New Books in African American Studies

Black Americans are by far the most unified racial group in American electoral politics, with 80 to 90 percent identifying as Democrats—a surprising figure given that nearly a third now also identify as ideologically conservative, up from less than 10 percent in the 1970s. Why has ideological change failed to push more black Americans into the Republican Party? Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forc...

Hannah Walker’s new book, Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race (Oxford UP, 2020), brings together the political science and criminal justice disciplines in exploring how individuals are mobilized to engage in political participation by their connection to the criminal justice system in the United States. The fusion between these two academic disciplin...

Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) by Jerry Gershenhorn is a history of the struggle for Black equality in North Carolina from 1927 to 1971 as told through the life and activism of Black newspaperman Louis Austin. Austin, as editor of the Carolina Times, was involved in nearly every facet of the long Black freed...

What Black and White America Must Do Now: A Prescription to Move Beyond Race (Hot Books, 2020) explores the complexity of race and culture in the United States. In his third book, renowned conservative entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist Armstrong Williams discusses his prescription for healing and atonement amidst today’s current social upheaval. Race and racism are America's original sin, a...

After Laura Arata first visited Virginia City, Montana in graduate school, she became fascinated by the story of one historical figure—Sarah Bickford, a former slave, who migrated to this frontier, mining town in the late 1860s, and became a prominent business owner who promoted tourism at the site of a famous lynching of white “lawbreakers” by the Montana Vigilantes. In Race and the Wild West: Sa...

Pushing Back: Women of Color–Led Grassroots Activism in New York City (U Georgia Press, 2020) explores women of color’s grassroots leadership in organizations that are not singularly identified with feminism. Centered in New York City, Pushing Back brings an intersectional perspective to communities of color as it addresses injustices tied to domestic work, housing, and environmental policies and...

Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers won’t be able to put down, and that listeners from all sort of backgrounds will definitely want to hear more about. Weaving together histories of Black communities (in the US and the Americas more broadly), Native Americans, and multiple Latin Americans...

In 2017, We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People, the historic petition authored by William L. Patterson, was published in its third edition. It has been nearly 70 years since Patterson, who passed away in 1980, and Paul Roberson, who passed away in 1976, presented the petition to the United Nations General Assembly, charging the United States government with genocide...

Following the high-profile deaths of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, both cities erupted in protest over the unjustified homicides of unarmed black males at the hands of police officers. These local tragedies—and the protests surrounding them—assumed national significance, igniting fierce debate about the fairness...

Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press) is a richly illustrated history of the American Anti-Slavery Society and its print, material, and visual artifacts. Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audie...

How do we have a serious conversation about race that moves beyond the brevity of Twitter or an op-ed? In this episode of Post-Script (a New Books in Political Science series from Lilly Goren and Susan Liebell), three scholars engage in a nuanced and fearless discussion grounded in history, data, and theory. There is no way to summarize this hour of engaged and enraged conversation about racism in...

Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities (Living Justice Press, 2020) consists of stories that have arisen from the lived experiences of a broad range of seasoned, loving restorative justice practitioners of color—mostly women—who have fiercely unearthed realities about devastation caused by white practitioners who have unthinkingly worked without a racial or social justice consciousn...

Black women intellectuals have traditionally been overlooked in the academic study of American intellectual history. Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger) highlights the important contributions of both well- and lesser-known abolitionists, civil rights activists, preachers, writers, and artists to all spheres of American life and culture, arguing...

Prior to the 1960s, Democrats were seen as having a lock on the South in national and local electoral politics, while Republicans had strengths in other parts of the country. While this was the case for some time, Boris Heersink and Jeffrey A. Jenkins, in their new book,Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), look a bit more deeply into the r...

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host Adam McNeil. Today is part 2 of my discussion about Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s 2004 Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Instead of Dr. Morgan, who was featured in part 1 of the discussion, I enlisted a few #Blktwitterstorians to pull up to the pod and discuss the importance...

In 2004, Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press) was published. Sixteen years later, Morgan’s Laboring Women stands tall as one of the most important historical texts in the history of the academy. Building on Dr. Deborah Gray White’s literal field building and seminal 1985 monograph, Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves...

America's Other Muslims: Imam W.D. Mohammed, Islamic Reform, and the Making of American Islam explores the oldest and perhaps the most important Muslim community in America, whose story has received little attention in the contemporary context. Muhammad Fraser-Rahim explores American Muslim Revivalist, Imam W.D. Mohammed (1933–2008) and his contribution to the intellectual, spiritual, and philosop...

Two south side Chicago families are bound together by a violence-infused past. Ruby’s mother, Alice King, has been murdered. Her father, Lebanon King, is an abusive man who endured a terrible childhood. Her best friend, Layla, has always tried to protect Ruby from Lebanon even though her own father and Ruby’s father have been close friends since childhood. And their mothers were friends before the...

Can’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game (University of Mississippi Press, 2020) is a collaboration between musician and ethnomusicologist Kyle DeCoste and more than a dozen members of the Stooges Brass Band, past and present. It is the culmination of five years of interviews, research, and writing. Told with humor and candor, it’s as much a personal account of the Stooges’...

“I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America. “I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. “I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that.” – Shirley Chisholm, January 25, 1972, Announcement of Run for the Presidency What i...

In his new book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s (Faber, 2020), Simon Hall, a Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds, colorfully details an extraordinary visit by Fidel Castro to New York in the Autumn of 1960 for the opening of the UN General Assembly. Holding court from the iconic Hotel Theresa in Harlem, Castro's riotous stay in New York saw him conne...

Why is the scholarship and advocacy work of W.E.B. Du Bois so relevant for 21st century politics? Does his unique combination of both serve as a possible template for today’s freedom movements? Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly (assistant professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College and 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar with the Race and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago...

The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reprod...

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures? In On the Spirit of Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the r...

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Adam McNeil. Today on the podcast I have the honor of chatting with a good friend, Dr. J. T. Roane, assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Dr. Roane is on New Books in African American Studies to discuss a ran...