You may know Toni Morrison’s famed novel Beloved, but do you know much about the true story of the woman depicted in that story? You will know about the real story and more, by reading her biography called Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Marg...

Writers have long created networks and connections by exchanging letters or writing back to one another in their poetry and fiction. Letters between Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes,

It takes courage to walk into a classroom when students don’t look like you. It takes courage to return every day to teach a class when students devalue education. Media has portrayed the scenario in films like Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds with ...

Drawing on materials from archives in eight southern US states, Melissa Milewski’s Litigating Across the Color Line: Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to the Civil Rights Era (Oxford University Press,

Today we are joined by David A. Goldstein, author of the book Alley-Oop To Aliyah: African American Hoopsters in The Holy Land (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017.) Goldstein explores the story of the African-American professional basketball players who practic...

Slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world for centuries. Scholars have examined various aspects of the visual culture that was slavery, including its painting, sculpture,

In this podcast I talk with James Forman Jr. about his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Mass incarceration and the carceral state are hot topics in law and criminology,

In the black liberation movement, imprisonment emerged as a key rhetorical, theoretical, and media resource. Imprisoned activists developed tactics and ideology to counter white supremacy. Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Libe...

On July 17, 1944, a massive explosion rocked the segregated Navy base at Port Chicago, California, killing more than 300 sailors who were at the docks, critically injuring off-duty men in their bunks, and shattering windows up to a mile away.

For the first time, African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement (Stanford University Press, 2015) tells the compelling story of those black activists who fought for nuclear disarmament by connecting ...

Contemporary conversations and debates over Confederate monuments underline how memory-making and the legacies of U.S. slavery and the Civil War remains raw and highly contested in public discourse. In her new book,

Recent popular and scholarly interest has highlighted the complex and brutal system of mass incarceration in the United States. Much of this interest has focused on recent developments while other scholars have revealed the connections between the deve...

Underground Airlines (Mulholland Books, 2016) is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we’d like to believe. In an alternative world,

Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Masterless Men: Poor Whites in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017) reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor.

The Blessings Series continue with a heartwarming novel, Chasing Down a Dream (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2017), about what makes a family when trials test relationships. And in Henry Adams, Kansas, there’s never a dull day. After a horrendous storm,

By drawing on a vast, never-utilized trove of archival materials along with oral histories, choreographic analysis, and embodied research, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora (Oxford University Press,

What is the labor for Black soldiers of the regiment? That is the question Johari Jabir asks in his book Conjuring Freedom: Music and Masculinity in the Civil War’s “Gospel Army” (Ohio State University Press, 2017).

In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere – the Argentinean statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave, abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick Douglass – both published their first works.

When Dorothy Sterling wrote her book about nineteenth-century black women in America, she stated in the introduction that the book was not a definitive history of black women but a sourcebook to lead others to “compile a complete history.

First Martyr of Liberty: Crispus Attucks in American Memory (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores how Crispus Attucks’ death in the 1770 Boston Massacre led to his achieving mythic significance in African Americans’ struggle to incorporate their exp...

Addie Wyatt stands at the intersection of unionism, feminism, and civil rights activism in post-World War II America. In Reverend Addie Wyatt: Faith and the Fight for Labor, Gender, and Racial Equality (University of Illinois Press, 2016),

Tanya Ann Kennedy‘s book, Historicizing Post-Discourses: Postfeminism and Postracialism in United States Culture (SUNY Press, 2017), is a complex and important exploration of our collective understanding of questions of racial and gender equality,

Rosalind Rosenberg‘s book Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a multi-layered and rich biography of Pauli Murray, an activist, lawyer and Episcopal priest whose life intersected with the most significant civil and hum...

The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press, 2017) is a book-length justification for the burgeoning field of Black Male Studies. The author posits that we should conceptualize the black male as a victim,...

In his 1903 hit “Congo Love Song,” James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with that narrative, it also invokes the site of King Leopold II of Belgium’s...