Long before the rise of New World slavery, West Africans were adept swimmers, divers, canoe makers, and canoeists...

Banks explores the rise of the African American museum and its patrons and philanthropists...

Balto argues that local police department policies and procedures left black Chicagoans “overpoliced and underprotected” far before mass incarceration began...

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."

Finkelman is a specialist on the history of slavery and the law...

Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi is an African, Cuban, Indigenous, American Trans performance artist, author, and playwright among many different titles...

Though women’s roles in the black freedom struggle remain under-acknowledged, scholars continue to make their importance clear...

O'Brassill-Kulfan focuses on the control over poor migrants’ mobility and how their movement shaped ideas of class, race, and status in the United States...

When hate groups descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, triggering an eruption of racist violence, the tragic conflict reverberated throughout the world...

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...

The black avenger channeled fresh anxieties about slave uprisings and racial belonging occasioned by European colonization in the Americas...

Alves makes a powerful contribution to urban anthropology, describing the spatial contours of “Brazilian Apartheid” in Sao Paulo...

Quintana examined how enslaved African Americans built the state of South Carolina, in the literal sense of the word...

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...

Clark-Pujara draws on the documents of the state, the business, organizational, and personal records of their enslavers, and the few first-hand accounts left by enslaved and free black Rhode Islanders to reconstruct their lived experiences...

The secession of Texas from Mexico was a dry run for the slaveholder’s republic of the Confederate States of America, argues Andrew Torget...

Twitty looks at numerous freedom suits filed in the St. Louis circuit court in order to examine the legal history of slavery and freedom...

"Rethinking Rufus" is the first book-length study of sexual violence against enslaved men...

Welch explores the history of free and enslaved black Americans use of local courts in the Cotton South...

Powers explores the rich and, at times, unexpected intersections of love, sex, race, gender, sexuality, and American popular music...

jayy dodd offers her own brilliant reflections on so many things: the contemporary moment, dystopia, her transition, and more...

During the civil rights era, Memphis gained a reputation for having one of the South’s strongest NAACP branches...

Keyser explores the ways that modern fiction writers responded to the theories and anxieties about race in the early twentieth century through related anxieties about modern industrial food...

Allison Davis (1902-1983) was a pioneering anthropologist who did ground-breaking fieldwork in the Jim Crow south,  challenged the racial bias of IQ tests, and became the first African American to be tenured at the University of Chicago...

Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade...