New Books in African American Studies

In an incisive analysis of over two dozen clauses as well as several 'unwritten' rules and practices, The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2019) shows how the Constitution aggravated the sectional conflict over slavery to the point of civil war. Going beyond the fugitive slave clause, the three-fifths clause, and the international slave trade clause, Mi...

Today, I’m talking with Chelene Knight. She’s written a new memoir called Dear Current Occupant (Book*hug, 2018). And as her title suggests, it’s a letter of sorts, one written to those people who might now be occupying one of many places she and her family lived back when she was growing up in downtown Vancouver’s eastside, and in this sense, her memoir is a map of the city, allowing us to see in...

If you really want to understand Jim Crow—what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it—you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. There you can see remnants of the shops and churches where, amid the violence and humiliation of segregation, men and women gathered to build a remarkable community. William Sturkey int...

Environmental racism is visible not only as cancer clusters or the location of grocery stores. It is responsible for the reported gap in IQ scores between white Americans and Black, Latinx, and Native Americans. So argues science writer Harriet Washington in A Terrible to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind (Little, Brown Spark 2019). While acknowledging IQ is a biased...

In this episode of the American Society for Legal History’s podcast Talking Legal History Siobhan talks with Hendrik Hartog about his book The Trouble with Minna: A Case of Slavery and Emancipation in the Antebellum North (UNC Press, 2018). The Trouble with Minna is also used as a vessel to explore some of the topics discussed in Law and Social Inquiry's May 2019 “Review Symposium: Retrospective o...

Kevin M. Levin is the author of Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2019. Searching for Black Confederates investigates the claims that numerous African Americans willingly fought for the Confederacy. Investigating the Confederate Army at the time of the Civil War, Levin illustrates that such a claim would h...

Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South (Cambridge University Press, 2018)  demonstrates the significance of internal divisions, comparison, and conflict in shaping gender and status in slave communities of the American South. David Doddington seeks to move beyond unilateral discussions of slave masculinity, and instead demonstrates how the repressions of slavery were both personal and...

Just in time for the APSA annual meeting, Niambi Michele Carter has written an incredibly timely book on a central issue to American politics, American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2019). Carter is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University. Her work focuses on racial and ethnic politics in the United States...

In his new book, Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (Princeton University Press, 2019), historian Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof seamlessly ties together various scholarly subfields into a truly transnational history of anticolonial politics and the Afro-Latino diaspora in the United States. Hoffnung-Garskof, Professor of History and American Culture a...

Long before the rise of New World slavery, West Africans were adept swimmers, divers, canoe makers, and canoeists. They lived along riverbanks, near lakes, or close to the ocean. In those waterways, they became proficient in diverse maritime skills, while incorporating water and aquatics into spiritual understandings of the world. Transported to the Americas, slaves carried with them these West Af...

What is the future, and what is the past, of the African American Museum? In Diversity and Philanthropy at African American Museums: Black Renaissance(Routledge, 2019), Patricia Banks, an associate professor of sociology at Mount Holyoke College, explores the rise of the African American museum and its patrons and philanthropists. Combining sociology of culture with organisational and institutiona...

Recent scholarship locates the origins of mass incarceration in national anticrime policy from 1960 to 1990, and has drastically reframed the “punitive turn” in American politics as bipartisan. But how then, do we reckon with the fact that most police policy and funding is determined locally? In his new book, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago From Red Summer to Black Power (UNC Press, 201...

Inspired by Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi has written her own beautiful choreo drama titled For Black Trans Girls Who Gotta Cuss A Mother F*cker Out When Snatching An Edge Ain’t Enough. Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi describes For Black Trans Girls as “a celebration of Trans Women, Goddesshood, a lament for our fallen, a sword...

Reflecting on his fifty-year effort to steer the Grand Old Party toward black voters, Memphis power broker George W. Lee declared, "Somebody had to stay in the Republican Party and fight." As Joshua D. Farrington, Instructor in African & African-American Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, recounts in Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016),...

In this episode of the American Society for Legal History’s podcast Talking Legal History Siobhan talks with Paul Finkelman, President of Gratz College, about his book Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court(Harvard University Press, 2018). Finkelman is a specialist on the history of slavery and the law. He is also the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and the author or e...

Though women’s roles in the black freedom struggle remain under-acknowledged, scholars continue to make their importance clear. In her new book, Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, DC, 1920-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Mary-Elizabeth Murphy (Associate Professor of History at Eastern Michigan University) examines black women’s activism in Washingto...

Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan is the author of Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic, published by New York University Press in 2019. Vagrants and Vagabonds focuses on the control over poor migrants’ mobility and how their movement shaped ideas of class, race, and status in the United States. Examining how local and state government’s criminalized vagrancy, O’Bras...

When hate groups descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, triggering an eruption of racist violence, the tragic conflict reverberated throughout the world. It also had a profound effect on the University of Virginia’s expansive community, many of whose members are involved in teaching issues of racism, public art, free speech, and social ethics. In the wake of this momentous incident, scholars, edu...

Lenora Warren about her book, Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789-1886, published by Rutgers University Press in 2019. Fire on the Water looks at the history of abolition and slave violence by looking at the representation of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late 18th and early 19th century literature. By examining the intersection of both re...

With the Ta-Nehisi Coates–authored Black Panther comic book series (2016),  recent films Django Unchained (2012), The Birth of a Nation (2016), Nate Parker’s cinematic imagining of the Nat Turner rebellion, and screen adaptations of Marvel’s Luke Cage (2016) and Black Panther (2018), violent black redeemers have rarely been so present in mainstream Western culture. Grégory Pierrot argues, however,...

The 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought the issues of police violence, racial discrimination, and misogyny to the fore. Jaime Alves’s book the Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows that, from the perspective of Black Brazilians, these forces have deep roots in the nation’s history. Alves makes...

Ryan A. Quintana is the author of Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2018. Making a Slave State examined how enslaved African Americans built the state of South Carolina, in the literal sense of the word. From roads to canals, from public buildings to military fortifications, Quintana examines not only how ens...

In Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island(NYU Press, 2016; paperback, 2018), Christy Clark-Pujara, Associate Professor of History in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells the story of one state whose role was outsized: Rhode Island. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantatio...

Mary McLeod Bethune was often called the "First Lady of Negro America," but she made significant contributions to the political climate of Florida as well. From the founding of the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls in 1904, Bethune galvanized African American women for change. She created an environment in Daytona Beach that, despite racial tension throughout the stat...

The secession of Texas from Mexico was a dry run for the slaveholder’s republic of the Confederate States of America, argues Andrew Torget in Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850(University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Torget, the University Distinguished Teaching Professor of history at the University of North Texas (and the Guinness Worl...