New Books in the American South

Shannon McKenna Schmidt, "You Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson’s Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode With Her" (Sourcebooks, 2026)

Sun, 10 May 2026 08:00:00 -0000

From the author of The First Lady of WWII comes Y ou Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson’s Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode With Her (Sourcebooks, 2026), the story of Lady Bird Johnson's groundbreaking trip during the 1964 election, and the women who rode with her.

"It takes women to have guts."

Deemed “the most important campaign effort ever undertaken by the wife of an American president,” the Lady Bird Special was a whistle-stop tour of the South undertaken by Lady Bird Johnson, in a bid for her husband’s reelection in 1964. Never before had a president’s spouse taken to the campaign trail so ambitiously.

The 1,682-mile trek through the southern United States, from Washington DC to New Orleans, was a deliberate choice by Lady Bird—many in the southern states resented her husband’s championing of civil rights. But the first lady, proud of her southern heritage, wanted to appeal to her fellow southerners and bridge the divide. Despite the potential danger, she pressed forward, making speeches, shaking hands, and showing herself to be confident, capable, and impressive.

Y ou Can't Catch Us is a story of an election campaign, but it is also a story of a women-led operation and an appeal for understanding and civility. Lady Bird Johnson's exciting journey was monumental in expanding the role of women in politics and progressing the fight for women’s rights—a fight we still continue to this day.

Hosted by Jane Scimeca, Professor of History at Brookdale Community College: website here @janescimeca.bsky.social

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Jason R. Young, "The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2026)

Fri, 01 May 2026 08:00:00 -0000

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.

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Constance Bailey et al. "Get It While It's Hot: Gas Station, Roadside, and Convenience Cuisine in the U.S. South" (LSU Press, 2026)

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Get It While It’s Hot (LSU Press, 2026) is an innovative collection that examines an increasingly commonplace belief across the U.S. South—that some of the best, most enjoyable food comes from places you would not expect: a gas station, the back of a pickup truck, or a ramshackle building made of plywood.

These essays bring together scholars, food writers, influencers, and even a CEO to discuss the phenomenon of eating by the side of the road. They look at the delicious food that can be found in such spaces, but also at the ways that gas station, roadside, and convenience cuisine contributes to the social and cultural identities of people and communities in the U.S. South. Sometimes these roadside spaces serve goals of equity and food justice as they relate particularly to race, class, and gender, and sometimes they stymy them. Contributors address the importance of roadside vendors to low-income areas and communities of color, while also revealing how gas stations and convenience stores are particularly prone to anti-Black surveillance and community gatekeeping. Several essays examine the appearance of service stations and unconventional food vendors in southern literature. Interviews with photojournalist Kate Medley, social media influencer Stafford Shurden, and Stuckey’s CEO Stephanie Stuckey provide firsthand perspectives on the diverse landscapes of food culture in the South.

By surveying the importance of roadside and convenience cuisine to communities across the region, Get It While It’s Hot illustrates that these spaces do not function like typical restaurants. They mark boundaries of community, establish consistency and familiarity, and invite people, sometimes paradoxically, to pull up a chair and sit a while.

This is Constance’s second time on the podcast. She first appeared on September 24, 2025 alongside author Kiese Laymon, discussing her book, Conversations with Kiese Laymon (University Press of Mississippi, 2025). In this episode, we also mention the Catherine Coleman Literary Arts, Food, and Social Justice Summer Program.

If you are finding this episode in real time, you can attend the virtual launch for Get It While It’s Hot on Facebook, Wednesday, April 29, 2026 at 2:00pm CT.

You can find co-editor Constance Bailey at her website and on Instagram.

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Kasey Jernigan, "Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity" (U Arizona Press, 2026)

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The term "commod bod" is used with humor and affection. It also offers a critical way to describe bodies shaped by long-term reliance on U.S. federal commodity food programs.

In Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press, 2026), Kasey Jernigan shares her ongoing collaborative research with Choctaw women and describes the ways that shifting patterns of participation in food and nutrition assistance programs (commodity foods) have shaped foodways; how these foodways are linked to bodies and health, particularly "obesity" and related conditions; and how foodways and bodies are intertwined with settler colonialism and experiences of structural violence, identity making, and heritage in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Organized thematically, the book moves from a critical history of obesity and health in Indian Country to narratives of Choctaw women navigating food, memory, and belonging. Chapters such as "Food and Fellowship" and "Heritage, Embodied" center personal stories that show how food is not only sustenance but also a site of connection, resistance, and meaning making.

Food is critical to cultural survival and affirmation. For Choctaw people, the intentional demise of traditional foodways and dependence on federal food programs are specific experiences that inform part of what it means to be Choctaw today.

Kasey Jernigan is an assistant professor of American studies and anthropology at the University of Virginia, where she also co-directs the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute. She is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Caleb Zakarin is the CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Mark A. Johnson, "American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon" (U Georgia Press, 2026)

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon (U Georgia Press, 2026), Dr. Mark A. Johnson asks (and answers) a seemingly simple question: How has bacon overcome centuries of religious prohibition, cultural contempt, and dietary advice to become a twenty-first-century culinary and cultural powerhouse? Starting in early modern Britain and tracing the story of bacon through the colonial era, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, modern fad diets, and the emerging craft bacon industry, Johnson provides a new perspective on some familiar American narratives. More than a story of production, marketing, and consumption, Johnson argues, this cultural history connects bacon to race, class, and gender while also illuminating major historical forces, such as migration, warfare, urbanization and suburbanization, reform movements, cultural trends, and globalization. For Dr. Johnson, bacon’s story from “most dangerous food in the supermarket” to pop culture and gastronomic phenomenon reflects the cultural values of a nation.

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.

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Voices from a Century of Struggle: Writings of the Jim Crow Era

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Tuesday, April 7, 2026—Confronting disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and terrorist violence in the aftermath of the Civil War, Black Americans challenged white supremacy in word and deed in a prolonged struggle to create a better, more just nation.

Join Tyina L. Steptoe, editor of the new two-volume LOA edition of writings from the Jim Crow era, and historians Keisha N. Blain and Manisha Sinha for a conversation about courageous voices and revelatory firsthand documents that bring this crucial period to life and speak powerfully to the present.

Hosted by Max Rudin

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Michael W. Tuck, "The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River: A Creole Community in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World" (Brill, 2026)

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In his new book, The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River: A Creole Community in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (Brill, 2026) historian Dr. Michael W. Tuck examines life on James Island, now Kunta Kinteh Island, where enslaved Africans worked for European trading companies in the eighteenth century.

These individuals were not plantation workers. They served as carpenters, sailors, soldiers, canoe workers, healers, cooks, mothers, and interpreters. They built forts, repaired boats, buried the dead, and maintained trading posts.

Dr Tuck’s research demonstrates that, despite harsh conditions, Castle Slaves formed families, preserved African names, practised healing, held funerals, and resisted captivity through escape and daily acts of survival.

Women played key roles as caregivers, cultural anchors, and healers, despite facing significant vulnerability and exploitation. The book also highlights the high number of escape attempts from James Island, challenging the idea that resistance in West Africa was uncommon.

Drawing on company ledgers, punishment logs, and death records, Dr. Tuck reconstructs a world often overlooked in Atlantic history. His work emphasises that each archival entry represents a person with relationships, memories, fears, and hopes.

The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River provides both a history of slavery and a testament to resilience, community, and humanity.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands and Europe.

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Lindsay Rae Smith Privette, "The Surgeon's Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Between May 1 and May 22, 1863, Union soldiers marched nearly 200 miles through the hot, humid countryside to assault and capture the fortified city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Upon its arrival, the army laid siege to the city for a grueling forty-seven days. Disease and combat casualties threatened to undermine the army’s fighting strength, leaving medical officers to grapple with the battlefield conditions necessary to sustain soldiers' bodies. Medical innovations were vital to the Union victory. When Vicksburg fell on July 4, triumph would have been fleeting if not for the US Army Medical Department and its personnel.
By centering soldiers' health and medical care in the Union army’s fight to take Vicksburg, in The Surgeon's Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War (UNC Press, 2025), Dr. Lindsay Rae Smith Privette offers a fresh perspective on the environmental threats, logistical challenges, and interpersonal conflicts that shaped the campaign and siege. In doing so, Privette shines new light on the development of the army’s medical systems as officers learned to adapt to their circumstances and prove themselves responsible stewards of soldiers' bodies.

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Abe Walker, "Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South" (Temple UP, 2026)

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

When Volkswagen’s Chattanooga Assembly Plant opened in 2012, the United Auto Workers were excited by the golden opportunity to organize in the anti-union South, where their efforts had been routinely thwarted. However, it took ten years and several attempts before the UAW was successful in unionizing the plant. Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South (Temple UP, 2026) explains why.

Dr. Abe Walker chronicles the organizing campaign from its origin in 2014 to the union’s breakthrough victory in 2024, illustrating what went wrong—and what went right—along the way. Walker provides a systematic analysis of the strategic challenges and tactical shifts, showing the patterns that persisted across three election cycles while highlighting their differences, from global-level alliances to local labor issues.

Reassembling the UAW also demonstrates how rebel rank-and-file workers ousted the old-guard leadership and transformed the UAW into a militant union to achieve results. Ultimately, Walker offers valuable lessons for organizational strategy, the power of collective action, and the future of the labor movement.

