New Books in African American Studies

A striking triptych once displayed in countless African American households, the Trinity typically features Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy. More than decoration, these portraits were deliberate acts of memory and quiet resistance, a medium through which African Americans asserted their own narratives of hope, leadership, and the fight for justice. In this provocative history The Trinity: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Civil Rights in African American Memory (UNC Press, 2026), Sharron Wilkins Conrad traces the Trinity across several decades, showing how African Americans didn’t merely remember the civil rights movement; they shaped its meaning. The Trinity reveals why Kennedy’s image hung beside King and Christ, while Lyndon B. Johnson, despite signing landmark legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, remained largely unheralded. Kennedy’s charisma, symbolic promise, and perceived martyrdom placed him among sacred icons, while Johnson—seen as transactional and confronted by the era’s growing impatience—never secured the same emotional legacy. In a gripping exploration of memory and meaning-making, Conrad reveals how communities create historical truths by elevating some leaders, sidelining others, and preserving their own visions in defiance of the official record. Raymond Williams, PhD is a political scientist, blogger, and book club administrator with an interest in American History and Politics. You can find Raymond on Instagram, Threads, and Twitter at @rtwilliams16. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

1. A complete list of University of California Press journals is available at UC Press Journals 2. Clare E. B. Cannon; Advancing sustainable transitions: A spatial analysis of socio-environmental dynamics of landfills across the United States. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00101: Link 3. Morrison, Matthew D. Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024. Available at: UC Press Bookstore 4. Matthew D. Morrison; Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2019; 72 (3): 781–823: Link 6. Jennifer Lynn Peterson; Scenes of Destruction and Beauty: Sponsored Film, Women Reformers, and the Save-the-Redwoods League. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2023; 9 (2): 43–75: Link If you are interested in supporting the work of UC Press and its Journals Program, please consider making a charitable donation to the UC Press Foundation. To learn more about the UC Press Foundation and how to contribute, please visit UC Press Website. David Famiano is the Journals Director at the University of California Press Jessica Chesnutt is the Journals Manager at the University of California Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

A cemetery as open-air museum? Historian and award-winning author of Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal, Eric K. Washington thinks so. In this compelling discussion, Washington talks about his newly-completed project revealing the hidden stories of Harlem Renaissance figures buried at the historic Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. Funded by a $50,000 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the initiative was led by Washington, alongside A’Lelia Bundles, journalist, historian, and great-granddaughter of entrepreneur and icon Madam C.J. Walker. While the Harlem Renaissance is often told through a handful of well-known names, Where Harlem Rests (available here) allows for a look beyond the spotlight, uncovering the many voices that helped shape the movement, and the community itself, expanding the historical narrative, and honoring a broader, more inclusive legacy of creativity, resilience, and cultural impact that has long deserved recognition. The Woodlawn Conservancy is the 501c3 not-for-profit support organization for the Woodlawn Cemetery. Woodlawn Cemetery was established in 1863 and spans 400 acres in the Bronx, New York. It is one of the nation’s most distinguished historic cemeteries and a certified Level II Arboretum. In 2011, Woodlawn was designated a National Historic Landmark for its singular importance in the history of the nation and New York City. It is also an active cemetery with ongoing burials and funeral services, and more than 310,000 individuals are memorialized on its grounds. Woodlawn is one of the nation's finest examples of a 19th-century garden cemetery. Its monuments represent some of the best memorial art and architecture in the nation, including nearly 1,300 private mausoleums designed by some of the most prominent architects of the 20th century. The Woodlawn Cemetery is open to the public free of charge 365 days a year from 8:30am - 4:30 pm. You can find Erik at his website, and on at personal Instagram page, as well as @taggingthepast. His recommended reading list is available on the Additions to the Archive Substack. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Mark Twain’s Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self‑aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn Black fathers in American fiction. Haunted by the family he has left behind, Jim acts as father figure to Huck, the white boy who is his companion as they raft the Mississippi toward freedom. Jim is also a highly polarizing figure: he is viewed as an emblem both of Twain’s alleged racism and of his opposition to racism; a diminished character inflected by minstrelsy and a powerful challenge to minstrel stereotypes; a reason for banning Huckleberry Finn and a reason for teaching it; an embarrassment and a source of pride for Black readers.In Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade (Yale UP, 2025) eminent Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin probes these controversies, exploring who Jim was, how Twain portrayed him, and how the world has responded to him. Fishkin also follows Jim’s many afterlives: in film, from Hollywood to the Soviet Union; in translation around the world; and in American high school classrooms today. The result is Jim as we have never seen him before—a fresh and compelling portrait of one of the most memorable Black characters in American fiction. Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, professor of English, and professor (by courtesy) of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author or editor of many books, including Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee and Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices, and editor of the twenty-nine-volume Oxford Mark Twain. She lives in Stanford, CA. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Black Freedom: A Visual History of Juneteenth and Emancipation Days (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) is the first fully illustrated history of Juneteenth and other Emancipation Day celebrations, told through photographs, art, and an engrossing narrative. For more than 150 years, Black communities have gathered to honor freedom, resilience, and the ongoing struggle for true liberation. While Juneteenth has recently gained wider recognition, it was one of many Emancipation Day traditions celebrated across the United States. These observances were spaces of joy, remembrance, and resistance—even as the fight for full freedom was unfinished. This volume brings together stirring essays and striking images from Juneteenth and beyond, offering a sweeping portrait of how Black people have created and sustained rituals of remembrance, a testament to the generations who, through celebration and storytelling, demanded that their contributions to the making of America be fully recognized. Blair LM Kelley is an award-winning author, historian, and scholar of  the African American experience. She is also the president and director of the National Humanities Center, the only independent center for advanced study in the world dedicated exclusively to the humanities. Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Youssef J. Carter’s The Vast Oceans: Remembering Allah and Self on the Mustafawiyya Sufi Path (UNC Press, 2026) is a stunning meditation on Black Atlantic Sufism, specifically as it travels between South Carolina and Senegal via the Mustafawiyya Sufi community and Shaykh Arona Faye. The book orbits around Sufi conceptual frameworks which are translated through the register of Black and Africana Studies. For example, bay’a is rendered as “solidarity” or khidma as “labour”; such attunement of Sufi concepts presents capacious possibilities for Sufi studies at the intersection of Black and Muslim studies. The book then uses deep ethnography to capture the flows of stories, rituals, and piety, and also Black radical labour, motherwork, and becoming to highlight how in spite of the ongoing violence of racial capitalism and plantation modernity, Black-Africana Sufi communities are vital spaces of worldmaking, one that is not merely metaphysical (such as through ritual piety) but also political, anti-racist, and anti-colonial and rooted in collective care. This book is necessary reading for scholars of Sufism, and those who work on Black and African Islam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Anna O. Law, the Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights in the Department of Political Science at City University of New York-Brooklyn Campus, has a deeply researched and important new book that weaves together different approaches to understanding American citizenship, especially in context of immigration and migration in the first century of the U.S. republic. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2026) engages three different disciplines, including Political Science, History, and Legal Studies/Law, to unpack the many different approaches to citizenship in the new republic. Law noted as we spoke that she had not intended to write a book about slavery, but it was impossible to think about or understand immigration in the United States, especially in the first century of the United States, without examining the particular place and role of those who were enslaved, since they were also immigrants to the United States, though it was a forced immigration, against their will and without their consent. Part of what Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship focuses on is that prior to the Civil War and the post-war constitutional Amendments, immigration was a patchwork, designed state by state, without a national standard or structure. Thus, we see a form of federalism that shifts from the states to the national government after the 14th and 15th Amendments, and after a number of pieces of legislation passed in the 1880s by Congress. Immigration becomes a more centralized issue and process as Congress passed a raft of restrictive laws focused mostly on Chinese individuals. These moves took the power to manage immigration away from the individual states and nationalized policies and regulations. At the same time, the story of American immigration is incomplete without understanding how the national government forcefully took land belonging to Native Americans and compelled their migration to other areas of the United States. In much the same way that we cannot understand immigration without understanding how slavery was intertwined with it, we also can’t understand immigration to the United States without the history of how newly arrived immigrants displaced Native Americans and were given stolen land through national and state level regulations and policies. This is another entire area of history, policy, law, and regulation that Law unpacks to explore the interaction between Native Americans, sovereignty, land claims, and federalism in context of American citizenship and the complexity of who was and was not considered to be a citizen. Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship is a masterful work that helps us understand the contemporary battles over citizenship. As the Supreme Court is set to make yet another determination of how the 14th Amendment is to be applied to individuals born in the United States, Law’s research and analysis has particular relevance and importance as we grapple with these ongoing disputes. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

There is no alternative. The End of History. Climate Apocalypse. It seems that our contemporary moment is defined by the idea that things can only get worse or, in the most optimistic reading, perhaps stay as they are. Ideas for things getting better, utopian ideas, seem in short supply. It is this which Joe Davidson confronts in his book Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026). Davidson links this apparent decline in utopian thinking to a change in ‘time consciousness’, the ways in which our sense of the future seems less open to possibility than it once was. Despite this he notes the persistence of utopianism in a new form, the ‘postdystopian utopia’ which takes account of the assumption the future will be worse and uses this as a spur to utopian thinking. He then explores how this manifests itself in various utopian works in different traditions, from Black utopianism considering the tragedy of the slave trade, feminism mining the nostalgia of previous battles to consider how things could be different and climate change utopianism confronting catastrophe. In our discussion we explore the changing fortunes and forms of utopianism over time, the value of ‘utopian studies’, why Silicon Valley tech-bros might be as utopian (or dystopian) as they make out and think about why it is important we all imagine the possibility of different worlds. Joe also makes a number of reading recommendations for postdystopian utopian novels. Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

From the mid-nineteenth century through the dust bowl years of the Great Depression, a new kind of migrant worker became a familiar sight in communities across America. The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants (Princeton UP, 2026) by Dr. Robert Suits traces the journeys of these homeless men and women, showing how hobo work was an adaptation to energy transitions and a harsh and unpredictable climate, and how the hobo played a central role in the histories of industrialization and westward expansion.Challenging common depictions of the hobo as a world-weary, bearded man in ragged clothes, Dr. Suits reveals how these wandering laborers were often fastidious and heartbreakingly young. Forever on the move due to economic hardship and climate disaster, they chased harvests and took seasonal jobs in industries like logging and mining. Too often they couldn’t find employment at all. Suits describes the difficult, dangerous, and highly unstable jobs they worked while shedding light on the hobo life and philosophy, from their techniques for stowing away on railroads to their unique blend of socialist, anarchist, and anti-work thought. He traces the emergence of the hobo to the advent of steam and the need for manual laborers in places where this new technology couldn’t reach and describes how a growing reliance on the internal combustion engine brought an end to hobo work.Drawing on oral histories, environmental data, and cutting-edge digital methods, The Hobo paints an unforgettable portrait of an eclectic group of wandering radicals, troublemakers, poets, and writers, demonstrating how their experiences upend some of our basic assumptions about how environments and technologies shape society. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Marriage rates have fallen dramatically since the 1970s. Yet far from devaluing marriage, people still overwhelmingly describe marriage as the highest commitment they can imagine. Most Americans say they want to marry eventually, and couples who do marry have a lower chance of divorce than at any time since the 1970s. Increasingly, though, people tell pollsters they “have no idea” if they actually will end up married. And unlike in the past, young women are more uncertain than young men. In For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage (Viking, 2026), Stephanie Coontz—author of the “rich, provocative, and entertaining” book Marriage, A History—unravels the roots of such paradoxical trends. Examining five critical periods of historical transformation, she reveals how shifting romantic ideals, gender expectations, sexual mores, and cultural myths have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory beliefs, dysfunctional habits, and emotional earworms that make it hard to adjust our family relationships to the social and economic challenges of twenty-first-century life. Coontz demonstrates that today’s widespread nostalgia for a seemingly more stable past is an understandable reaction to heightened economic insecurity and eroding social solidarities. But trying to reproduce a largely imaginary golden age of marriage from the past simply locks us into a restricted future. Current public debates about marriage are dominated by two diametrically opposed groups. One argues that marriage is the only sure route to personal happiness and social stability; the other, that marriage is inherently oppressive. Coontz puts forward a radical middle ground, pointing to surprising new research on the personal changes and the policy innovations that can help people create successful relationships, in or out of marriage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Offering a novel approach to contemporary landscape studies, Explosivity: Following What Remains (U Minnesota Press, 2025) unearths the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the physical and cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. As he sifts through the historical debris of previous centuries, Dr. Javier Arbona-Homar analyzes a series of explosions that took place between 1866 and 2011 to call attention to the scattered remnants of militarism and racialized capitalism embedded in the region’s geography. From incidents involving nineteenth-century explosives manufacturing and World War II munitions loading to radical activism and contemporary television productions, Dr. Arbona-Homar locates a pattern of historical violence that refocuses the broader racial and colonial context. Citing the material, social, and political conditions that gave rise to these disparate episodes, he reviews the historic erasure of those driving forces and puts forth alternative possibilities for how such disasters might be memorialized. Synthesizing a diverse set of field research methods, including oral histories and site visits, and supplemented by specially commissioned landscape photographs by Andrea Gaffney, Explosivity presents a radical exercise in the exposition of public memory. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with editor, poet, and author, Terese Mason Pierre about As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories (Spiderline, 2025). A ground-breaking anthology of haunting speculative stories by contemporary Black Canadian writers that explore growth, futurity, and joy. Edited by esteemed poet Terese Mason Pierre, this bold and innovative anthology of speculative short fiction reveals and uplifts the spectacular imaginings, reveries, reflections, experiments, and hopes of Black writers in Canada. A masseuse attends her mother's fourth funeral, only to encounter family she's never met. A postdoc instructor navigates an almost-life in an Elsewhere realm of safety and comfort. After societal collapse, an immigrant leaves her precarious station, and her memories, behind. A woman isolating from a new virus starts hallucinating. A young nanny accepts a job with a peculiar employer in search of immortality. A medium is tasked with summoning a spirit that hits too close to home. And two teenagers test a friendship over magic carpet flying practice. These ten breathtaking stories explore natural and urban landscapes, living and dead relationships, economic catastrophe, love, and desire--all while celebrating the persistent and ever-changing self, and envisioning beautiful Black futures. Featuring stories by:Trynne Delaneyfrancesca ekwuyasiWhitney FrenchAline-Mwezi NiyonsengaChimedum OhaegbuSuyi Davies OkungbowaChinelo OnwualuLue PalmerTerese Mason PierreZalika Reid-Benta TERESE MASON PIERRE (she/her) is a writer, poet, and editor whose work has appeared in the Walrus, ROOM, Brick, Quill & Quire, Uncanny, and Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, Best of the Net, the Aurora Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Ignyte Award. She is one of ten winners of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize and was named a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. Terese is the chief programming officer at Augur, a speculative arts nonprofit, and co-director of AugurCon, Augur’s biennial speculative arts conference. Terese lives in Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Revolutionary New York: 250 Years of Social Change (SUNY Press, 2026), edited by Bruce Dearstyne and published by SUNY Press, examines what the volume calls the “unfinished revolutions” of the Empire State. In sixteen essays by a varied cast of authors, the book explores efforts to achieve what the editor describes as the full promise of the revolution. Central to the book are ordinary New Yorkers who faced great challenges, such as the Oneida who tried to maintain sovereignty in the era of the American Revolution, women winning the vote, and African American soldiers who served in the United States Army in World War I. Together, Dearstyne writes, they tell a story of “the two-and-a-half century struggle to realize the Revolution’s ideals and bring increased freedom and opportunities to marginalized populations.” Dearstyne is the editor of this volume and the author of several books, including The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History and The Crucible of Public Policy: New York Courts in the Progressive Era. Robert Snyder, interviewing for the New Books Network and the Gotham Center for New York Cit History, is professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. He is the author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers (Cornell, 2025), winner of the Fiorello LaGuardia Book Prize. [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In 1898, vaudeville actors Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown joyously embraced in a short silent film titled Something Good—Negro Kiss. The first known film to portray African American affection, it was lost for over a century until its rediscovery inspired contemporary audiences with a powerful and enduring depiction of Black love. More than a missing piece in an untold history of Black cinematic performance, Something Good—and the magnetism of Suttle and Brown—attests to the power of Black performance on stage and screen from the nineteenth century to today. In Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History (University of California Press, 2026), Allyson Nadia Field tells the story of Something Good and recovers the forgotten yet fascinating lives of its performers and their world. Drawing a vivid picture from sparse historical records, Acts of Love examines popular culture's negotiation of blackness to reconsider the intersections of minstrelsy, vaudeville, and cinema in ragtime America. This book not only presents the story of Something Good, its performers, and the drama of its rediscovery; it shows how the rediscovery of this short early film changes our understanding of American film history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In Paper Heroines: Women Writers in Conversation and Community Across the Sea Islands, 1838-1902 (U South Carolina Press, 2026), Dr. Mollie Barnes studies the ways women represented their own and one another's lives in their personal diaries and their biographies of their contemporaries. By reading these women writers—Black and white, obscure and well-known—in conversation, Dr. Barnes presents entirely new portraits of these freedom fighters of the nineteenth-century South Carolina Lowcountry. Like feminist and anti-racist leaders in our own moment, the women in Paper Heroines were often flawed. White women reformers sometimes created tensions, silences, revisions, and erasures within their print-culture networks, obscuring the lives and contributions of Black women. Black women developed counternarratives and counter-networks as they sought to reclaim their own life histories. What emerges from Barnes's exploration of these textual conversations is a story of complicated relationships that reveal the dynamism of women's lives in a place and time that was equally tumultuous and consequential. Key terms and names is this episode include: close reading, archival silences, the peripheries, life writing, The Penn School, Port Royal, Beaufort, Combahee River, St. Helena, Relief Workers, Harriet Tubman, Fanny Kemble, Psyche, Teresa, Laura Towne, Charlotte Forten, Mr. Holland, and Sarah Hopkins Bradford. Guest: Dr. Mollie Barnes is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, Vice President of the Margaret Fuller Society, and Vice President of Organizational Matters for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on 19th century women writers, and is the author of Paper Heroines, which received funding support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Host: Dr. Christina Gessler holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore which stories we tell, and what happens to those we never tell. She is an academic writing coach and editor. She created, produces and hosts of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: Writing Biography Running From Bondage Jumping Through Hoops Never Caught Speaking While Female Women Reformers and The House on Henry Street We Refuse Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

David Cunningham joins John to speak about his pathbreaking article about visiting each of the 113 communities that removed or relocated Confederate symbols between 2015 and 2023. After discussing his co-authored Social Problems article, “Contesting Commemorative Landscapes” which first got him thinking about monument removal, he posits that “expungement, amplification, and repositioning” are three ways contemporary communities contest the monuments of the past.. The conversation from there ranges onward through various kinds of contested removal, ending with Cesar Chavez and his ongoing de-monumentalization. David is author of There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence and the award-winning Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era KKK,, a member of the City of St. Louis Reparations Commission and recently has been engaged in exploring political signalling in public art and monuments, including a forthcoming article on the political and cultural work of murals in Protestant and Catholic communities and in the interface areas that connect them in Belfast. His earlier Recall This Book episodes include on racialized policing in the US, on January 6th , and also on the 2024 presidential election–and a conversation with Glenn Patterson, author of Lapsed Protestant about the mural culture and politicized spaces of Belfast and Northern Ireland. Read the episode here. Mentioned in the episode By David Cunmningham himself: “What Richmond got Right about taking down Confederate Monuments” and a 2023 article coauthored with Christina Simko, “Montgomery’s Monumental Truths” On place vs space there is wonderful work by Pierre Nora and Henri Lefebvre. Interface zones and the strategic cul de sacs that continue to divide Belfast neighborhoods have been brilliantly detailed and studied by various historians; eg this tour by Neil Jarman. The lucid John Guillory article (mentioned but not discussed) is “Monuments and Documents: On the Object of Study in the Humanities.” Confederate generals whose statues were erected essentially to glorify the KKK famously include Nathaniel Bedford Forrest. Private parks built up to collect Confederate monuments (with an underlying anti-government bias) include North Carolina’s Valor Memorial Park, and in Texas the SS American Memorial Foundation’s military retreat space now adorned with removed Confederate statues. In Bentonville, this park glorifies a Confederate statue that has now been (dubiously) linked to Governor James H. Berry. The MOCA/Brick reimagined MONUMENTS Exhibition includes work by Kara Walker and Bethany Collins. https://www.nps.gov/boaf/learn/historyculture/shaw.htm Sylva North Carolina Confederate plaque debate. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant and the Nietzschean problem of “creative forgetting.” The idea of Productive creative cognitive dissonance is drawn from MLK’s idea of “creative tension.” Hajar Yazdiha, Struggle for the People’s King How long will the Chavez National Monument last? The statue at UC Fresno is already gone…” Is The Trail of Tears a historical site the same way Confederate statues are? Denmark Vescey’s Garden by Ethan J. Kytle and, Blain RobertsZore Neale Hurston Their Eyes were Watching God Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. It’s a word that Elizabeth Pryor has not only contemplated, it’s one that she has taught and observed up close.When a white student quoted her father and blurted out the N-word in the middle of a class she was teaching, Professor Pryor’s worlds collided. In that moment, she was forced to confront the history of the notorious slur in the United States, and her complicated relationship with her father Richard Pryor, who made the word a trademark of his comedy in the 1970s.As she dives into her research, her own memories of the N-word come flooding back in unprocessed memories that she hadn’t thought about for decades. In reckoning with those memories, Elizabeth goes on a more public journey of discovery of the messy and sometimes surprising legacies of racism in the United States.A braided narrative that seamlessly integrates the history of the N-word with Elizabeth’s own story of growing up the Black Jewish daughter of Richard Pryor, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word and Me (37 Ink, 2026) follows Elizabeth as she becomes a leading scholar and teacher of the very word her father put on the pop culture map. You can find Elizabeth on her website, Instagram, and TikTok. Her viral Ted talk, “Why it’s so hard to talk about the N-word,” is here. And Richard Pryor: Live in Concern (1979) can be streamed on YouTube.  Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Wide ranging interview with Dr. Ronald L. Jackson II, Professor and Department Chair of Communication Studies, the University of Miami. Interview explores Dr. Jackson's pioneering scholarship in Black Masculinist Thought, its contribution to Black Studies, its intercultural conversations with Black Feminist Thought, the State of Black Men's Studies and its relationship to Black Women's Studies, its interface with the public spheres of Manosphere and Womanosphere, as well as the future of Black Masculinist Thought Scholarship and Black Gender Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

