This terrific book follows the itinerary of Eric Walrond’s peripatetic life. Born in Guyana in 1898, Walrond lived in Barbados, Panama, New York, Paris, London. As a writer and sharp observer of those around him,

George Whitefield was a complex man driven by a simple idea, the new birth that brought salvation. Because of such passion, Whitefield received both enthusiastic support, preaching to audiences numbering in the thousands,

Is hip hop defined by its artists or by its audience? In Home With Hip Hop Feminism, Aisha Durham returns hip hop scholarship to its roots by engaging in an ethnographic and autoethnographic approach to studying hip hop.

In this podcast I talk with Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University about his book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015). Per the book jacket,

What does it mean to be free? How can paying attention to the relationship between freedom and slavery help construct a concept and practice of freedom that is “perpetual, unfinished, and rooted in acts of flight” (181)?

In Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature (New York University Press, 2013), Jodi Eichler-Levine, associate professor of Religion Studies and Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization at Lehigh U...

What is hip? Can a piece of music be hip? Or is hipness primarily a way of engaging with music which recognizes the hip potential of the music? Or primarily a manner of being, which allows the hip individual to authentically engage with the hip artwork...

In Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, a writer and former journalist, introduces us to the larger-than-life personality Ha...

Colson Whitehead’s fiction has drawn varied criticism. On the one hand, there’s the scholarship of the African diaspora, a tradition that takes the long view of Whitehead–extrapolating him from their existing canon (of Du Bois, Hurston, Ellison, etc.

Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Associate Professor in U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin. His book Beyond Civil Rights: The Moynihan Report and Its Legacy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) is a detail and illuminating analysis of the recept...

In her wonderful new book Polygyny: What it Means When African American Muslim Women Share Their Husbands (University Press of Florida, 2015), Debra Majeed, Professor of Religious Studies at Beloit College,

Gregory E. O’Malley examines a crucial, but almost universally overlooked, aspect of the African slave trade in his new book Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohund...

Sonja D. Williams‘ book Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom (University of Illinois Press, 2015) connects its subject to some of the most important events and social movements of his time, including what we now call the Civil Rights Moveme...

Leah Wright Rigueur is an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her book The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton University Press,

Following the Civil War, Memphis emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment, after a period of turmoil. Preston Lauterbach joins host Jonathan Judaken for an in-depth discussion in advance of the launch of Lauterbach’s latest bo...

In this podcast I talk with Laura F. Edwards, Peabody Family Professor of History at Duke University about her book, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (Cambridge University Press 2015).

Mia Bay is a professor of history at Rutgers University, and Director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity. She is co-editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina, 2015).

David George Surdham is the author of The Big Leagues Go to Washington: Congress and Sports Antitrust, 1951-1989 (University of Illinois Press, 2015). Surdham is Associate Professor of Economics at Northern Iowa University.

Although the designation now applies to American citizens of Mexican ethnicity writ large, the term Mexican American (hyphenated or not) also refers to the rising generation of ethnic Mexicans born and raised in the U.S.

Julian E. Zelizer is the author of The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (Penguin Press, 2015). Zelizer is the Malcom Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princet...

Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox are the authors of Running from Office: Why Young Americans Are Turned off to Politics (Oxford UP,2015). Lawless is a Professor of Government and the Director of the Women & Politics Institute at American Universi...

People living in the modern west generally have no problem criticizing religiously-justified violence. It’s therefore always interesting when I discuss John Brown, a man who legitimized anti-slavery violence Biblically.

Philip A. Wallach is the author of To The Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis (Brookings Institution Press, 2015). Wallach is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

The historiography of the southern Civil Rights Movement has long focused on the tactic of non-violence. With only a few notable exceptions, most scholarship locates the use of armed self-defense and other forms of armed resistance in northern cities w...

Andrew Hartman is associate professor of history at Illinois State University. His book A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2015) provides a whirlwind tour through the most salient debates of what ...