronicles the country’s legal and cultural battles over the regulation of hate speech in the last hundred years. Charting the historica...

In Afroindigenization: A Theory of Grassroots Cultural Practice (Duke University Press, 2026), Catherine A. John addresses the underbelly of spiritual resilience shaping a range of African diasporic institutions, traditions, and practices. John argues that repressed forms of indigenous African knowledge systems manifest in a myriad of culturally embodied ways in African diaspora spaces and places....

Although historians have given considerable attention to the American Revolution, the agricultural history of the American War for Independence exists only in pieces found in scattered articles and passing references in various books dealing with the war. Nonagricultural historians have ignored it or treated it almost as an aside and unworthy of analysis, even when it is related to other war topic...

Today’s guest, Christopher Freeburg, is the author of Soul: A Brief History of Black Cultural Life (Yale University Press, 2026). This book explores the US history of black cultural life as a history of soul – a spiritual lived practice rooted in communally fostered music, religion, and politics. It makes the case that soul is forged through black community connections and that it’s sustained by m...

David Gellman interviews Patrick Griffin on The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World The Age of Atlantic Revolution was a defining moment in western history. Our understanding of rights, of what makes the individual an individual, of how to define a citizen versus a subject, of what states should or should not do, of how labor, politics, and trade would be organized,...

Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award Winner of the 2025 Avern Cohn Award A New York Times Notable Book of 2025, A New Yorker Best Book of 2025 selection A Christian Science Monitor 25 Best Books of 2025 The epic story of Detroit’s struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs—and the defeat of desegregation in the North. In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken...

As we approach the 50th anniversaries of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Roots (1976) and its landmark television adaptation (1977), journalist and storyteller Lucas L. Johnson II reflects on the enduring legacy of Haley’s work through the voices of those it continues to move, including scholars, artists, genealogists, students, and original cast members like LeVar Burton and Ben Vereen....

Race and Place: School Desegregation in Prince George's County, Maryland (Rutgers University Press, 2025) considers the everyday experiences of community members throughout the process of school desegregation and how race, place, and truth came to matter in this process in Prince George's County, Maryland from 1945 through 1973. Organized around several successive policies that emerged in this tim...

While Lexington and Concord claim significance as the sites of the American Revolution’s opening battles, New York City’s geography, population density, and cultural status made it one of the most important theaters of the war. Between 1776 and 1777, numerous battles were fought for control over the Port of New York, including the Battles of Harlem Heights, Pell’s Point, White Plains, Fort Washing...

Unwelcome Shores: Black Refugees in America (Rutgers University Press, 2025)   is an ethnographic study of the Liberian refugee community in Staten Island, New York, home to the largest per capita concentration of Liberians in the U.S., that sheds light on the racialization of Black refugees and the racism they have experienced at every step of their migration journey. In this pioneering study, so...

What if children’s literature was never as innocent as we imagine? In Sugarcoated Ethics: Children’s Literature and Atlantic Enslavement (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), the relationship between childhood reading and Atlantic slavery is brought into sharp focus. The book argues that children’s literature did not merely emerge alongside the plantation economy; it was deeply shaped by it. Su...

In 2021, the NAACP Image Award-winning poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers made her fiction debut with The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois , a magisterial epic of African American historical fiction—an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing ; Sing, Unburied, Sing ; and The Water Dancer —chronicling the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial sl...