From The New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson’s writings on race that every American should read Among America’s Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controversially entangled with race and slavery than Thomas Jefferson. The man whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal” enslaved more than 600 people of African descent even as he acknowledged the injustice of slavery, saw himself as its opponent, and condemned it in his writings. How is this possible? In Jefferson on Race: A Reader (Princeton University Press, 2026), Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed gathers Jefferson’s most revealing writings about African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, enabling readers as never before to directly explore his complex and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and decisions on these subjects—the most hotly debated aspect of his legacy. These selections come from Jefferson’s public and private writings, letters, and plantation records, as well as accounts by contemporaries, including his son Madison Hemings and three other people formerly enslaved at Monticello. The book documents Jefferson’s ideas about—and self-image in relation to—African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, as well as his conduct, including interactions with individual Black and Native people. The writings show how Jefferson responded to living in a multiracial slave society while professing progressive ideals, and how his views on race and slavery were shaped by his experiences with enslaved Black people. Jefferson on Race is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Jefferson’s conflicted attitudes—and the impact of race and slavery on American history. Annette Gordon-Reed is a New York Times-bestselling historian and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In Ladder or Lottery: Economic Promises and the Reality of Who Gets Ahead (University of California Press, 2026), Gary Hoover asks the reader a simple question: Is our economy a ladder or a lottery? Are people able to control their position on the economic spectrum by their actions? Some argue that, in our market-based economy, if you play by certain rules and make certain choices, you'll achieve upward mobility no matter what economic position you were born into. Drawing on his vast economic expertise, Hoover explores what this "social contract" requires of its citizens, and what it offers in return. Hoover shows how civil unrest is often directly related to broken society-level promises, exploring protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, the Arab Spring, and student debt forgiveness as case studies. He also predicts where future protests can be expected if results promised are not results delivered. This insightful and data-driven book tackles challenging issues around income inequality, health care, and artificial intelligence, and ultimately equips readers to answer these pressing questions: Is our social contract a ladder to higher economic standing, accessible to all no matter where they start? Or rather a lottery in which many will buy a ticket but only a few will find success? And how can we best align social promises with our lived economic realities? Gary Hoover is Executive Director of the Murphy Institute, Professor of Economics, and Affiliate Professor of Law at Tulane University. Dr. Zachery Williams is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at LSU. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

For much of the Crescent City's history, days began with the cries of roaming street vendors and the percussive thwack of butchers' meat cleavers echoing out from the municipal markets. Generations of New Orleanians—Black and white, enslaved and free, men and women, wealthy and working class—gathered in public to feed the city.In Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans (Oxford UP, 2025), historian Dr. Ashley Rose Young illuminates the central role of food in shaping the vibrant culture of New Orleans. While the city's dynamic culinary scene fostered bonds between some communities, under the surface, groups viciously vied for control over who bought and sold food and where they could do it. Dr. Young traces the intricate systems of food vendors and their customers, and how those relationships were affected by race, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. She shows how vendors and customers alike exercised considerable influence over the city's food economy and the laws that regulated it by negotiating prices, shaping taste preferences, liaising with government officials, and even openly defying ordinances they felt were unfair. The power each group gained and lost determined the success of their businesses, the well-being of their families, and their ability to shape food retail and local laws to meet their needs.Nourishing Networks vividly depicts a city that throughout its history has struggled to feed its population safely and affordably, and in documenting those challenges, it offers lessons for building a better food future. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Since the release of Jordan Peele's Academy Award-winning horror hit Get Out (2017), interest in Black horror films has erupted. This renewed intrigue in stories about Black life, history, culture, or "Blackness" has taken two forms. First, the history and politics of race have been centered in the horror genre. Second, Black horror has become an increasingly visible topic in mainstream discourses with scholars, critics, and fans contending that Black horror is seeing its so-called renaissance. However, critical attention to Blackness in horror has primarily focused on the U.S. and western world, despite Black stories having featured prominently in the genre-as actors, screenwriters, directors, producers-globally and across cultures.The essays in this handbook explore global Black horror cinema by interrogating Blackness and the ways in which it manifests in films across the diaspora and around the world. Chapters pose and answer questions including how taxonomies of race are presented; who is considered "Black?"; how is Blackness constructed in the culture in which it is produced and/or distributed?; How is horror defined and represented globally and/or culturally?; and what textual role does Blackness play in horror?Sophisticated, innovative, argument-driven research that brings to bear the most enlightened reflections upon Black horror's place in the world drives this handbook. Significantly, The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film (Oxford UP, 2024) presents expansive scholarship about Blackness, expanding the ways in which researchers, critics, and fans see and make meaning of Black experiences. In this volume, leading scholars from around the world contribute provocative, worthy examinations of the popular genre of horror in all its rich and empowering possibility. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In The Door of No Return: Being-As-Black (Temple University Press, 2026), Michael E. Sawyer presents a bold work of speculative theory and philosophy that explores how Black people bring the future into being—and what existence in that future looks like. He considers what people of African descent face and the proper response to the situation. He introduces the idea of Being-As-Black as a response and questions the overarching ethos that will be the guide to a beneficial resolution. Using critical theory and philosophy, Sawyer decouples Black identity and Black philosophy from White and Western frames by building on Toni Morrison’s ideas of Black Thought and encouraging an understanding of Black Self-Consciousness and Black Self-Identity on Black terms. The Door of No Return uses music, literature, visual art, and a variety of physical disciplines to imagine a world that differs from one that confounds the positive formation of Black Self-Consciousness under the coercive regime of white supremacy and Anti-Black racism. Michael E. Sawyer is Professor with Tenure of African American Literature & Culture, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Brigid Wallace is a graduate student at Lehigh University whose research focuses on the French Atlantic and Latin American world during the 18th and 19th centuries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Black women have always been the most relentless instigators for change—building a democracy for all. In The Instigators: How Black Women Have Been Essential to American Democracy (And What We Can Learn from Them (Harper, 2026), Atima Omara draws on her political knowledge and expertise, as well as history, to examine how they have responded to failed strategic decisions by movement leaders and the modern Democratic Party in previous elections as a context for the present. She also provides actionable recommendations to organizers, donors, candidates, strategists, political party leaders, that everyday people can use in their communities to build an inclusive democracy that endures beyond one election cycle. The Instigators is at once an urgent political guide, historical exploration, and a poignant memoir that pulls from Omara’s two decades of work in Democratic politics and the progressive movement as an elected Democratic Party leader, movement organizer, former candidate, gubernatorial aide, campaign staff to candidates at the national, state, and local level; and now political strategist. Powerful, insightful, and practical, it is imperative reading for everyone eager to protect and rebuild our democracy and create a better tomorrow for all. Our guest is: Atima Omara, who works and leads at the intersection of electoral politics and issue advocacy in the progressive movement. She is a political strategist, advocate, trainer, leader, and speaker with significant political, government, and non-profit experience, and she is a sought-after commentator and strategist. She is the author of The Instigators. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and developmental editor for academics. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance Reproductive Justice: An Essential Guide The End of White Politics The Vice-Presidents Black Wife Never Caught Leading From The Margins Remembering Lucille Black Woman On Board How Girls Achieve Stuck: How Money, Media and Violence Prevent Change in Congress Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

A cultural history of race, resistance, and representation in a city divided by politics and playWhen outfielder Bernie Carbo joined the Red Sox in 1974, he brought with him a toy gorilla named Mighty Joe Young that became the team’s unofficial mascot for several players and many in the local press. This seemingly innocent stuffed animal was introduced within a baseball team notorious for its stubborn discrimination, and during a particularly fraught era of racial discord in Boston. That June, after years of activism from the city’s Black community, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled that Boston must address the segregation of its schools through redistricting and busing. The ensuing racial animus to these policies led some of the city’s white residents to throw bananas and chant monkey sounds at African American students as they integrated the predominantly white South Boston High School. In this agitated atmosphere, cultural symbols like the Red Sox’s Mighty Joe Young mirrored and amplified the heightened racial tensions of Boston’s busing crisis.Situated at the intersection of US cultural and social history, Segregation Games: Boston, Busing, and the Making of Red Sox Nation (U Massachusetts Press, 2026) examines the surprising ties in 1970s Boston between the racial segregation of the city’s schools and the racial controversies expressed on and off the field of “Red Sox Nation.” “I found out in the black community why they don’t come out [to Fenway Park],” explained Black player Reggie Smith of his experiences with the Red Sox and the city during this period. “The team was the last to get Black players, and some of the things I hear out in the stands make me sick.” To understand these connections, Faflik erases the lines between politics and sport, which routinely blurred in a city suffused with an anti-Black racism that was both deceptively subtle and fiercely overt.Drawing upon deep archival research from sources that have largely been ignored, such as the Black press of the time, Faflik offers a carefully nuanced portrait of Boston’s cultural life at a pivotal moment in the city’s history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina (U South Carolina Press, 2020), longtime journalist Claudia Smith Brinson details the lynchings, beatings, bombings, cross burnings, death threats, arson, and venomous hatred that black South Carolinians endured―as well as the astonishing courage, devotion, dignity, and compassion of those who risked their lives for equality. Through extensive research and interviews with more than one hundred fifty civil rights activists, many of whom had never shared their stories with anyone, Brinson chronicles twenty pivotal years of petitioning, preaching, picketing, boycotting, marching, and holding sit-ins. Participants' use of nonviolent direct action altered the landscape of civil rights in South Carolina and reverberated throughout the South. These firsthand accounts include those of the unsung petitioners who risked their lives by supporting Summerton's Briggs v. Elliot, a lawsuit that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision; the thousands of students who were arrested and jailed in 1960 for protests in Rock Hill, Orangeburg, Denmark, Columbia, and Sumter; and the black female employees and leaders who defied a governor and his armed troops during the 1969 hospital strike in Charleston. Brinson also highlights contributions made by remarkable but lesser-known activists, including James M. Hinton Sr., president of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Thomas W. Gaither, Congress of Racial Equality field secretary and scout for the Freedom Rides; Charles F. McDew, a South Carolina State College student and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and Mary Moultrie, grassroots leader of the 1969 hospital workers' strike. These intimate stories of courage and conviction, both heartbreaking and inspiring, shine a light on the progress achieved by nonviolent civil rights activists while also revealing white South Carolinians' often violent resistance to change. Although significant racial disparities remain, the sacrifices of these brave men and women produced real progress―and hope for the future. For more information on this book, see storiesofstruggle.com Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel University where he teaches course in U.S. and public history. His research interests focus on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South. You can follow him on X @matthewfsimmons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Reverberations of Culture: Racialized Performance in Early Twentieth-Century Musical Variety by Just a Buncha Clowns (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Shane Breaux examines musical variety clowns and the broad array of racial and ethnic impersonations they performed on four distinct touring circuits and apparatuses: the African American Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), the Chinese American so-called Chop Suey Circuit, the Mexican and Mexican American carpas tours, and Country American barn dances. This book explores the overlooked history of touring clown performers in early twentieth-century musical variety shows, addressing both their historical marginalization and their significant impact on popular entertainment. By examining these performers' widespread presences both on and off stage, the work challenges traditional historical narratives that have excluded diverse voices, particularly women and non-white performers. The research corrects a common misconception that racial impersonation in musical variety was exclusively the domain of white male performers. Instead, it reveals how performers and managers from various backgrounds actively challenged prevailing ideas about American identity, whiteness, and cultural inclusion. Through this lens, the book demonstrates that musical comedy performance and management were not exclusively white privileges, but rather spaces where diverse artists contributed significantly to early twentieth-century entertainment culture and beyond. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Mary Freeman, associate professor of history at the University of Maine, joins Michael Stauch to discuss her new book Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026), about how abolitionists harnessed the power of letter-writing to further their political aims. It highlights everyday Americans’ involvement in abolition, and shows in particular how women and Black Americans used letters to intervene in politics when other avenues were closed to them. Freeman focuses not only on what people wrote but also how they wrote about it: how they manipulated, exploited, and subverted cultural conventions to make political statements and claims. Highlights include: The inspiration behind the book’s striking title; The influence of the “archival turn” on Freeman’s analysis of the materiality of letters; A bold new reading of the lives of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, suggesting how their letter writing influenced their activism; How the abolitionist movement grew alongside the rise of the post office; The role of new forms of technology in shaping social movements, yesterday and today. Guest: Mary Freeman is an associate professor of history at the University of Maine, with a focus on the political, social, and cultural history of slavery and abolition. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the Early Republic and she is currently developing research projects on nineteenth-century Black activism in Maine and on the history of abolitionist archives. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In 1822, Black Charlestonians attempted to overthrow slavery. They were exposed before they could strike, and many were tried and executed in what has come to be known as the Denmark Vesey Affair. Take Freedom: Recovering the Fugitive History of the Denmark Vesey Affair (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) reinterprets these events on the basis of new evidence and methods. Dr. James O’Neil Spady narrates the roles of a variety of Black men and women, arguing that the uprising was a broadly based, African-influenced social movement that marshaled radical love and fugitive practices of freedom to ignite a revolution that sought to liberate beloved friends, families, and communities from increasingly aggressive and racializing slaveowners.  Uncovering never-before-consulted, unpublished documents, Dr. Spady names the clerk who made the trial records and settles old arguments about their reliability. Take Freedom demonstrates the realism of the uprising movement’s strategy and uses social network mapping to illustrate the social dynamics within the Black community, emphasizing the roles of women and relationships among enslaved people. Ultimately, this book offers a more inclusive and expanded portrayal of this pivotal revolutionary movement.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Since the late nineteenth century, the US federal government has enjoyed exclusive authority to decide whether someone has the ability to enter and stay in US territory. But freedom of movement was not guaranteed in the British colonies or early US. By contrast, voluntary migrants were met with strict laws and policies created by colonies and states, which denied free mobility and settlement in their territories to unwanted populations.  Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Anna O. Law presents a story of constitutional development that traces the confluence of the logics of slavery and settler colonialism in early legal rulings and public policy about migration and citizenship. The book examines the division of labor between the national and state governments that endured for over a century, reasons why that arrangement changed in the late nineteenth century, and what the transformation meant for people subject to those regimes of control. Drawing into one study the migration policy histories of groups of people that are usually studied separately, and combining the methodologies of political science, history, and law, Dr. Law reveals the unmistakable effects of slavery and Native American dispossession in modern US immigration policy.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

“The poor, of whatever color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason to, and God knows we didn't. ‘If you must call a cop,’ we said in those days, ‘for God’s sake, make sure it's a white one.’ We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder—on your head—to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other n******.” James Baldwin (1967) Professor and journalist Steven Thrasher, author of the critically acclaimed The Viral Underclass (one of Kirkus Reviews best books of 2022), explores in The Overseer Class: A Manifesto (Amistad, 2026) what happens when members of historically minoritized groups are selected for high-visibility positions of power within existing institutions—law enforcement, academia, the military, for profit and not-for-profit corporations, and government—under the conditions of a kind of Faustian bargain. This is a conversation, and a book, not to be missed. You can find author Steven Thrasher on Bluesky and Instagram. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Historian Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2026) recounts the 1984 New York City subway shooting in which Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers—Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur—and became both a fugitive and, later, a celebrated vigilante figure for many Americans frustrated by the social and economic tensions of the Reagan era. The book examines how media outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and later Fox News fueled public fear and anger, transforming Goetz into a hero while casting his victims as villains. Using archival materials and legal records, Thompson revisits the shooting’s lasting impact and argues that it marked a pivotal moment in modern American politics, media, and racial attitudes. Dr. N'Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Justin Randolph, assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University, joins Michael Stauch to discuss Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside (UNC Press, 2026), his new book on policing in Jim Crow Mississippi, told through the lens of that state’s highway patrol. Using oral history and a wide range of archival sources, Randolph narrates efforts by elites in Mississippi to modernize the police while maintaining social hierarchies, as well as efforts on the part of Black Mississippians to envision a world without police. Highlights include: What a focus on state-level policing adds to our understanding of policing; How the founding of the Mississippi highway patrol brought together various forms of policing in the Southwest, including the Texas rangers; A surprisingly robust discussion of cows, including Mississippi’s economic transformation to a center of cattle raising and the rise of cattlemen’s “Massive Resistance” in the 1950s; What Nina Simone revealed about policing in Mississippi, and the myth of Southern exceptionalism, in her song “Mississippi Goddam.” Guest: Justin Randolph is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University, and his other research projects include histories of police desegregation, rural debt peonage, the Taser, and 9-1-1. His writing has appeared in scholarly outlets like the Journal of Southern History and Southern Cultures. He has also written for popular outlets such as The Washington Post, The Mississippi Encyclopedia, and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. He has received an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship and prizes from both the Southern Historical Association and Agricultural History Society. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

The black power movement helped redefine African Americans' identity and establish a new racial consciousness in the 1960s. As an influential political force, this movement in turn spawned the academic discipline known as Black Studies. Today there are more than a hundred Black Studies degree programs in the United States, many of them located in America’s elite research institutions. In From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (JHU Press, 2010), Fabio Rojas explores how this radical social movement evolved into a recognized academic discipline. Rojas traces the evolution of Black Studies over more than three decades, beginning with its origins in black nationalist politics. His account includes the 1968 Third World Strike at San Francisco State College, the Ford Foundation’s attempts to shape the field, and a description of Black Studies programs at various American universities. His statistical analyses of protest data illuminate how violent and nonviolent protests influenced the establishment of Black Studies programs. Integrating personal interviews and newly discovered archival material, Rojas documents how social activism can bring about organizational change. Shedding light on the black power movement, Black Studies programs, and American higher education, this historical analysis reveals how radical politics are assimilated into the university system. Interview covers the evolution of Black Studies as a subject area and discipline, the historical role of philanthropy in funding and supporting Black Studies, the comparative existence and need of knowledge production coming from Black Studies think tanks and research centers and institutes, and the State of Black Studies in the 21st Century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Award-winning author Wil Haygood joins Michael Stauch to discuss The War within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home (Knopf, 2026) his new book on the experiences of Black soldiers during the first war fought with an integrated military, the Vietnam War. Through the lives of seven soldiers, a pianist, and a wartime journalist, Haygood details how Black soldiers’ attempts to rise through their merits in the military came up against white racism within that same military, even as the Civil Rights movement scored significant gains domestically, through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Highlights include: How VA employee Maude DeVictor helped expose the effects of Agent Orange on returning veterans; Pilot Fred Cherry’s flight “from segregation to integration” before spending five years as the first African American prisoner of war in Vietnam; Art Gregg’s distinguished career in military logistics, culminating in renaming Fort Robert E. Lee in his honor (before that fort was again renamed under the Trump administration); The power of monuments and memorials to shape public memory and inspire future generations, as in the memorial to Henry O. Flipper, the first Black graduate of West Point, in former secretary of defense Lloyd Austin’s hometown; Wil’s soon-to-be legendary rendition of Marvin Gaye’s antiwar masterpiece, “What’s Going On.” Guest: Wil Haygood is the author of ten nonfiction books, many of which have won literary awards. His book, The Butler, was made into a film directed by Lee Daniels. Haygood has been a correspondent for the Washington Post and The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In 2022, he received the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Peace Prize Foundation. A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Haygood is currently Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Miami University in Ohio and has recently been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Starting in the 1880s, Black performers, and those invested in telling stories centering Black people, attempted to counter the dehumanizing and harmful stereotypes used to portray Black characters. Shows began touting “All Colored Revues” to indicate that a cast was made up of actual Black performers rather than white people in blackface, and that these spectacles aimed to build stories around the perception of Black experiences. Although these performances were sometimes flawed, and even overly prejudiced, they represented a significant form of Black American cultural development and expression. Since theatrical performances were rarely recorded, and many of the movies that featured all Black casts are now considered “lost films,” films for which no copy is known to survive, advertising posters often provide the only remaining evidence of the most important productions featuring Black performers between the 1870s and 1940s. These posters, and the historic innovations of playwrights, composers, directors, producers, and the Black performers behind them, are the subjects of the exhibition, Act Black: Posters From Black American Stage and Screen, curated by our guest for this episode, Assistant Curator of Collections at New York City’s Poster House museum, Es-pranza Humphrey. Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen is on view at Poster House through September 6, 2026. Exhibition resources are also available via the Bloomberg Connects app until September 6, and at the Poster House online exhibition archive thereafter. Es-pranza’s recommended reading list is available at the Additions to the Archive Substack. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Samiha Rahman’s Black Muslim Freedom Dreams: Islamic Education, Pan-Africanism, and Collective Care (New York University Press, 2026) follows three generations of Black American Muslims as they pursue education through the Tijani Sufi order in Medina Baye, Senegal, outside the anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism of the United States. This deeply rich ethnographic book captures the transatlantic flows of Black American religious life through the prism of Black mothers and othermothers (as conceptualized by Patricia Hill Collins “motherwork”) and the young people whose lives are transformed through the process. By focusing on the Islamic education offered by the Tijani Order, such as Qur’an education, we learn about the intricate networks of kin that step in to support the young Black Muslims who have migrated for schooling, highlighting the tangible realities of collective care and service that circulates within the Tijani Order. These registers of care and service are informed by Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse, the Senegalese Islamic scholar, Sufi Shaykh, and pan-Africanist, whose teachings define these networks of education, organizing, and care work. The book then offers critical insights into the flow of one particular Sufi community between the United States and Senegal, and how dreams of better futures for Black Muslim youth and the liberatory goals of Pan-Africanism intersect to co-constitute a significant economy of collective care, Sufi service, and Islamic piety. This book will be of interest to anyone who works on education, Sufism, Black and African Islam and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

May 5, 2026—In March 1880, an extraordinary American traveled to Washington, DC, to testify before a Senate committee investigating the exodus of formerly enslaved people from the Southern states. Vividly describing the nightmarish violence and exploitation inflicted by “the very men who held us slaves,” the Louisiana freedman Henry Adams spoke of Black resistance to terrorism and disenfranchisement, articulating hope for a future where Black people might “make themselves a name and a nation.” Join Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Hahn and acclaimed historian Kidada E. Williams for a conversation about a revelatory text, recently published in full for the first time by Library of America, that speaks to the fragility of democracy and the bravery of those who fought for freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Prince George’s County, Maryland, is a suburban jurisdiction in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and is home to the highest concentration of Black middle-class residents in the United States. As such, it is well positioned to overcome white domination and anti-Black racism and their social and economic consequences. Yet Prince George’s does not raise tax revenue sufficient to provide consistent high-quality public goods and services. In Fighting for a Foothold: How Government and Markets Undermine Black Middle-Class Suburbia (Russell Sage Foundation, 2026) sociologist Angela Simms examines the factors contributing to Prince George’s financial troubles. Dr. Simms draws on two years of observations of Prince George’s County’s budget and policy development processes, interviews with nearly 60 Prince George’s leaders and residents, and budget and policy analysis for Prince George’s County and its two Whiter, wealthier neighbors, Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia. She argues legacy and ongoing government policies and business practices—such as federal mortgage insurance policy prior to 1968, local government reliance on property taxes, and private investment patterns—have resulted in disparities in wealth accumulation between Black and white Americans, not only for individuals and families but local jurisdictions as well. Fighting for a Foothold is an in-depth analysis of the fiscal challenges experienced by Prince George’s County and by the suburban Black middle-class and majority-Black jurisdictions, more broadly. The book reveals how race, class, and local jurisdiction boundaries in metropolitan areas interact to create different material living conditions for Americans. Our guest is: Dr. Angela Simms, who is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Fighting for a Foothold. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and developmental editor for academics. She is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast. Listeners may enjoy this playlist: House of Diggs The Social Constructions of Race The Fight To Save The Town Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress Of Bears and Ballots Remembering Lucille The Names of All the Flowers What Might Be The End of White Politics Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading or sharing episodes. Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

We know who Martin Luther King Jr. became, but who was he at the beginning of his life? How did his youth inform his outlook and activism? Before Martin Luther King, Jr. was a civil rights leader, a Nobel Laureate, and a global hero, he was an emotional boy, a middling high school student devoted to fashion, dancing, and dating. Lerone A. Martin, Faculty Director of the Martin Luther King Institute at Stanford University, traces these roots to develop a fuller understanding of the influential preacher’s emotional life, his youthful confusion about his future and career direction, his teenage missteps, and his inspiration to fight for justice. Revelatory, humanizing, and compassionate, Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. (Amistad, 2026) unearths MLK’s days as “Little Mike,” the ever-eager middle child and a precocious prankster; his early experiences of segregation and the summers he spent on a Connecticut tobacco farm, his first trip outside the Jim Crow South; his transformative time at Morehouse, playing basketball, hosting parties, studying sociology, and joining the Ministers’ Union; and his winding path to seminary, his spiritual devotion, and his relationship with Coretta, his wife-to-be. As America undergoes another era of turmoil and change, this powerful biography—and this discussion—provides a vital roadmap for how greatness comes to light, and how history shapes a leader. You can find Lerone Martin, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute on Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

There was no more trenchant and substantive critic of the Left from the Left in the 1960s and 1970s than Bayard Rustin. Some liberals and leftists today valorize Rustin on the basis of his multiple oppressed identities and civil rights organizing. On the other hand, many others dismiss him for being compromised by his commitment to the Democratic Party or by his deep suspicion of the new forms of left activism that appeared in the mid-1960s. While Rustin certainly made some strategic mis-steps later in life, his challenges to the New Left, Black Power, and a regressing liberal establishment from 1964 until his passing in 1987 were insightful, cutting, and often quite prescient. At a time when the Left is in dire need of self-reflection and reorientation, Rustin’s work has gained a new relevance and urgency. In a new collection of Rustin's writings from this period, Fong and Prescod gathered together articles and speeches that represent Rustin's Challenge to the Left of his day. Some of the pieces of Rustin’s writing chosen for inclusion have been published before, but only in pamphlets or newspapers from many decades ago. Some will be published for the first time here.The volume also includes commentaries on these pieces by Adolph Reed, Jr., Jennifer Silva, Les Leopold, Mark Dudzic, Jen Pan, John-Baptiste Oduor, and many others, all contextualizing Rustin's challenge and demonstrating its continuing applicability. Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

A rich history of cross-racial coalitions and alliances of the Sixties' freedom movement, acclaimed historian Alice Echols's Black Power, White Heat reshapes our understanding of the entire era. One of the most divisive issues in recent progressive politics has been what role, if any, allies might legitimately play in other people's movements. Despite the significance of this debate, it has taken place in a historical vacuum.In Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic, (Oxford UP, 2026) the Sixties historian Alice Echols explores what happened some sixty years ago when whites and Blacks came together in the fight against racism. She tells this story by focusing on two Black-led organizations that bookend the Sixties: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party. In SNCC, whites were, in part, meant to generate a "white heat" so searing it would accelerate change. Results were mixed, and white activists formed new movements, from women's liberation to draft resistance.By 1967, the Black Panther Party was advancing its own unique brand of "revolutionary nationalism," and seeking out white supporters. Partnering with whites brought the group visibility and resources, but it also put the Panthers at odds with other Black radicals, with unfortunate consequences.Black Power, White Heat explains how solidarity lost credibility, and not just from within the movement. Here, the FBI played a key role, and so did the discourse of "radical chic," advanced most effectively by the journalist Tom Wolfe. Still, even as Black-white solidarity lost steam, it was not entirely played out. In some of the era's most important political trials, even courtrooms became sites of solidarity as predominantly white juries returned verdicts that suggested they trusted Black Panther defendants more than the District Attorneys prosecuting them. Clear-eyed about the difficulties of solidarity, Black Power, White Heat nonetheless emphasizes the achievements and considerable promise of uniting across difference, and in ways that will inform and deepen current debates roiling progressive politics. Alice Echols is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. She is the author of numerous books, including Daring to Be Bad, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In the early twentieth century, a group of white writers, artists, and performers from the cultural hub of Charleston, South Carolina, created and curated a highly sanitized view of slavery. They imagined a once and future plantation society that would reestablish them as the proper heirs of the slave past. In the process, they crafted a set of dangerously durable and virulent stereotypes about slavery. Many of the sights and sounds that Americans associate with slavery are rooted in this grandiose historical myth. The image of the Big House, sitting atop carefully manicured rolling green hills, is in large part, a fantasy, as is the idea of the plantation as an expansive family home to chivalrous planters and content slaves. Jason R. Young explores the persistence of these myths and the historical memory of slavery by focusing on the elite white mythmakers who helped shape our understanding of slavery. Examining literature, art, and performance, Young interrogates both the power and the folly of these ideas. In uncovering their origins, The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War (UNC Press, 2026) resists these racial fantasies and challenges their stubborn resurgence in our own time. You can find Jason Young at the University of Michigan website. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Ian Smith urges readers of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet to develop “racial literacy.” Through both wide social influences and specific professional pressures, Shakespearean critics have been taught to ignore, suppress, and explain away the racial thinking of the plays, a set of evasion strategies that inevitably have political and social ramifications in the contemporary United States. As Ian writes in the introduction, Black Shakespeare is intended to “shift the focus to conditions that shape readers, inform their epistemologies, and influence their reading practices” (3). Today’s guest is Ian Smith, Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Ian is the author of the previous monograph, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (Palgrave, 2009), as well as one of the most important articles in early modern literary criticism of the last twenty years, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief.” Ian is the current President of the Shakespeare Association of America. John Yargo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the “working class” is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the contributions and challenges of the white working class – and this obscures the ways in which Black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities – but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy, and established community.  In Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (LIveright, 2023), Dr. Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story by interrogating the lives of laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers. The book is both a personal journey and a history of Black labor in the United States from enslavement to the present day with a focus on a critical era: after Southern Emancipation to the early 20th century, when the first generations of Black working people carved out a world for themselves. Dr. Kelley captures the character of the lives of Black workers not only as laborers, activists, or members of a class but as individuals whose daily experiences mattered – to themselves, to their communities, and to “the nation at large, even as it denied their importance.” As she weaves together rich oral histories, memoirs, photographs, and secondary sources, she shows how Black workers of all genders were “intertwined with the future of Black freedom, Black citizenship, and the establishment of civil rights for Black Americans.” She demonstrates how her own family’s experiences mirrors this wider history of the Black working class – sometimes in ways that she herself did not realize before writing the book. Even as the book confronts violence, poor working conditions, and a government that often legislated to protect the interests of white workers and consumers, Black Folk celebrates the ways in which Black people “built and rebuilt vital spaces of resistance, grounded in the secrets that they knew about themselves, about their community, their dignity, and their survival.” Black Folk looks back but also forward. In examining the labor and challenges of individuals, Dr. Kelley sheds light on reparations and suggests that Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be spaces of resistance and labor activism in the 21st century. Dr. Blair LM Kelley is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first Black woman to serve in that role in the center’s thirty-year history. She is also the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson from the University of North Carolina Press. Dr. Kelley mentions Dr. Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, Duke University’s Behind the Veil oral history project, and Philip R. Rubio’s There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. In this comprehensive biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927-2003). Based on extensive archival work and oral histories, Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson (Oxford UP, 2023) sets Gibson's life and choices against the backdrop of the Great Migration, Jim Crow racism, the integration of American sports, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and second wave feminism. Throughout her life Gibson continuously negotiated the expectations of her supporters and adversaries, including her patrons in the black-led American Tennis Association, the white-led United States Lawn Tennis Association, and the media, particularly the Black press and community's expectations that she selflessly serve as a representative of her race.  An incredibly talented, ultra-competitive, and not always likeable athlete, Gibson wanted to be treated as an individual first and foremost, not as a member of a specific race or gender. She was reluctant to speak openly about the indignities and prejudices she navigated as an African American woman, though she faced numerous institutional and societal barriers in achieving her goals. She frequently bucked conventional norms of femininity and put her career ahead of romantic relationships, making her personal life the subject of constant scrutiny and rumors. Despite her major wins and international recognition, including a ticker tape parade in New York City and the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time, Gibson endeavored to find commercial sponsorship and permanent economic stability. Committed to self-sufficiency, she pivoted from the elite amateur tennis circuit to State Department-sponsored goodwill tours, attempts to find success as a singer and Hollywood actress, the professional golf circuit, a tour with the Harlem Globetrotters and her own professional tennis tour, coaching, teaching children at tennis clinics, and a stint as New Jersey Athletics Commissioner. As she struggled to support herself in old age, she was left with disappointment, recounting her past achievements decades before female tennis players were able to garner substantial earnings. A compelling life and times portrait, Serving Herself offers a revealing look at the rise and fall of a fiercely independent trailblazer who satisfied her own needs and simultaneously set a pathbreaking course for Black athletes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom. Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash. Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice. Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life (FSG, 2023) is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.--and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family's origins as well as MLK's complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father--as well as the nation's most mourned martyr. In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history's greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime. Jonathan Eig is a former senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including two highly acclaimed bestsellers, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. Visit him at JonathanEig.com. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Arise Africa, Roar China: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) explores the close relationships between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II and the Cold War--journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen. Charting a new path in the study of Sino-American relations, Gao Yunxiang foregrounds African Americans, combining the study of Black internationalism and the experiences of Chinese Americans with a transpacific narrative and an understanding of the global remaking of China's modern popular culture and politics. Gao reveals earlier and more widespread interactions between Chinese and African American leftists than accounts of the familiar alliance between the Black radicals and the Maoist Chinese would have us believe. The book's multilingual approach draws from massive yet rarely used archival streams in China and in Chinatowns and elsewhere in the United States. These materials allow Gao to retell the well-known stories of Du Bois, Robeson, and Hughes alongside the sagas of Liu and Chen in a work that will transform and redefine Afro-Asia studies. Hettie V. Williams Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of African American history in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University where she teaches courses in African American history and U.S. history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi (UP Mississippi, 2025) chronicles the profound history of a low-income county that became a pivotal site for Delta organizing during the civil rights movement. Landowning African American farmers, who enjoyed more economic independence than sharecroppers, emerged as the grassroots leaders of the movement. The volume begins with the county’s Native American heritage, moving through the periods of removal, land sales to speculators, the rapid increase of enslaved labor in the nineteenth century, and early African American political engagement during Reconstruction. Author Diane T. Feldman explores how African Americans fostered cooperative landownership efforts in the 1880s and 1920s, alongside the development of schools and churches, particularly the Church of God in Christ, a denomination founded in Holmes County. The fight for voting rights started with African American farmers in the 1950s and gained momentum with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. Their struggle to desegregate schools culminated in the landmark Supreme Court case Alexander v. Holmes, which abolished dual school systems in the South. The final chapters cover the past sixty years and current initiatives to restore food production in the Mississippi Delta. Enriched with recent and historic photographs, this volume serves as a microhistory of a single county, illuminating broader themes prevalent throughout Mississippi and the rural South. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies