The links between African Americans and the global struggle for decolonization, particularly in Africa are well-documented. Facing similar kinds of repression that were rooted in systemic racism and the denial of political rights,

Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (Oxford, 2017) is a dramatic and vibrant story of a little-known Kentucky school, the Choctaw Academy. Christina Snyder, McCabe-Greer Professor of History at Penn State University,

How do schools empower but also potentially emasculate young black men? In his new book, Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Freeden Blume Oeur uses observational and inte...

Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man is a milestone of American literature and the idea of invisibility has become a key way for understanding social marginalization. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU Press, 2017), M. Cooper Harriss,

In their new edited volume Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power (University Press of Florida, 2018), Keri Leigh Merritt and Matthew Hild provide an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the historical development of southe...

In Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins (Duke University Press, 2017), David García reminds us that how culture is understood and interpreted not only reflects the political and social discourses of t...

Boston’s political culture is most known within the frame of antebellum political struggles over the institution of slavery. What about Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era Black Bostonian politics though? That story is made clear by the Dr.

Brian Abrams interviewed more than 100 people – Democrats, Republicans, cabinet officials, White House aides, campaign operatives, congresspeople and activists – to piece together a comprehensive oral history of the Barack Obama presidency,

Optimism at All Costs: Black Attitudes, Activism, and Advancement in Obama’s America (University of  Massachusetts Press, 2018) takes as its point of departure and central preoccupation the notion of “paradoxical ebullience,” by which author Lessie B.

A wave of religious leaders in black communities in the early twentieth-century insisted that so-called Negroes were, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or a raceless children of God. In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identi...

The Kansas-Missouri border holds a place of infamy in the history of American slavery as the chief battleground of the Bleeding Kansas crisis of the mid-nineteenth century. Kristen Epps, an associate professor of history at the University of Central Ar...

Naomi André’s innovative new book, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (University of Illinois Press, 2018) is an example of a concept she calls “engaged musicology.” Positioning herself within the book as a knowledgeable and ethical listener,

How did prisons become a tool of racial inequality? Using historical data, Heather Schoenfeld’s new book Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2018)  “answers how the United States became a...

As every scholar of African Americans knows, Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is an essential resource for black history. But who was Schomburg? In Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (SUNY Press,

Black Greek-Letter organizations (BGLOs) appeared as an initiative from black college students to provide support, opportunities and service, as well as a free space for the black community. Despite most BGLO members are black,

Fifty years ago, the United States, and many other societies, experienced one of the most turbulent years of the century. In 1968, Americans were deeply divided. The Vietnam War was at its height, an antiwar movement raged,

Activism comes in many forms, be it political, educational, or social. Less often though, do people perceive historical activism in such conversations. Dr. Ian Rocksborough-Smith’s new book: Black Public History in Chicago: Civil Rights Activism From W...

The concept of “Southern hospitality” began to take form in the late eighteenth century and became especially associated with Virginia’s grand plantations. This state was home to many of our founding fathers. Their galas, balls, feasts,

The World War II era was a transformative period for the United States’ relationship to the rest of the world. Exporting liberal democracy was an important goal for the American government. Yet in places like Florida,

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 Eq...

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 Scho...

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 R...

We recently marked the 50th Anniversary of Terry vs. Ohio, the US Supreme Court case that dramatically expanded the scope under which agents of the state could stop people and search them. Taking advantage of a North Carolina law that required the coll...

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 ...

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 se...