New Books in African American Studies

In 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back (Cambridge University Press, 2014), David Krugler chronicles the origins and development of ten major race riots that took place in the United States during that year. Although sustained, anti-black violence both predates and succeeds the year under examination,  1919 distinguishes itself by the sheer number of major racial co...

A kind of biography of the town of Annamaboe, a major slave trading port on Africa’s Gold Coast, Randy J. Sparks‘s book Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Harvard University Press, 2014) focuses on the African women and men who were the crucial middle figures in the African slave trade, the largest forced migration of people in human history. The millions...

Sarah Mayorga-Gallo is the author of Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood (UNC Press 2014). She is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Cincinnati. We are joined by a guest podcaster, Candis Watts Smith, assistant professor of political science at Williams College. Behind the White Picket Fence makes a strong case that simple, statistica...

Jeff Smith is the author of Ferguson in Black and White (Kindle Single, 2014). Smith is assistant professor of political science at The New School’s Milano Graduate School. Smith writes this book from a position of academic and personal expertise. He grew up in the area and served as a state representative for several years. Ferguson in Black and White provides useful background about the socio-po...

Many books on film discuss the artistic aspects of movies, often as they relate to social and political events that affected the filmmakers. In his book The Birth of a Nation: How a Legendary Filmmaker and a Crusading Editor Reignited America’s Civil War (PublicAffairs, 2014), journalist/professor Dick Lehr uses a controversial film to tell a bigger story about one of the first civil rights leader...

When it came to race relations, the post-World War Two North was different — better — than the South. Or so white people in the northeast told themselves. While Jason Sokol argues that there was a real basis for what he calls the “northern mystique,” his new book All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn (Basic Books, 2014) shows that this conviction disguised a deep, rich ve...

Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is associate professor in the School of International Service at American University. Timeliness is not something that every scholarly book can claim, but Cathy Schneider has published a book of the moment. With protests occurring across the country in r...

Scholars interested in the history of the civil rights movement in the North will definitely be interested in Brian Purnell‘s new book, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings:The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (University Press of Kentucky, 2014). Thiscase study of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Brooklyn joins one of the fastest-growing areas of research in the field: the roo...

Candis Watts Smith is the author of Black Mosaic: The Politics of Black Pan-Ethnic Diversity (NYU Press, 2014). Watts Smith is assistant professor of political science at Williams College. How do Black immigrants in the US view their racial and ethnic identities? Do they identify with being Black, African American, or something else? Like Christina Greer (Black Ethnics) and Natalie-Masuoka and Jan...

Often when we think of missions to Native Americans or people of African descent, we think of white missionaries. In his book Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2013), Dr. Edward E. Andrews challenges this view. Through his careful research, skilled use of anecdotes, and compelling narrative. Dr. Andrews shows how it was Native A...

When he died from AIDS in 1993, Arthur Ashe was universally hailed as a man of principle, grace, and wisdom–a world-class athlete who had transcended his game. But a closer look at Ashe’s life reveals a more complex picture. Certainly, Ashe was an admirable figure. When tennis tournament organizers barred the teenage phenom because of his race, Ashe maintained his dignity. Decades later, when he w...

John Morrow and Jeffrey Sammons share their insights on the story of the fabled 369th Infantry Regiment in their book, Harlem’s Rattlers and the Great War: The Undaunted 369th Regiment and the African American Quest for Equality (University Press of Kansas, 2014). Our guests reveal a great deal about the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming...

Seeking to fill the gap in scholarship focused on African American artisans in the American South, Catherine W. Bishir uses the very specific location of New Bern, North Carolina to “dig a deep hole” and produce a longitudinal study of black artisans that moves chronologically from the colonial period, through the early national period to the period following the Civil War. Crafting Lives: African...

In Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (Vintage Books, 2004), Melvin Ely uses a trove of documents primarily found in the county court records of Prince Edward County, Virginia to unravel a rich story about the free blacks who inhabited “the gentle slope of Israel Hill.” The story begins in 1796 when Richard Randolph, a prominent Vi...

There was once a notion that black people had no meaningful history. It’s a notion Dorothy Porter Wesley spent her entire career debunking. Through her 43 years at Howard University, where she helped create the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, her own publishing endeavors and collecting, and her unfettered support of the researchers she encountered, Wesley devoted her entire life to the preserva...

Adam Ewing acknowledges the enduring, if reductive, image of Garveyism – “the parades and shipping lines and colonization schemes” – in its early, Harlem-based incarnation, but focuses The Age Of Garvey: How A Jamaican Activist Created A Mass Movement And Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton University Press, 2014) on tracing the myriad manifestations of this “organic mass politics” beyond the...

Co-founded in 1962 by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, the National Farm Workers Association would eventually become the United Farm Workers (UFW), the landmark labor union dedicated to achieving better wages and working conditions for rural California agricultural workers. In To March for Others: The Black Freedom Struggle and the United Farm Workers (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), La...

Our taken for granted assumptions are questioned in a new book by Karl Spracklen, a professor of leisure studies at Leeds Metropolitan University in England. Whiteness and Leisure (Palgrave, 2013) combines two bodies of theoretical literature to interrogate leisure activities which seem innocuous or inoffensive. The book deploys insights from critical race theory along with the work of Jurgen Habe...

An unflinching examination of the trauma, violence, opportunism, and vision that combined to create the empire for slavery that was the Old South, Ed Baptist‘s new book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014) challenges popular conceptions of that region that imagine it as a land of proud men, genteel ladies, and an antiquated, inefficient sy...

On November 29, 1957, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holliday, Zoot Sims, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, and a multi-talented young R&B player who played jazz that night, Ray Charles, and others played a benefit concert for the Morningside Recreation Center at Carnegie Hall. Almost a half a century later, these recordings, intended to be played on radio Voice of America, were found in the Library of Congress...

Bruce Ackerman is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. His book, We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard UP, 2013) fills out the constitutional history of America’s “Second Reconstruction” period and makes a powerful argument that traditional understandings of the constitutional canon must be expanded to accurately reflect the American lawma...

Slavery was pervasive in the Ancient World: you can find it in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In Late Antiquity , however, slavery went into decline. It survived and even flourished in the Byzantine Empire and Muslim lands, yet it all but disappeared in Medieval Western and Central Europe. Then, rather suddenly, slavery reappeared in the West, or rather in Western empires. By the early sixt...

During his lifetime, Michael Jackson became a global icon. Michael Jackson was beloved by millions; his journey began as he became a boy star with The Jackson Five and it culminated with his being crowned the King of Pop, While some of the controversy of his later years along diminished his popularity, Jackson’s status as an icon of American music has never wavered. When he died, there was a treme...

Sitting in my home office this morning, I’ve periodically looked up from my computer screen and out the window to see who the dog is barking at. Sometimes it’s a young mother pushing a stroller, sometimes an older man walking his dogs, occasionally a young woman jogging. Regardless of age, gender or agenda, all of the people I’ve seen have one thing in common. They are white. This is not unusual,...

The city of Iowa City’s website promotes its “small-town hospitality” and its focus on “culture.” But a closer look at Iowa City, home to 70,000 and the University of Iowa, reveals a community trying to redefine itself as urban African-Americans relocate to the area. This is the focus of Robert E. “Ted” Gutsche‘s book, A Transplanted Chicago: Race, Place and the Press in Iowa City (McFarland, 2014...