It takes a brave historian to take on the orthodoxy regarding the rise and fall of lynching in the United States. That orthodoxy holds that lynching in the South was a ‘system of social control’ in which whites used organized terror to oppress blacks.

In his new book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Columbia University Press, 2008), Houston A. Baker makes the argument that many contemporary black public intellectuals,

The study of non-heteronormative sexualities in the academy continues to be remarkably dynamic. Despite the usual attempts to harden the frame around this scholarship, it remains consistently exciting and surprising. Robert J.

Frank Dobson, Jr.‘s Rendered Invisible: Stories of Blacks and Whites, Love and Death (Plain View Press, 2010) is a single-authored collection of fiction. It includes the opening, gripping novella “Rendered Invisible,” which gives the book its title.

In his new book, A Vulcan’s Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (Brookings Institution Press, 2011) Dov Zakheim, former chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Defense,

Deborah Whaley’s new book Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (SUNY Press, 2010) may be the first full-length study of a Black Greek-Letter Organization (BGLO) written by a non-BGLO...

When an Atlantic Coastline Railroad train pulled into Red Springs, North Carolina, the conductor faced a difficult dilemma. Whom to allow in coach class with whites and whom to relegate to the back? In an effort to clarify the matter,

An interview with Dov Zakheim

America, wrote the late historian and public intellectual Tony Judt, is “intensely familiar–and completely unknown.” America’s current position as the globe’s single superpower means that almost everyone, from a farmer harvesting his crops in Missouri ...

“Isn’t it funny?” once mused Buck O’Neil, the sage of Negro League baseball. “Everybody remembers going to their first baseball game with their father. They might not remember going to their first day of school, . . .

My older daughter is twelve years old. Like many girls her age, she has spent countless hours on the soccer field. She has played volleyball and run cross-country at her school. She was the catcher for her Little League baseball team.

Essay collections are often a repository of an author’s lesser works, an attempt by publishers to milk every last penny from a well-regarded scholar. This is not the case with Jace Weaver’s new book Notes from a Miner’s Canary: Essays on the State of N...

One of the greatest challenges American military leaders have faced since the American Revolution has been to motivate citizens to forego their own sense of private identity in favor of the collective identity needed to wage war effectively.

With the election of Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of African descent, many people believed that America had ushered in an era of post-racial harmony. Harvey Young is not one of them. When it comes to the racial experience of black people,

When I arrived at college in the early 1980s, drugs were cool, music was cool, and drug-music was especially cool. The coolest of the cool drug-music bands was The Velvet Underground. They were from the mean streets of New York City (The Doors were fro...

It is the summer of discontent for fans of the National Football League. What will they do if team owners and players cannot reach a labor agreement before the fall season? The satirists at The Onion have offered their speculations: fans of the Green B...

In recent months, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk about filibustering in the Senate, about how Senate Democrats acquired a filibuster-proof majority in the 2008 elections only to lose it by the midterm elections of 2010 when Scott Brown was elected to...

“On July 5, 1954, Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black forever changed musical history,” writes Sheree Homer in Catch that Rockabilly Fever: Personal Stories of Life on the Road and in the Studio (McFarland, 2010).

How can those in African, Africana, and African American Studies strengthen their disciplinary ties? What do these connections have to do with Kwasi Konadu‘s recent study The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (Oxford 2010)?

Corruption in big-time college sports recently claimed another victim: Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel. Once regarded as a paragon of integrity, Tressel is now seen as one more example of a coach who recruited star players and built a successful ...

I think this is really interesting. Among the thousands of iconic and easily recognizable photographs of segregated water fountains in the American South, you will almost never find one that features a black woman,

Playboy is having (another) moment. Since its fiftieth birthday in 2003, the brand’s relevance has risen after a period of decline. The Girls Next Door, a reality television show about the goings-on at Hugh Hefner’s Los Angeles mansion,

In his new book, Failing Liberty 101: How We Are Leaving Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship in a Free Society, (Hoover Institution Press, 2011) William Damon, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution,

For most non-native Americans, the Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s appeared out of nowhere. Convinced of triumphalist myths of the disappearing (or disappeared) Indian, white America relegated native communities to the margins of society.

I have the habit of reacting audibly when reading good works of non-fiction. Members of my household and strangers on airplanes have been startled by my hmms and huhs of surprise, my ews and ughs of disgust, and my wows of disbelief.