New Books in African American Studies

Most people’s image of the American frontier does not conjure anything relating to people of African descent. But, as  Anna-Lisa Cox’s points out in her new book The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality (PublicAffairs, 2018), it should. Dr. Cox uncovers not only the presence of black life in the Northwest Territory states of Illinois, Indiana...

In cities ravaged by years of bloodshed and warfare, how did black populations, many formerly enslaved, help shape the new world that the Civil War left open for them to mold? In Dr. Hilary Green’s book Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools In The Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham University Press, 2016), she answers that question and more. Dr. Green chronicles the history of the blac...

Harold Washington’s election as mayor of Chicago in 1983 sent a shockwave through the politics of America’s third largest city, one that reverberated for decades afterward. Yet as Roger Biles describes in his book Mayor Harold Washington: Champion of Race and Reform in Chicago (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Washington’s promise as mayor was in many respects unfulfilled. The son of parents w...

The contemporary moment has brought to the forefront the question of what constitutes an American citizen. The legal question in popular understanding stems from the Fourteenth Amendment and its use of birthright citizenship as a central identifier of what makes a citizen. In Dr. Martha S. Jones’ newest book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge Univer...

The sit-in movement that swept the Southern states in 1960 was one of the iconic moments of the post-World War II civil rights movement. Yet the images of students patiently sitting at “whites-only” lunch counters conveys only one facet of a complex series of events. In The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Christopher W. Schmidt chronic...

The award-winning author Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History at the University of Texas. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (Basic Books, 2017) is a biography of the riveting life of Lucy Parsons. As an activist, writer and speaker, Parsons embodied the most radical expression of the battle for labor rights in American history, yet...

What do werewolves, enslaved women and immortal beings have in common? And how can they shed light on contemporary questions of ableism and police brutality? In Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2018), Sami Schalk argues that black women’s speculative fiction changes the rules of literary and textual interpretation by...

What happened in popular entertainment when African Americans could access the stage after the Civil War? In Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Sandra Graham tells the complex story of how folk spirituals composed by enslaved people but transformed for the stage became the core repertoire for the emerging black entertainment industry af...

As America changed in the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, the Southern music industry was changing as well. The music studios of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals–known as the “country-soul triangle”–began producing some of the most important music of the 1960s and 1970s. In Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Charles...

Combining memoir with auto-ethnography, historical study and sociocultural analysis, Halifu Osumare draws on her decades of experience to explore the complexities of black dance in the United States. Starting in San Francisco during the rise of the Black Arts and Black Power Movements as well as of hippie counterculture, Osumare’s narrative follows her subsequent journeys to twenty-three countries...

Several weeks ago, we had Professor Lilliana Mason on the podcast talking about her book about the process of social sorting that has deepened divides between citizens by aligning race, religion, and region. Mason argues that social sorting acts on a psychological-level, shaping how not just how people view policy but also political opponents. This week on the podcast, Matt Blackwell and Maya Sen...

A book that strikes at the source of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts‘ Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (The New Press, 2018) reveals the deep roots of these controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina,...

John Munro’s new book, The Anticolonial Front: The African-American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a transnational study that traces the persistence and continuities of Black radicalism from the end of the Second World War through the period of McCarthyism in the United States. Departing from an insistence on colonialism as the primary historical d...

Could slaves become Christian? If so, did their conversion lead to freedom? If not, how could perpetual enslavement be justified? In her recent book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Katharine Gerbner asks these questions as she traces how religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the ear...

Most people know that slavery was foundational to the economic development of the United States in the antebellum period. Fewer people are aware that slavery was also important for American foreign policy in the period. In his book This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at The Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard University Press, 2016), Matthew Karp examines how American slaveholders and the...

Today we talked with Nancy Mitchell about her book Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War, published by Stanford University Press in 2016 as part of the Cold War International History Project Series. Drawn from extensive archival research and personal interviews spanning three continents, Mitchell’s book attempts to recast the Carter administration as an active, and in some cases forceful,...

The title of Lisa A. Lindsay’s book Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa (University of North Carolina Press, 2017),  invokes enduring family ties, as well as the connections between slavery, migration, and colonization in the Atlantic world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book returns, again and again, to the theme of vulnerability as a consequence of...

Today we are joined by Averell “Ace” Smith, The Pitcher and the Dictator: Satchel Paige’s Unlikely Season in the Dominican Republic (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). Smith is a political consultant and a lifelong baseball fan who became enamored with the game when he bought a copy of the 1956 edition of The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball at a school rummage sale. In a descriptive and richly...

Keisha N. Blain teaches African American and gender and women’s history at the University of Pittsburg. Her book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) tells the story of an overlooked group of black women leaders in the aftermath of a declining Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist movement of the 1920s. Building on...

In his book, Flavor and Soul: Italian America and Its African American Edge (University of Chicago Press, 2017), scholar John Gennari examines the intersectionalities between African American and Italian American cultures in the United States. Using an auto-ethnographic lens, Gennari explores this relationship, what he calls “the edge”, between the two cultures. Gennari examines the intersectional...

The United States leads the world in incarceration. That’s a problem, especially the disproportionate impact of “mass incarceration” on low-income men of color. In their new book Start Here: A Roadmap to Reducing Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2018), Greg Berman and Julian Adler take us though a series of concrete, practical, and practicable steps that we could take to radically reduce the num...

Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem in August 2016 prior to a preseason game reopened a national conversation about public performances of patriotism. What does a national anthem do to promote unity in a nation with a long running history of racial slavery, lynching, and segregation? Imani Perry answers this question in her recent book May We Forever Stand: A History of the...

Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic (Univers...

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s nineteenth-century novel Iola Leroy has not always been considered a core text in the canon of African American literature. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century, her work was dismissed as derivate and was erased by intellectuals until black feminist scholars such as Deborah McDowell and Hazel Carby undertook the crucial work of recuperating Harper’s writi...

The black social gospel–formulated and given voice by abolitionists and post-reconstruction Black men and women–took the United States by storm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Black Christians were not the only ones involved in the black social gospel, though. Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien’s The New Abolition: W.E.B Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Yale University Press, 2018) argues th...