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Antwain K. Hunter, "A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865" (UNC Press, 2025)

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Spanning the 1720s through the end of the Civil War, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865 (UNC Press, 2025) explores how free and enslaved Black North Carolinians accessed, possessed, and used firearms—both legal and otherwise—and how the state, and white people, responded. Historian of slavery and freedom, Antwain K. Hunter reveals that armed Black people used firearms for a wide range of purposes: they hunted to feed their families and communities, guarded property, protected crops, and defended maroon communities from outsiders. Further, they resisted the institution of slavery and used guns both against white people and within their own community. Competing views of Black people’s firearm use created social, political, and legal points of contention for different demographics within North Carolina, and left the general assembly and white civilians struggling to harness Black people’s armed labor for white people’s benefit. A Precarious Balance challenges readers to rethink how they understand race and firearms in the American past, and in its present.

Author Antwain K. Hunter is a historian of slavery and freedom in North America, with a current focus on the Carolinas. A Precarious Balance is his first book.

Find host, Sullivan Summer, at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Antwain continued their conversation.

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Danielle Wiggins, "Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

A provocative new history of modern black liberalism

Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post–civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition.

In the 1970s and ’80s, cities across the country elected black mayors for the first time. Just as these officials gained political power, however, their cities felt the full brunt of white flight and deindustrialization. Tasked with governing cities in crisis, black political leaders responded in seemingly conservative ways to the social problems that austerity worsened. Nowhere was this response more evident than in Atlanta. In the nation’s preeminent black urban regime, black leaders such as mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young employed the power of policing and the private sector to discipline black Atlantans, hoping they would equip vulnerable communities with the tools to manage the volatility of the era.

Danielle Wiggins shows that these punitive responses to the problems of crime, family instability, and unemployment were informed by black liberalism’s disciplinary impulse: an enduring tendency to reform behaviors believed to threaten black survival in a white supremacist nation. Forged in response to the violence of Jim Crow, the disciplinary impulse relied upon notions of pathology and its inverse, black excellence. Wiggins identifies several black liberal efforts to cultivate excellent black communities, families, and workers in the post–civil rights era, including community policing, corporate-sponsored family initiatives, and black entrepreneurship.

In embracing disciplinary strategies, however, black liberals often focused on behavior at the expense of addressing structural inequality. Consequently, their approaches dovetailed with those of the “New” Democrats, whose post–Great Society social policies were informed by urban black liberals. Black Excellence reveals thus how urban black liberals not only reshaped black politics but, as Democrats, also helped build the neoliberal Democratic Party.

Guest: Danielle Wiggins is an assistant professor of history at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on U.S. and African American history since the 1960s. She is currently researching race and the politics of energy since the 1960s. Focusing on the 1970s energy crisis, her project will explore how black Americans thought about energy, consumption, growth, and sustainability in ways that alternately challenged, intersected with, and radically rethought mainstream energy discourses.

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Rebecca Sharpless, "People of the Wheat: Culture and Cultivation in North Texas" (U Texas Press, 2026)

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

If you’ve ever wondered where your wheat flour is coming from, who is milling it (and how), or how it came to be such an important staple, then this episode might be for you. Dr. Rebecca Sharpless speaks with host Scott Catey about People of the Wheat: Culture and Cultivation in North Texas (U Texas Press, 2026). This book examines the history of wheat in the six counties of the North Texas wheat belt, and how wheat growing, milling, and baking shaped the people and culture there.

In the national imaginary, America’s amber fields of grain lie in the country’s center, but for more than a century, they also grew across one pocket of the South: North Texas. From the 1840s to the 1970s, the state's agriculture, dominated in lore by cotton in the east and livestock in the open range, was heavily invested in the cultivation, processing, sale, and consumption of wheat. Recalling a forgotten history, Rebecca Sharpless shows how the rhythms of the wheat harvest—and the evolution of the milling, distribution, and baking industries—governed daily life in what is now known as the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex.

In the 1840s, Anglo settlers discovered that grain flourished in North Texas and quickly built an economy that included wheat in fields, mills, and kitchens. After the Civil War, hand labor gave way to mechanization, greatly increasing production. Commercial bakeries churned out novel confections, and big cities were built on the bounty of the countryside. In the second half of the twentieth century, as production moved northward, industrial milling and baking declined, but home baking boomed, flour advertising supported regional music, and wheat fortunes financed the region’s cultural life. Sharpless covers 150 years of wheat’s very human history and shows how the labor that cultivated it, the sustenance it provided, and the prosperity it generated left an indelible mark on the people and institutions of Texas.

Dr. Rebecca Sharpless is a Professor of History at Texas Christian University. She specializes in Gender & Sexuality, Texas History, and American History. She is the author of three previous books: Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South (2022); Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (2010); and Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 (1999).

Dr. Scott Catey is founder of The Catey Creative Group, LLC. and host of the podcast The Sum of All Wisdom. Website here

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Paul Gillingham, "Mexico: A 500-Year History" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025)

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Mexico is among the most unique nations in the world, writes Northwestern University historian Paul Gillingham in Mexico: A 500-Year History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025). The country has several claims to fame in this regard - one of the first to abolish slavery, North America's first Black president, North America's only Indigenous president, and its only woman president. Gillingham explains the rich, complex, often bloody, and just as often inspiring history of this place from its early sixteenth century origins, into the turn of the twenty first century. Along the way, readers learn that much of what many Americans think they know about Mexico - a place of violence, drugs, and political chaos - is actually myth. In this sweeping account of Mexican history, the resilience and fortitude of the Mexican people shine through as a major theme in this important synthetic work.

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Sarah Jones Weicksel, "A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era" (UNC Press, 2026)

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

During the American Civil War, clothing became central to the ways people waged war and experienced its cost. Through the clothes they made, wore, mended, lost, and stole, Americans expressed their allegiances, showed their love, confronted their social and economic challenges, subverted expectations, and, ultimately, preserved their history. As the collections they left behind make clear, Civil War Americans believed clothing was not merely a reflection of one’s class, gender, race, military rank, political ideology, or taste. Instead, Northerners and Southerners alike understood that clothing—from the weave of a fabric to the style and make of a coat—had the power to affect people’s way of living through the war’s tumult.
In A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era (UNC Press, 2026), Dr. Sarah Jones Weicksel reveals the meanings clothing had for Civil War Americans. Contributing to the growing body of scholarship on the material culture of the Civil War, Dr. Weicksel invites readers to understand how the war penetrated daily life by focusing on the intimate, visceral, material experiences that shaped how people moved through the world.

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Fred Turner on Countercultures, Cybercultures, and Californian and Texan Ideologies

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, and guest host, Paula Bialski, Associate Professor of Digital Sociology at University of St. Gallen, talk to Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, about his classic 2006 book, _From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism_. They briefly explore the arc of Fred’s career and revisit the book in the spirit of asking what has changed in digital ideology since the book’s publication, including with the role of Silicon Valley elites in the second Trump Administration, Elon Musk’s role in DOGE, and the (perhaps only brief) turn of digital technology elites moving from California to Texas. Since this conversation was recorded in April 2025, Fred’s essay, “The Texan Ideology,” has been published in The Baffler: Link here.

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Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations in the United States--the rise of an increasingly mobile middle class, the civil rights movement and fight over school integration, the growth global connection of the region's economy, and political conflict over immigration--Márquez reveals how Latinx people in the South have confronted both whiteness and antiblackness, and how cultural boundaries to exclude Black people from full participation in the life of the region and nation have been essential to the construction of Latinx as a category.

Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter.

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Danielle N. Boaz, "Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Coined in the middle of the nineteenth century, the term "voodoo" has been deployed largely by people in the U.S. to refer to spiritual practices--real or imagined--among people of African descent. "Voodoo" is one way that white people have invoked their anxieties and stereotypes about Black people--to call them uncivilised, superstitious, hypersexual, violent, and cannibalistic.

In Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Danielle N. Boaz explores public perceptions of "voodoo" as they have varied over time, with an emphasis on the intricate connection between stereotypes of "voodoo" and debates about race and human rights. The term has its roots in the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, especially following the Union takeover of New Orleans, when it was used to propagate the idea that Black Americans held certain "superstitions" that allegedly proved that they were unprepared for freedom, the right to vote, and the ability to hold public office. Similar stereotypes were later extended to Cuba and Haiti in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s, Black religious movements like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam were derided as "voodoo cults." More recently, ideas about "voodoo" have shaped U.S. policies toward Haitian immigrants in the 1980s, and international responses to rituals to bind Nigerian women to human traffickers in the twenty-first century. Drawing on newspapers, travelogues, magazines, legal documents, and books, Dr. Boaz shows that the term "voodoo" has often been a tool of racism, colonialism, and oppression.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Blair Kelley, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class" (LIveright, 2023)

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

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.

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Thomas Aiello, "Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta" (U Nebraska Press, 2025)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta (U Nebraska Press, 2025) tells the story of Muhammad Ali’s return to the ring in 1970, after a more than three-year suspension for refusing his draft notice as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. With Ali’s career still in doubt, he found new support in shifting public opinion about the war and in Atlanta, a city still governed by white supremacy, but a white supremacy decidedly different from that of its neighbor cities in the Deep South.

Atlanta had been courting and landing professional sports teams in football, basketball, and baseball since the end of 1968. An influential state politician, Leroy Johnson, Georgia’s first Black state senator since Reconstruction, was determined to help Ali return after his exile. The state had no boxing commission to prevent Ali from fighting there, so Johnson made it his mission for Ali to make a comeback in Georgia. Ali’s opponent would be Jerry Quarry, the top heavyweight contender and, more important, a white man who had spoken out against Ali’s objection to the war.
In Return of the King, Thomas Aiello examines the history of Muhammad Ali, Leroy Johnson, and the city of Atlanta, while highlighting an important fight of Ali’s that changed the trajectory of his career. Although the fight between Ali and Quarry lasted only three rounds, those nine minutes changed boxing forever and were crucial to both the growth of Atlanta and the rebirth of Ali’s boxing career.

Craig Gill is a writer, researcher and historian based in Vancouver, BC. He is the author of Caddying on the Color Line, a history of African American golf caddies in the U.S. South.

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O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight, "We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In the spring of 1969, hundreds of workers, all Black and mostly female, went on strike at Medical College Hospital and Charleston County Hospital to protest racial discrimination, low wages, and the marginalization of their dignity. The movement began with an incident of wrongful termination in 1967 involving five Black women at Medical College Hospital that uncovered the pervasiveness of racial and economic discrimination at both hospitals. The termination sparked outrage among other hospital workers who, with support from local community leaders, organized a movement that galvanized the city, state, and nation.

We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign (UP of Mississippi, 2025) explores this campaign in the context of a broader protest tradition, revealing it to be a full-scale movement that demonstrates the power and complexity of Black women's activism in the mid-twentieth century. O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight argues that the experiences of the women at the center of this conflict offer a window into the plight of Southern Black working-class women and the ways in which they fought for equality, access, and well-being.

Though much of what has been written about the hospital workers' campaign focuses on the strike through an institutional lens, Dixon-McKnight uses extensive interviews and oral history to expand the scope of existing scholarship. Local leaders such as Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, William Saunders, and Isaiah Bennett served as bridge builders for the Black community's involvement in protest, which helped shape and nurture the hospital workers' campaign. By discussing the grassroots organizing that sparked the strike and tracing the aftermath of the conflict, including what workers experienced in their return to work and their relationships with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Local 1199 Hospital and Nursing Home Employees Union, this volume situates the hospital workers' movement as a critical moment in the nation's long civil rights history.

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Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, "Taco" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Taco (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a deep dive into the most iconic Mexican food from the perspective of a Mexico City native. In a narrative that moves from Mexico to the United States and back, Dr. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado discusses the definition of the taco, the question of the tortilla and the taco shell, and the existence of the taco as a modern social touchstone that has been shaped by history and geography.

Challenging the idea of centrality and authenticity, in this latest addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Sánchez Prado shows instead that the taco is a contemporary, transcultural food that has always been subject to transformation.

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Caroline Peyton, "Radioactive Dixie: A Nuclear History of the American South" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

How and why did the South’s history, culture, and politics shape the region’s nuclear and energy industries? And how is that history linked to broader developments in the nuclear and energy industries—nationally and globally? Radioactive Dixie: A Nuclear History of the American South (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Caroline Peyton answers those questions as it traces the origins of the U.S. South’s love affair with the atom.
The South contains more nuclear reactors than any other region in the United States and much of the nation’s radioactive waste. This book shows how the South’s atomic footprint resulted from a decades-long effort by Southern politicians, industry figures, universities, and government officials to transform the American South into a nuclear-oriented region. Waving the atomic talisman, the nuclear industry served as one pivotal part in a larger project of regional modernization—a process that began in the nineteenth century and lasted more than a century. From this perspective, bomb plants and nuclear reactors promised to expand the South’s economy and to cast its identity as a center of modern industry, science, and engineering and as a producer of cheap, limitless energy. Radioactive Dixie is the first book to chronicle this regional story that had national implications. Southern history informed national siting decisions, regulatory oversight, and attitudes toward the various nuclear projects that proliferated in the post–World War II period.

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Brian Martin, "From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War" (ECW Press, 2022)

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Despite all we know about the Civil War, its causes, battles, characters, issues, impacts, and legacy, few books have explored Canada’s role in the bloody conflict that claimed more than 600,000 lives. Until From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War (ECW Press, 2022) by Brian Martin.

A surprising 20,000 Canadians went south to take up arms on both sides of the conflict, while thousands of enslaved people, draft dodgers, deserters, recruiters, plotters, and spies fled northward to take shelter in the attic that is Canada. Though many escaped slavery and found safety through the Underground Railroad, they were later joined by KKK members wanted for murder. Confederate President Jefferson Davis along with several of his emissaries and generals found refuge on Canadian soil, and many plantation owners moved north of the border.

Award-winning journalist Brian Martin will open eyes in both Canada and the United States to how the two countries and their citizens interacted during the Civil War and the troubled times that surrounded it.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.

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Sonya Lea, "American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture" (UP of Kentucky, 2025)

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just four and a half minutes to find him guilty. Bethea is hanged near the banks of the Ohio River in Owensboro, Kentucky, with more than twenty thousand white people in attendance. The crowd turns the violent spectacle of Bethea's hanging—the last documented public execution in the United States—into a brutal carnival.

Bethea's story came to author Sonya Lea through her family, and it is through her family that she reckons with its truths. At her grandmother's funeral, Lea received an oral history recorded by a neighbor. In its pages, Lea, who is descended from white Kentuckians on both sides, discovered that two of the spectators at Bethea's execution were her grandparents, teenage newlyweds Sherrel and Frances Ralph. Lea's research would also divulge that she was related to the prosecuting attorney for the Commonwealth, the man considered most responsible for Bethea's hanging.

American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture (University Press of Kentucky, 2025) combines memoir with reportage and cultural criticism to interrogate and complicate the traditional narrative about how lynch culture is created in families, communities, and institutions. The essays in this collection grapple with our complicity in these atrocities—including the agreement in our silences—and demonstrate how we, as descendants, might take responsibility and bring new scrutiny to ancestral and communal crimes.

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W. Ralph Eubanks, "When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land" (Beacon Press, 2026)

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country’s economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted for the sins of the South, portrayed as a regional backwater that willfully cleaved itself from the modern world. But buried beneath the weight of good ol’ boy politics and white-washed histories lies the Delta’s true story.
Mississippi native and award-winning writer W. Ralph Eubanks unearths the region’s buried history, revealing a microcosm of economic oppression in the US. He traverses the Delta, examining its bellwether efforts to combat income inequality through vivid portraits of key figures like

Theodore G. Bilbo and William Whittington, segregationist congressmen who sabotaged federal reparations for former sharecroppers in the 1940s and ’50s

Gloria Carter Dickerson, founder of the Emmett Till Academy, whose parents were instrumental in desegregating schools in Drew, MS, where Till was murdered

Calvin Head, a community organizer who runs a farming co-op in Mileston, who revived the legacy of his hometown, the only Black resettlement community in Mississippi

Eubanks delivers a powerful and insightful examination of how racism and economic instability have shaped life in the Mississippi Delta. He traces the enduring consequences of political decisions that have entrenched inequality across generations. At the same time, he brings attention to the resilience of local communities and the grassroots movements working toward meaningful change. The book offers a thoughtful framework for policy reform and community investment, underscoring the need to support those who have long sustained the region through their labor and lived experience.

You can find Ralph at his website.

A soundtrack for the book is available here.

Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack.

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T. R. Johnson, "New Orleans: A Writer's City" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. T. R. Johnson's book New Orleans: A Writer's City (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives.

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Robert D. Bland, "Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation" (UNC Press, 2026)

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The promise of Reconstruction sparked a transformative era in American history as free and newly emancipated Black Americans sought to redefine their place in a nation still grappling with the legacy of slavery. Often remembered as a period of failed progressive change that gave way to Jim Crow and second-class citizenship, Reconstruction’s tragic narrative has long overshadowed the resilience and agency of African Americans during this time.
Requiem for Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) chronicles Reconstruction’s legacy by focusing on key Black figures such as South Carolina congressman Robert Smalls, Judge William Whipper, writer Frances Rollin, and others who shaped postbellum Black America. Robert D. Bland traces the impact of the Reconstruction generation—Black Americans born between 1840 and 1870 who saw Reconstruction as a defining political movement and worked to preserve its legacy by establishing a new set of historical practices such as formulating new archives, shaping local community counternarratives, using the Black press to inform national audiences about Southern Republican politics, and developing a framework to interpret the recent past’s connection to their present world. Set in South Carolina’s Lowcountry—a hub of Black freedom, landownership, and activism—this book shows how late nineteenth-century Black leaders, educators, and journalists built a powerful countermemory of Reconstruction, defying the dominant white narrative that sought to erase their contributions.

Find Professor Bland at his website, and on Threads, BlueSky, and X.

Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack where she and Professor Bland continued their conversation.

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Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025)

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

American conservatism as we know it today is a West Texas export, argues College of Wooster professor Jeff Roche in The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right (U Texas Press, 2025). Tracing the roots of the state's conservative movement back to the giant cattle ranches and tycoons of the nineteenth century, Roche argues that you cannot separate the local and historical conditions in the West (and in West Texas specifically) from the "cowboy conservatism" of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Full of fascinating characters and the kind of tall tales you only find in the Lone Star State, The Conservative Frontier makes a compelling case for Texas politics eventually becoming national politics by the mid to late 20th century. No matter where you are in the United States today, the political weight of Texas creates a gravity that has proven impossible for American politics to emerge from.

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David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

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.

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Sylvia D. Hoffert, "Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town (University of Georgia Press, 2025), Dr. Sylvia Hoffert calls on a particularly rich collection of primary sources, including diaries, letters, oral histories, census data, court documents, church records, and psychiatric hospital logs, all relating to Hillsborough, North Carolina, to argue that gossip and rumor were central to the formation of interpersonal relationships and an integral part of small-town life in the antebellum South. They exposed the insecurities and anxieties of the town’s inhabitants. Indeed, they served as important weapons in the power struggle between the white slaveholding elite—who tried to exert, maintain, and consolidate their control over community life—and the Black, white, and mixed-race men and women, free and enslaved, who did their best to challenge the socioeconomic status quo. And they exposed fissures in the social fabric that discretion, good manners, and historical amnesia could not obscure.

The result was that, on a day-to-day basis, the shady streets of Hillsborough may have seemed peaceful to the casual observer. But underneath all that tranquility, the town was ripe with competition and conflict as the inhabitants used gossip to negotiate relationships with their neighbors and make places for themselves in the social, economic, and political hierarchy of the community.

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Gregory S. Wilson, "Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and Its Legacy" (U Georgia Press, 2023)

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In 1975 workers at Life Science Products, a small makeshift pesticide factory in Hopewell, Virginia, became ill after exposure to Kepone, the brand name for the pesticide chlordecone. They made the poison under contract for a much larger Hopewell company, Allied Chemical. Life Science workers had been breathing in the dust for more than a year. Ingestion of the chemical made their bodies seize and shake. News of ill workers eventually led to the discovery of widespread environmental contamination of the nearby James River and the landscape of the small, working-class city. Not only had Life Science dumped the chemical, but so had Allied when the company manufactured it in the 1960s and early 1970s. The resulting toxic impact was not only on the city of Hopewell but also on the faraway fields where Kepone was used as an insecticide.
Aspects of this environmental tragedy are all too common: corporate avarice, ignorance, and regulatory failure combined with race and geography to determine toxicity and shape the response. But the Kepone story also contains some surprising medical, legal, and political moments amid the disaster. With Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and Its Legacy (U Georgia Press, 2023) Gregory S. Wilson explores the conditions that put the Kepone factory and the workers there in the first place and the effects of the poison on the people and natural world long after 1975. Although the manufacture and use of Kepone is now banned by the Environmental Protection Agency, organochlorines have long half-lives, and these toxic compounds and their residues still remain in the environment.

Matthew Powell is a doctoral student studying history at the University of Georgia. He focuses on the intersection of environmental and labor history, looking at how workers understand the natural world around them.

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Beau Cleland, "Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy (U Georgia Press, 2025) by Dr. Beau Cleland recenters our understanding of the Civil War by framing it as a hemispheric affair, deeply influenced by the actions of a network of private parties and minor officials in the Confederacy and British territory in and around North America. John Wilkes Booth likely would not have been in a position to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, for example, without the logistical support and assistance of the pro-Confederate network in Canada. That network, to which he was personally introduced in Montreal in the fall of 1864, was hosted and facilitated by willing colonials across the hemisphere. Many of its Confederate members arrived in British North America via a long-established transportation and communications network built around British colonies, especially Bermuda and the Bahamas, whose primary purpose was running the blockade.

It is difficult to overstate how essential blockade running was for the rebellion’s survival, and it would have been impossible without the aid of sympathetic colonials. The operations of this informal, semiprivate network were of enormous consequence for the course of the war and its aftermath, and our understanding of the Civil War is incomplete without a deeper reckoning with the power and potential for chaos of these private networks imbued with the power of a state.

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Gwyneth Mellinger, "Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

“When the civil rights movement began to challenge Jim Crow laws, the white southern press reframed the coverage of racism and segregation as a debate over journalism standards. Many white southern editors, for instance, designated Black Americans as “Negro” in news stories, claiming it was necessary for accuracy and “objectivity,” even as white subjects went unlabeled. These news professionals disparaged media outlets that did not adhere to these norms, such as the Black press. In this way, the southern white press weaponized journalism standards—and particularly the idea of objectivity—to counter and discredit reporting that challenged white supremacy.

Through deep engagement with letters and other materials in numerous archives from editors, journalists, and leaders of newswire services, Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)interrogates and exposes how the white southern press used journalism standards as a professional rationalization for white supremacy and a political strategy to resist desegregation. Gwyneth Mellinger argues that white skin privilege gave these news professionals a stake in the racial status quo and was thus a conflict of interest as they defended Jim Crow. Her study includes an examination of the Southern Education Reporting Service, an objectivity project whose impartiality, she contends, instead affirmed systemic racism. In a pointed counternarrative, Mellinger highlights Black editors and academics who long criticized the supposed objectivity of the press and were consequently marginalized and often dismissed as illegitimate, fanciful, and even paranoid.

Elegant and incisive, Racializing Objectivity unequivocally demonstrates that a full telling of twentieth-century press history must reckon with the white southern press’s cooptation of objectivity and other professional standards to skew racial narratives about Black Americans, the freedom struggle, and democracy itself.”

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Erika Pani, "Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848-1867" (UNC Press, 2025)

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Between the late 1840s and the late 1860s, the United States and Mexico had quite a bit in common. Both suffered from reactionary succession movements, both faced brutal civil wars, and both had to figure out a method of reconstructing broken nations in their aftermath. In Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848-1867 (UNC Press, 2025), Colegio de Mexico history professor Erika Pani draws out these comparisons to explain the strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities of nineteenth century republican institutions. What she reveals is that, for all their different contexts and outcomes, the Mexican and American republics both buckled but did not break in very similar ways. The experiences of these governments in an era of crisis serves as a lesson in the flexibility of republican government in our own moment of global reactionary and authoritarian revolt.

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Karen Auman, "The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores some of Georgia’s earliest settlers, the Salzburgers.

Georgia, the last of Britain’s American mainland colonies, began with high aspirations to create a morally sound society based on small family farms with no enslaved workers. But those goals were not realized, and Georgia became a slave plantation society, following the Carolina model. This trajectory of failure is well known. But looking at the Salzburgers, who emigrated from Europe as part of the original plan, provides a very different story.

The Good Forest reveals the experiences of the Salzburger migrants who came to Georgia with the support of British and German philanthropy, where they achieved self-sufficiency in the Ebenezer settlement while following the Trustees’ plans. Because their settlement comprised a significant portion of Georgia’s early population, their experiences provide a corrective to our understanding of early Georgia and help reveal the possibilities in Atlantic colonization as they built a cohesive community.

The relative success of the Ebenezer settlement, furthermore, challenges the inherent environmental, cultural, and economic determinism that has dominated Georgia history. That well-worn narrative often implies (or even explicitly states) that only a slave-based plantation economy—as implemented after the Trustee era—could succeed. With this history, Auman illuminates the interwoven themes of Atlantic migrations, colonization, charity, and transatlantic religious networks.

Guest: Dr. Karen Auman is an assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University and a certified genealogist. She studies Germans during the colonial period in the Atlantic World, religion on the frontiers of America, migrations, and families.

Host: Lucy Smith Biemiller is an intended M.A. History student at the University of Georgia. She studies 18th and 19th material culture in the American South primarily as it relates to classical culture.

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Doug MacCash, "Mardi Gras Beads" (Louisiana UP, 2022)

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The first in a new LSU Press series exploring facets of Louisiana’s iconic culture, Mardi Gras Beads (2022) delves into the history of this celebrated New Orleans artifact, explaining how Mardi Gras beads came to be in the first place and how they grew to have such an outsize presence in New Orleans celebrations. It explores their origins before World War One through their ascent to the premier parade catchable by the Depression era. Doug MacCash explores the manufacture of Mardi Gras beads in places as far-flung as the Sudetenland, India, and Japan, and traces the shift away from glass beads to the modern, disposable plastic versions. Mardi Gras Beads concludes in the era of coronavirus, when parades (and therefore bead throwing) were temporarily suspended because of health concerns, and considers the future of biodegradable Mardi Gras beads in a city ever more threatened by the specter of climate change.

Doug MacCash covers New Orleans art and culture for NOLA.com, The Times- Picayune, and The New Orleans Advocate.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a PhD in Musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

Check out some of MacCash's other pertinent writings from NOLA.com here:

"Pretend Karens, marching traffic cones and French Quarter Fools: An amazing Monday before Mardi Gras"

"Biodegradable Mardi Gras beads might be rarest throw of 2022 - or ever"

"Mardi Gras flashback: Texas artist, 65, says she was first to bare breasts for beads at Carnival"

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research is about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival.

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Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

How do we narrate history, both the troubling past and what we chose to remember? Clint Smith sets out to wrestle with this question and its relationship to enslavement in his first nonfiction book, How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown and Company, 2021). From Monticello plantation to Angola Prison to Galveston Island, Smith guides the reader on a journey as he visits domestic and abroad landmarks. In his exploration, he includes the reactions of the people he meets, like tourists, local public historians, and teachers, illuminating how these sites and all of us participate in remembering enslavement in contemporary America.

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Diane T. Feldman, "Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

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.

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Amanda Laury Kleintop, "Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

During the Civil War, the U.S. federal government abolished slavery without reimbursing enslavers, diminishing the white South’s wealth by nearly 50 percent. After the Confederacy’s defeat, white Southerners demanded federal compensation for the financial value of formerly enslaved people and fought for other policies that would recognize abolition’s costs during Reconstruction. As Amanda Laury Kleintop shows in Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), their persistence eventually led to the creation of Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which abolished the right to profit from property in people. Surprisingly, former Confederates responded by using Lost Cause history-making to obscure the fact that they had demanded financial redress in the first place. The largely successful efforts of white Southerners to erase this history continues to generate false understandings today. Kleintop draws from an impressive array of archival sources to uncover this lost history. In doing so, she demonstrates how this legal battle also undermined efforts by formerly enslaved people to receive reparations for themselves and their descendants—a debate that persists in today’s national dialogue.

Amanda Laury Kleintop is assistant professor of history at Elon University.

Ryan Tripp is an adjunct for universities and California community colleges.

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Michael W. Twitty, "Recipes from the American South" (Phaidon Press, 2025)

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The views expressed by the guest are their own and do not reflect those of the New Books Network or its hosts. This episode contains some content that listeners may find controversial.

A home cook's guide to one of America's most diverse - and delicious - cuisines, from James Beard Award-winning author and culinary historian Michael W. Twitty 'Our cuisine, with its grits and black-eyed peas, crab cakes, red rice, and endless variations on the staple foods of the region, casts a spell that, if you're lucky, gets passed down with snapping string beans at the table and chewing cane on the back porch.' - Michael W. Twitty In the introduction to this groundbreaking recipe collection, acclaimed historian Michael W. Twitty declares, 'No one state or area can give you the breadth of the Southern story or fully set the Southern table.' To answer this, Recipes from the American South journeys from the Louisiana Bayou to the Chesapeake Bay, showcasing more than 260 of the region's most beloved dishes. Across more than 400 pages, Twitty explores the broad culinary sweep that Southern history and its many cultures represent. Recipes for breads and biscuits, mains and sides, stews, sauces, and sweets feature insightful headnotes and clear, step-by-step instructions. Home cooks will discover both iconic dishes and lesser-known specialties: Chicken and Dumplings, She-crab Soup, Red Eye Gravy, Benne Seed Wafers, Hummingbird Cake, and Mint Juleps appear alongside Shrimp Pilau, Chorizo Dirty Rice, Sumac Lemonade, and Cajun Pig's Ears Pastry. A masterful storyteller, Twitty enriches his extensive recipe collection with lyrical, deeply researched essays that celebrate the region's "multicultural gumbo" of influences from immigrants from across the globe. Vibrant food photography adds further color to the fascinating narrative. Expansive, authoritative, and beautifully designed, Recipes from the American South is a classic cookbook in the making.

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Kalle Kananoja, "Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Kalle Kananoja tells the story of how pre-colonial communities throughout the west coast of Africa employed a wide range of medical and spiritual strategies to treat all kinds of diseases. In the sixteenth century, the arrival of European traders and colonists initiated an exchange of healing knowledge that moved across the Atlantic for the next three-hundred years. The initial links in this chain of exchanges were established by European settlers or visitors who, given the limited number of European doctors and medications available, sought the services of African healers whose methods were often seen as more suited and efficacious in the local environments. Missionaries, travelers and botanists also added to these exchanges by collecting and systematizing some of the knowledge they acquired from African informants.

By documenting the richness and mobility of African healing knowledge, Kananoja points that even though plants, remedies and practices from the Americas and Asia have been more widely studied, African contributions were equally significant. Africans also sought to learn from the practices, institutions and remedies that travelers brought back from Europe and other parts of the Atlantic world, and incorporated them into what was an already rich and diverse body of healing knowledge. Ultimately the prevalence of these exchanges illustrates not just the differences that existed between European and African understandings of disease and the human body, but also how much common ground there was between them. Kananoja compellingly argues that African healing knowledge should be seen as a rich and dynamic system, which was central to the emergence of an Atlantic world.

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.

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Michael T. Bertrand, "Southern History Remixed: On Rock 'n' Roll and the Dilemma of Race" (UP Florida, 2024)

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Southern History Remixed: On Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Dilemma of Race (UP Florida, 2024) spotlights the key role of popular music in the shaping of the United States South from the late nineteenth century to the era of rock ’n’ roll in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. While musical activities are often sidelined in historical narratives of the region, Michael Bertrand shows that they can reveal much about social history and culture change as he connects the rise of rock ’n’ roll to the civil rights movement for racial equality.

In this book, Bertrand traces a long-term culture war in which white southerners struggled over the region’s cultural complexion with music serving as an engine that both sustained and challenged white supremacy. He shows how rock ’n’ roll emerged as a working-class genre with biracial sources that stoked white racial anxieties and engaged the region’s color and culture lines. This book discusses the conflict over southern identity that played out in responses to jazz, barn dance radio, Pentecostal and gospel music, Black radio programming, and rhythm and blues, concluding with a close look at the popularity of Elvis Presley within a racially segregated society.

Southern History Remixed suggests that both Black and white southerners have used music as a tool to resist or negotiate a rigid regional hierarchy. Urging readers and scholars to take the study of popular music seriously, Bertrand argues that what occurs in the music world affects and reflects what happens in politics and history.

Guest: Michael T. Bertrand is a historian of the American South and the modern United States.

Host: Caroline Alt (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Georgia. She studies the hauntings of the American South from the 19th through the 21st centuries.

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Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Civil War Americans, like people today, used the past to understand and traverse their turbulent present. As Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean reveals in this fascinating work of comparative intellectual history, nineteenth-century Americans were especially conversant with narratives of the English Civil Wars of the 1600s. Northerners and Southerners alike drew from histories of the English past to make sense of their own conflict, interpreting the events of the past in drastically different ways. Confederates, for example, likened themselves to England’s Royalists (also known as Cavaliers), hoping to preserve a social order built on hierarchy and claiming the right to resist what they perceived as radicals' assaults on tradition. Meanwhile, conservative Northerners painted President Lincoln as a tyrant in the mold of English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, while radical abolitionists drew inspiration from Cromwell and sought to rebuild the South as Cromwell had attempted with Ireland.

Surveying two centuries of history-making and everyday engagement with historical thought, in Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), Dr. Sheehan-Dean convincingly argues that history itself was a battlefront of the American Civil War, with narratives of the past exercising surprising agency in interpretations of the nineteenth-century present. Dr. Sheehan-Dean’s discoveries provide an entirely fresh perspective on the role of historical memory in the Civil War era and offer a broader meditation on the construction and uses of history itself.

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Claire Whitlinger, "Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi" (UNC Press, 2020)

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Few places are more notorious for civil rights–era violence than Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders. Yet in a striking turn of events, Philadelphia has become a beacon in Mississippi’s racial reckoning in the decades since. In Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi (UNC Press, 2020) Claire Whitlinger investigates how this community came to acknowledge its past, offering significant insight into the social impacts of commemoration. Examining two commemorations around key anniversaries of the murders held in 1989 and 2004, Whitlinger shows the differences in how those events unfolded. She also charts how the 2004 commemoration offered a springboard for the trial of former Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen for his role in the 1964 murders, the 2006 passage of Mississippi’s Civil Rights/Human Rights education bill, and the initiation of the Mississippi Truth Project. In doing so, Whitlinger provides the first comprehensive account of these high profile events and expands our understanding of how commemorations both emerge out of and catalyze associated memory movements.
Threading a compelling story with theoretical insights, Whitlinger delivers a study that will help scholars, students, and activists alike better understand the dynamics of commemorating difficult pasts, commemorative practices in general, and the links between memory, race, and social change.

Claire Whitlinger is Associate Professor of Sociology at Furman University.

Host: Michael L. Rosino is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Molloy University, studying racial politics, media, and democracy. His most recent book, Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism Inside Grassroots Political Organizing, is now available with the University of North Carolina Press.

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Constance Bailey, "Conversations with Kiese Laymon" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

This is a very special episode of the New Books Network, as the editor of Conversations with Kiese Laymon (UP of Mississippi, 2025), Dr. Constance Bailey, discusses the process of selecting, compiling, and publishing the volume with the subject himself, award-winning author, Kiese Laymon.

Conversations with Kiese Laymon provides an in-depth look at Laymon as an educator, creative writer, activist, family member, and Mississippian. Interviews capture surprising insights into Laymon’s life and craft. Within the book’s pages, Laymon talks about his engagement with other writers, including Richard Wright, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty. These revelations situate his memoir, Heavy, among other great Mississippi autobiographies and memoirs, such as Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi, Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, and Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive. In other interviews, he discusses his obsession with revision and deftly fields questions about pop culture, politics, and Black masculinity, along with a host of other pressing contemporary issues.

As the first collection of its kind, Conversations with Kiese Laymon serves as the perfect introduction to studying Laymon. The cross section of interviews included reflects Laymon’s humility, while simultaneously celebrating his accomplishments. Most importantly, the interviews reflect his stature as a major American literary figure. With topics ranging from hip-hop and family to politics and everything in between, Conversations provides an unfiltered look at the prolific Southern writer in his own words.

And the same can be said of this episode.

You can find Dr. Constance Bailey at her website, and on Instagram.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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Philis Barragán-Goetz, "Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas" (U Texas Press, 2020)

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Debates about Ethnic Studies in K-12 and Higher Education have highlighted the importance of culturally inclusive pedagogy in schools. Despite discussions about Ethnic Studies, there is a more extended history of Mexican-origin people pushing for culturally responsive education. In Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas (University of Texas Press, 2020), historian Philis M. Barragán-Goetz argues that through cultural negotiation, escuelitas (community schools) shaped Mexican American identity and civil rights activism in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Barragán Goetz weaves in oral histories, government documents, newspapers, and archival sources to demonstrate the power in grassroots organizing for educational justice in Texas. She debunks a popular myth that Mexican Americans have not cared for education throughout history. Barragán Goetz writes that the progressive education movement in the late 19th century was not all that progressive if we examine the lived experienced of Mexican-origin people. Activists such as Idar Family, Villegas de Magnon, Maria Villarreal, Maria Renteria, and many involved in the two main Mexican American civil rights organizations of the time provided a foundation for Latina/os to be part of the fight for educational inclusion in the 20th century. Reading, Writing, and Revolution is not merely a book about educational history; it is a trailblazing study on how Mexican Americans have relied on any tools available to create a more inclusive educational system for themselves and their community.

Philis M. Barragán Goetz is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University - San Antonio. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She can be found on Twitter: @philismaria

Tiffany Jasmin González, Ph.D. is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the Newcomb Institute of Tulane University. You can follow Tiffany on Twitter @T_J_Gonzalez

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Uzma Quraishi, "Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War" (UNC Press, 2020)

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press), Uzma Quraishi (Sam Houston State University) follows the Cold War-era journeys of South Asian international students from U.S. Information Service reading rooms in India and Pakistan, to the halls of the University of Houston, to the suburban subdivisions of Alief and Sugar Land.

This student migration between 1960 and 1980 shows how public diplomacy programs overseas catalyzed the arrival of highly educated, middle-class Asians in the U.S. before the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. Drawing on archival documents, GIS data, and oral interviews, Quraishi investigates how Indian and Pakistani immigrants forged an “interethnic” identity in Houston and located themselves—both socially and geographically—in the midst of a booming yet segregated Sunbelt city.

She conceptualizes their mobility as “brown flight,” a process that simultaneously strengthened ethnic bonds even as it reinforced racial and class barriers. By exploring the links between international and local scales, Redefining the Immigrant South will interest scholars from many fields, including Asian American history; histories of the U.S. South, immigration, and U.S. foreign relations; and sub/urban studies.

Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan.

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Marlee S. Bunch, "Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era"

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era (University of Illinois Press, 2025), Dr. Marlee Bunch shared her research on Black female educators in Mississippi during the Civil Rights era and discussed how their experiences and wisdom continue to inform contemporary teaching practices and diversity initiatives. The conversation explored the importance of preserving and unearthing hidden histories through various forms of cultural expression, while examining the role of educators in creating inclusive learning environments. Marlee's work extends to her teaching philosophy and upcoming projects, including a National Academy of Education postdoc award project that will expand her oral history research to include Black male educators and explore the power of storytelling across generations.

Despite significant challenges and powerful opposition, Black female teachers stood at the forefront of advocating for and providing education to Black students. Their dedication not only improved opportunities for Black communities but also influenced changes in U.S. laws and societal expectations. Bunch draws on a rich fund of oral histories to reveal the interior lives of Black female educators who taught before and after desegregation in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In their own voices, these women detail the hurdles they faced guiding students through Jim Crow laws and Civil Rights-era desegregation. Bunch unearths the personal stories of teaching and activism during a historic time that included the Brown v. Board of Education decision and whites’ massive resistance to desegregation. The educators explain the importance of the Black community and Black homes while discussing their part in priming students for success and creating community cohesion. In addition, Bunch looks at the legacies of Black educators and the work still to be done. A section of images and poetry compliments the text. Inspiring and immersive, Unlearning the Hush combines memory with Civil Rights history to document Black women’s role in education during a tumultuous time.

Bunch is an interdisciplinary educator, scholar, author, and preserver of oral histories dedicated to illuminating untold stories and fostering human-centered, inclusive learning spaces. With over a decade of teaching experience across secondary and post-secondary classrooms, she has consistently championed equitable, rigorous, and reflective education that honors the lived experiences of students and educators alike.

A passionate advocate for justice-centered education, Bunch earned her doctoral degree in Education, Policy, Organization, and Leadership with an emphasis in Diversity and Equity from the University of Illinois. She also holds an M.Ed. in Secondary Education from DePaul University, an M.S. in Gifted Education, and an ESL certification — a testament to her commitment to meeting the diverse needs of learners. She is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.

At the heart of Bunch’s work is the belief that history and storytelling hold transformative power. Her research centers on the oral histories of Black female educators in Mississippi who taught during the Civil Rights era (1954–1970), preserving their narratives as both historical record and source of contemporary wisdom. Through this work, she invites reflection on resistance and the enduring importance of educators as community leaders and cultural stewards.
Her other publications include The Magnitude of Us (Teachers College Press, 2024), and Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning: Culturally Responsive and Social-Emotional Classroom Practice in Grades 6-12, co-authored with Brittany R. Collins (Routledge, 2025).

Whether through scholarship, storytelling, or advocacy, Bunch continues to elevate voices too often left at the margins, reminding us that the most meaningful learning happens when we center humanity, history, and hope.

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Christopher M. Reali, "Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones and Paul Simon. Christopher M. Reali's in-depth look at the fabled musical hotbed examines the events and factors that gave the Muscle Shoals sound such a potent cultural power. Many artists trekked to FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound in search of the sound of authentic southern Black music—and at times expressed shock at the mostly white studio musicians waiting to play it for them. Others hoped to draw on the hitmaking production process that defined the scene. Reali also chronicles the overlooked history of Muscle Shoals's impact on country music and describes the region's recent transformation into a tourism destination. Multifaceted and informed, Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals (University of Illinois Press, 2022) reveals the people, places, and events behind one of the most legendary recording scenes in American history.

Dr. Christopher Reali is an assistant professor of music at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama's carnival.

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Harriet Jacobs, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (Norton, 2025)

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive, detailing her harrowing escape from enslavement, seven years hiding in an attic crawl space, and the racism she faced in freedom.

Forgotten for decades after its original, 19th century publication, Jacobs’ story was so harrowing and so brave it was thought to be fiction. Only through the research of historian Jean Fagan Yellin in the 1980s was it proven, once and for all, to be a brilliant and compelling work of nonfiction. Incidents is routinely cited by historians and fiction writers alike as one of the most influential texts of our time and our history.

In this latest edition published by W.W. Norton (2025), Jacobs’ characters come alive for a new generation of readers, and re-readers, this time contextualized with a new introduction and explanatory notes by Evie Shockley.

Dr. Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is a two-time winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Review Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. You can find her on Instagram.

You can find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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Matthew R. Sparks and Olivia Sizemore, "Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Matthew Sparks and Oliva Sizemore join Jana Byars for a fun, chilling, and thoughtful discussion about about Haint Country: Dark Tales from the Hills and Hollers (University Press of Kentucky, 2024). The hills of the Appalachia region hold secrets—dark, deep, varied, and mysterious. These secrets are often told in the form of eerie, thrilling, and creepy folk tales that reveal strange sightings, curious oddities, and commonly serve as cautionary tales for eager and curious ears. These spine-tingling stories have been told and retold by family members, neighbors, and "hillfolk" for generations. Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers is a collection of weird, otherworldly, and supernatural phenomenon in Eastern Kentucky—tales that have been recorded and documented for the first time. Collected and adapted by Matthew Sparks and Olivia Sizemore, the anthology explores stories of ghosts or "haints," strange creatures or "boogers," haunted locations or "stained earth," uncanny happenings or "high strangeness," and humorous Appalachian ghost stories. Contemporary yarns of black panthers, demons, and sightings of ghostly coal miners are narrated in the first person, reflecting the style and dialect of the collected oral history. Though comprised of a mixture of claimed accounts and fabricated lore, the locations and people woven throughout are very real. Complemented with evocative watercolor illustrations by Olivia Sizemore (who was inspired by the work of Stephen Gammell) and a compendium that provides additional context, Haint Country is a thrilling and bone-chilling excursion to the spooky corner of Appalachia.

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Meredith McCarroll, "Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film" (U Georgia Press, 2018)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

If you mention Appalachia to many people, they may immediately respond with the "Deliverance" dueling banjos theme. Unfortunately, this is an example of how the region is stereotyped and misunderstood, particularly in films. In her book, Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film(University of Georgia Press, 2018), Meredith McCarroll, Director of Writing and Rhetoric at Bowdoin College, describes Appalachian people as being shown as different from both white and nonwhite groups, often considered as belonging to the worst of each group. Her book discusses specific film examples that help to illustrate the negative connotation heaped upon Appalachia, and also presents where filmmakers treat them more fairly.

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Stephanie McCurry, "Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War (Harvard UP, 2019), the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning challenges the idea that women are outside of war, through a trio of dramatic stories revealing women's transformative role in the American Civil War. We think of war as a man's world, but women have always played active roles in times of violence and been left to pick up the pieces in societies decimated by war. In this groundbreaking reconsideration of the Civil War, the award-winning author of Confederate Reckoning invites us to see America's bloodiest conflict not just as pitting brother against brother but as a woman's war. When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief.

Through a trio of dramatic stories, Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. We meet Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason sparked heated controversy, defying the principle of civilian immunity and leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved women escaped across Union lines, upending emancipation policies that extended only to enslaved men. The Union's response was to classify fugitive black women as "soldiers' wives," regardless of whether they were married--offering them some protection but placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. In the war's aftermath, the Confederate grande dame Gertrude Thomas wrestled with her loss of status and of her former slaves. War, emancipation, and economic devastation affected her family intimately, and through her life McCurry helps us see how fundamental the changes of Reconstruction were. Women's War dismantles the long-standing fiction that women are outside of war and shows that they were indispensable actors in the Civil War, as they have been--and continue to be--in all wars.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a doctoral candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers.

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Arianne Edmonds, "We Now Belong to Ourselves: J. L. Edmonds, the Black Press, and Black Citizenship in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Black press provided a blueprint to help Black Americans transition from slavery and find opportunities to advance and define African American citizenship. Among the vanguard of the Black press was Jefferson Lewis Edmonds, founder and editor of The Liberator newspaper. His Los Angeles-based newspaper championed for women's rights, land and business ownership, education, and civic engagement, while condemning lynchings and other violent acts against African Americans. It encouraged readers to move westward and build new communities, and it printed stories about weddings and graduations as a testament to the lives and moments not chronicled in the White-owned press.

Edmonds took this fierce perspective in his career as a journalist, for he himself was born into slavery and dedicated his life to creating pathways of liberation for those who came after him. Across the pages of his newspaper, Edmonds painted a different perspective on Black life in America and championed for his community--from highlighting the important work of his contemporaries, including Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, to helping local readers find love in the personal ads section. The Liberator, along with a chorus of Black newspapers at the turn of the century, educated an entire generation on how to guard their rights and take claim of their new American citizenship.

Written by Jefferson Lewis Edmonds' great-great granddaughter, We Now Belong to Ourselves: J. L. Edmonds, the Black Press, and Black Citizenship in America (Oxford University Press, 2025) chronicles how Edmonds and other pioneering Black publishers documented the shifting tides in the advancement of Black liberation. Arianne Edmonds argues that the Black press was central in transforming Black Americans' communication patterns, constructing national resistance networks, and defining Black citizenship after Reconstruction--a vision, mission, and spirit that persists today through Black online social movements. Weaving together poetry, personal narrative, newspaper clips, and documents from the Edmonds family archive, We Now Belong to Ourselves illustrates how Edmonds used his platform to center Black joy, Black triumph, and radical Black acceptance.

Arianne Edmonds is a 5th generation Angeleno, archivist, civic leader, and founder of the J.L. Edmonds Project, an initiative dedicated to preserving the history and culture of the Black American West. She is currently a Senior Civic Media Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism funded by the MacArthur Foundation and a Commissioner for the Los Angeles Public Library.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Random House, 2023)

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

More than a century and a half after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, historians are still searching for exactly when the U.S. Civil War ended. Was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”?

That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose previous work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Vorenberg was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title, Lincoln's Peace, in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln’s untimely death. To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States’s interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.

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Charlotte Bentley, "New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859" (U of Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Jazz is the music that many people associate with New Orleans. But before there was jazz in New Orleans there was opera. It was the only city in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century with a resident opera company that produced the latest European works. In New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Charlotte Bentley considers the thriving operatic life of New Orleans, drawing out the international connections that animated it. She explores the process of bringing opera to the stage, taking a detailed look at the management of New Orleans’s Francophone theater, the Théâtre d’Orléans, as well as the performers who came to the city and the reception they received. Opera’s role was not confined to the theater, however, and Bentley demonstrates that opera permeated everyday life in New Orleans and examines literary works to understand the genre’s significance to the city. Bentley examines the complicated transatlantic dance that brought operas and performers to New Orleans forever influencing the city, and ultimately, American culture.

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Ahmad Greene-Hayes, "Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans. When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space. Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an antiblack world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms--ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more--to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.

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Jeremy Black, "The Civil War" (Saint Augustine's Press, 2025)

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The American Civil War may have been more consequential to American history (and its global supremacy) than its Revolutionary War and participation in all other world wars. The influence of this war is not just reduced to the victory of the north and its economic infrastructure, but the fact of Union success ushered in the notion of 'what it means to be American' that even the revolution could not instill.

European military historian Jeremy Black reorients readers to see what was extraordinary in the civil war of 'the American colonies' and why this was warfare unlike anything that could be properly understood on the world stage at that time. He also examines with expertise the role of foreign powers (or lack thereof).

Black's treatment might be the doom of civil war counterfactuals. Was the south destined to fail? Was it weaker motive, faulty strategy, or lack of European support? Was the north just lucky, or possessed of foresight and providential endowment? Black dispels romanticism and sentimentalist hindsight--the American Civil War is unparalleled in many respects, but it is not without clear lessons in warcraft, diplomacy, and cultural-economic impasse.

Furthermore, Black's Civil War is a new resource that teaches, reaffirms, and reminds readers of the intensity of the American past--in both error and idealistic impulse--that might continue to guide us to the best future and avoid the lose-lose circumstances of a civil war. Black's acumen for historical review in this case renders a kind of warning: May the leaders of men in the future come to a better way of self-realization than give way to the internal conflict that pits father against son, and sister against brother. But if he must engage, at least understand the distinction between war and politics.

Black's objective and concise account is a treasure for students and experts alike who need clarity and insight without too much of an investment. The take-away is an appreciation for the American spirit that civil strife petrified and an understanding of the tactical progression of this conflict and the context of combat of that era.

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Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth, "Finding the Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia's Mountain Forests" (West Virginia UP, 2023)

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

2023 Weatherford Award Finalist, Nonfiction

How can the craft of musical instrument making help reconnect people to place and reenchant work in Appalachia? How does the sonic search for musical tone change relationships with trees and forests? Following three craftspeople in the mountain forests of Appalachia through their processes of making instruments, Finding the Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia's Mountain Forests (West Virginia UP, 2023) considers the meanings of work, place, and creative expression in drawing music from wood.

Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth explores the complexities and contradictions of instrument-making labor, which is deeply rooted in mountain forests and expressive traditions but also engaged with global processes of production and consumption. Using historical narratives and sensory ethnography, among other approaches, he finds that the craft of lutherie speaks to the past, present, and future of the region’s work and nature.

From West Virginia University Press

Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth PhD is Director and Curator of the Gordon Art Galleries at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He earned a PhD and MA in Anthropology from the University of Kentucky and a BA in Anthropology and History from the University of Virginia. He has held research, teaching, and administrative positions in Anthropology and Folklore Studies through his work with the Smithsonian Institution’s Asian Cultural History Program, the University of Kentucky Department of Anthropology and Appalachian Center, and The Ohio State University Department of Comparative Studies and Center for Folklore Studies.

Rachel Hopkin PhD is a folklorist and audio producer.

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Julia Brock, "Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South" (UNC Press, 2025)

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In a unique and personal exploration of the game and fish laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi from the Progressive Era to the 1930s, Julia Brock offers an innovative history of hunting in the New South. The implementation of conservation laws made significant strides in protecting endangered wildlife species, but it also disrupted traditional hunting practices and livelihoods, particularly among African Americans and poor whites.

Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South (UNC Press, 2025) highlights how hunting and fishing regulations were relatively rare in the nineteenth century, but the emerging conservation movement and the rise of a regional "sportsman" identity at the turn of the twentieth century eventually led to the adoption of state-level laws. Once passed, however, these laws were plagued by obstacles, including insufficient funding and enforcement. Brock traces the dizzying array of factors—propaganda, racial tensions, organizational activism, and federal involvement—that led to effective game and fish laws in the South.

Host Byline:

Craig Gill is a writer, researcher and historian based in Vancouver, BC. He is the author of Caddying on the Color Line, a history of African American golf caddies in the U.S. South.

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John Bardes, "The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930" (UNC Press, 2024)

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (UNC Press, 2024) reveals that Americans often assume that slave societies had little use for prisons and police because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. Mustering tens of thousands of previously overlooked arrest and prison records, John K. Bardes demonstrates the opposite: in parts of the South, enslaved and free people were jailed at astronomical rates. Slaveholders were deeply reliant on coercive state action. Authorities built massive slave prisons and devised specialized slave penal systems to maintain control and maximize profit. Indeed, in New Orleans—for most of the past half-century, the city with the highest incarceration rate in the United States—enslaved people were jailed at higher rates during the antebellum era than are Black residents today. Moreover, some slave prisons remained in use well after Emancipation: in these forgotten institutions lie the hidden origins of state violence under Jim Crow.

With powerful and evocative prose, Bardes boldly reinterprets relations between slavery and prison development in American history. Racialized policing and mass incarceration are among the gravest moral crises of our age, but they are not new: slavery, the prison, and race are deeply interwoven into the history of American governance.

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.

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Bryan D. Jones, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores the under-appreciated division in the South between the oligarchic rule of plantation owners and industrialists on the one hand, and the more democratic mindset of the mountain-dwelling small farmers on the other. These two mindsets were in continual tension from the 1800s to the 1960s, when the adherents of the more democratic side of the struggle capitulated to the oligarchical side in response to the Civil Rights movement.

Bryan Jones draws from his own family's centuries-old history in the region to explore the rise and fall of the "two minds" of the South. Through a comparison of the experiences of a slaveholding line in his family with three non-slaveholding lines, Jones provides a rich history of the politics of both class and race in the region from the Founding era to the present. The slaveholding side of his family settled in Black Belt Alabama, while ancestral members of the other side of his family were poorer uplanders. In the 1890s, the latter supported the burgeoning populist movement, which for a short window of time tried to unite poor Blacks and poor whites against the patrician planter class and industrialists. After a series of close elections, the planter class was able to stanch the populist tide. They did this in large part by sowing racial division among populism's supporters. Indeed, one of Jones' ancestors helped draft the 1901 Alabama constitution that made Jim Crow the law of the state.

Throughout, Jones shows how deep the political differences were between the two regions, with oligarchy characterizing the slaveholding region and a more democratic ethos shaping the non-slaveholding areas. Jones serves as the final observer, a white boy observing not only the demise of the Jim Crow South, but--in the wake of the Civil Rights movement--the demise of the mountain democratic South as well. Today, the vast majority of Southern whites regardless of class support an oligarchical Republican Party.

Bryan Jones is J.J."Jake" Pickle Regents' Chair in Congressional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Kathryn L. Beasley, "The Proof Is in the Dough: Rural Southern Women, Extension, and Making Money" (University of Georgia Press, 2025)

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The Proof Is in the Dough: Rural Southern Women, Extension, and Making Money (University of Georgia Press, 2025) examines how rural white and African American women in Alabama and Florida used the Cooperative Extension Service's home demonstration programming between 1914 and 1929 as a means to earn extra income. Kathryn L. Beasley explores an area of rural women's history that has not been closely examined--that is, how rural American women involved with home demonstration used the skills they learned as a way to better themselves economically. Furthermore, Beasley traces how this extra income allowed these women to shape their own producing and consuming habits. While most home demonstration programming during the Progressive Era and 1920s focused on ways to save money--among other objectives--rural women in Alabama and Florida used different strategies to earn more money and gain some economic independence. Beasley's research shows how Alabama and Florida's rural women exercised their own determination and resourcefulness to create ways to economically sustain themselves by using food, tangible items, handicrafts, small businesses, and more to their advantage. However, while there were similarities in how these rural women earned extra money, the states in which they lived differed in important agricultural ways. Florida offered a wider variety of growing and environmental seasons and, as a result, a larger diversity of crops. By taking a comparative approach--both Florida versus Alabama and Black versus white--Beasley details the unique and innovative ways that rural southern women applied their considerable agricultural and domestic skills to improve their lives and the lives of their families. In so doing, she also reveals how disposable income helped establish ideas of empowerment and financial independence in the years before the economic struggles of the 1930s.

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Victoria Bynum, "Deep Roots, Broken Branches: A History and Memoir" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Historian Victoria Bynum turns now to her own history in this multigenerational American saga spanning from 1840 to 1979. Through meticulous historical research, personal letters, diaries, and the unpublished memoir of Mary Daniel Huckenpoehler, the author’s maternal grandmother, Bynum examines five generations within the broader context of the nation’s history, navigating pivotal events such as First Wave immigration, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, two world wars, the Cold War, and beyond.

Child of a mother from Waconia, Minnesota, and father from Jones County, Mississippi, Bynum blends a historian’s voice with personal experiences, intertwining her grandmother’s unpublished memoir and letters with her own role as a diarist and historian. She explores class, race, ethnicity, and gender dynamics. From the rise of Welsh immigrant ancestors in the Upper Midwest and the Gilded Age privileges of her grandmother’s upbringing to Bynum’s own tumultuous childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s as she is shuttled between Georgia, Mississippi, Minnesota, Florida, and California, Bynum grapples with numerous dangers of being raised in a volatile environment marked by alcohol-fueled violence, sexual degradation, and neglect. Against the backdrop of racial segregation, civil rights movements, and the Cold War, Deep Roots, Broken Branches: A History and Memoir (UP of Mississippi, 2025) traces the author’s coming-of-age journey, and the profound influence of her grandmother.

Revealed through the lens and tensions of an Air Force family, Deep Roots, Broken Branches explores Bynum’s intellectual curiosity, voracious reading habits, and turbulent path through early motherhood, divorce, and higher education in California. Throughout, her grandmother remains a stabilizing force, offering inspiration and guidance. This book paints a vivid portrait of a southern identity’s growth amid personal challenges and broader societal shifts.

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Frank X Walker, "Load in Nine Times: Poems" (Liveright, 2024)

Sat, 24 May 2025 04:00:00 -0000

For decades Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers—including his own ancestors—who enlisted in the Union army in exchange for emancipation.
Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reconstruction, Walker braids the voices of the United States Colored Troops with their family members, as well as slave owners and prominent historical figures from Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglas and Margaret Garner. Imbued with atmospheric imagery, these persona poems and more “[clarify] not only the inextricable value of Black life and labor to the building of America, but the terrible price they were forced to pay in producing that labor” (Khadijah Queen). “How do you un-orphan a people?” Walker asks. “How do you pick up / shattered black porcelain and make / a new set of dishes fit to eat off?”
While carefully attuned to the heartbreak and horrors of war, Walker’s poems pay equal care to the pride, perseverance, and triumphs of their speakers. Evoking the formerly enslaved General Charles Young, Walker hums: “I am America’s promise, my mother’s song, / and the reason my father had every right to dream.” Expansive and intimate, Load in Nine Times is a resounding ode to the powerful ties of individual and cultural ancestry by an indelible voice in American poetry.

Winner of the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

A native of Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. Walker has published thirteen collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets Collective, the oldest continuously running predominantly African American writing group in the country. He is a Professor of English, and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program the University of Kentucky.

You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Professor X continue their conversation.

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Carrie Helms Tippen, "Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Sat, 17 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The cookbook genre is highly conventional with an orientation toward celebration and success. From glossy photographs to heartwarming stories and adjective-rich ingredient lists, the cookbook tradition primes readers for pleasure. Yet the overarching narrative of the region is often one of pain, loss, privation, exploitation, poverty, and suffering of various kinds. While some cookbook writers go to great lengths to avoid reminding readers of this painful past, others invoke that pain as a marker of southern authenticity. Still others use stories of southern suffering as an opportunity to make space for reconciliation, reparation, or apology for past wrongs.

In Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks (UP of Mississippi, 2025), author Carrie Helms Tippen attempts to understand the unique rhetorical situation of the southern cookbook as it negotiates a tension between the expectations of the genre and the prevailing metanarratives of the southern experience, one focused on pleasure and the other rooted in pain. Through an analysis of commercially published “southern” cookbooks from the 1990s to the present, Tippen examines the range of rhetorical purposes and strategies writers have employed, some of which undermine the reality of a painful past and cause harm or violence, and others which serve as tools for truth and reconciliation.

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Jennifer Lynn Gross, "Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South" (LSU Press, 2025)

Fri, 16 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Historians have thoroughly documented the vast devastation of the Civil War. In the attention they have paid to aspects of that destruction, however, one of the most obvious ramifications appears routinely overlooked—Confederate widowhood. Dr. Jennifer Lynn Gross’s Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South (LSU Press, 2025) helps rectify that historical omission by supplying a sweeping analysis of women whose husbands perished in the war.

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No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century—but they've never been as intense as they are today.

In No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (UNC Press, 2021), Dr. Karen L. Cox offers an eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments. Dr. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that anti-monument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.

Our guest is: Dr. Karen L. Cox, who is professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her other books include Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture and Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help support the show by downloading, assigning and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Frederick Knight, "Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Would there have been a Frederick Douglass if it were not for Betsy Bailey, the grandmother who raised him? Would Harriet Jacobs have written her renowned autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, if her grandmother, a free black woman named Molly Horniblow, had not enabled Jacobs’ escape from slavery?

In Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Frederick C. Knight explores the experiences of African Americans with aging and in old age during the eras of slavery and emancipation. Though slavery put a premium on young labor, elders worked as caregivers, domestics, cooks, or midwives and performed other tasks in the margins of Southern and Northern economies. Looking at black families, churches, mutual aid societies, and homes for the aged, Dr. Knight demonstrates the pivotal role of elders in the history of African American community formation through Reconstruction, offering a unique window into the individual and collective lives of African Americans, the day-to-day struggles they waged around their experiences of aging, and how they drew upon these resources to define the meaning of family, community, and freedom.

You can find Dr. Knight at the Howard University History Department page, or on LinkedIn.

And, once you’ve listened to the episode, head over to Additions to the Archive on Substack for a further conversation with Dr. Knight and host Sullivan Summer.

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Lesley J. Gordon, "Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Those who fought in the Civil War were expected to overcome their fear of injury or death as they charged into a hail of bullets. Soldiers could expect erupting artillery shells or Minié balls to maim or tear their bodies apart. The 11th New York Fire Zouaves and the 2nd Texas Infantry were no different. They charged into battle with high, perhaps even inflated, expectations of glory on the field of battle. After all, they had already shown their bravery at home especially in the case of the Fire Zoaves. Yet when they marched into battle at the fields of Bull Run or Shiloh, falter as a unit they did. Afterwards, members of both units faced charges of cowardice casting a lingering shadow on their regiments and personal reputations. Over time charges of cowardice would fade to be replaced with the rhetoric of martial heroism leading some historians to insist that all Civil War soldiers were heroes. In her latest work

, Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the America Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2024), Dr. Lesley Gordon seeks to offer a fuller understanding of the experiences of Civil War soldiers and sufferings of war.

Dr. Gordon is the Charles Boal Ewing Chair in Military History at West Point and the Charles G. Summersell Chair of Southern History at the University of Alabama. Dr. Gordon received her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia and specializes in civil war history.

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Megan Hunt, "Southern by the Grace of God: Religion, Race, and Civil Rights in Hollywood's American South" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Megan Hunt joins us to talk about her recent book, Southern By the Grace of God, which was published in 2024 by the University of Georgia Press.

Lke the media coverage of the civil rights era itself, Hollywood dramas have reinforced regional stereotypes of race, class, and gender to cleanse and redeem the wider nation from the implications of systemic racism. As Southern by the Grace of God reveals, however, Hollywood manipulates southern religion (in particular) to further enhance this pattern of difference and regional exceptionalism, consistently displacing broader American racism through a representation of the poor white southerner who is as religious as he (and it is always a he) is racist. By foregrounding the role of religion in these characterizations, Megan Hunt illuminates the pernicious intersections between Hollywood and southern exceptionalism, a long-standing U.S. nationalist discourse that has assigned racial problems to the errant South alone, enabling white supremacy to not only endure but reproduce throughout the nation. Southern by the Grace of God examines the presentation and functions of Protestant Christianity in cinematic depictions of the American South. Hunt argues that religion is an understudied signifier of the South on film, used--with varying degrees of sophistication--to define the region's presumed exceptionalism for regional, national, and international audiences. Rooted in close textual analysis and primary research into the production and reception of more than twenty Hollywood films that engage with the civil rights movement and/or its legacy, this book provides detailed case studies of films that use southern religiosity to negotiate American anxieties around race, class, and gender. Religion, Hunt contends, is an integral trope of the South in popular culture and especially crucial to the divisions essential to Hollywood storytelling.

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Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Knopf, 2025)

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

One historian’s journey to find the end of the Civil War—and, along the way, to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace.

We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and he’s decided he won’t return to Washington until he’s witnessed, or perhaps even orchestrated, the end of the Civil War. Now, it turns out, more than a century and a half later, historians are still searching for that end.

Was it April 9, at Appomattox, as conventional wisdom holds, where Lee surrendered to Grant in Wilmer McLean’s parlor? Or was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”? That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose work served as a key source of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Vorenberg was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln’s untimely death.

To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States's interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.

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Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, "Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2023)

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020.

Through extensive research, Dr. Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy.

Understanding Louisiana's carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.

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"Steadfast Democrats" Five Years Later: A Conversation with Chryl N. Laird

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today I’m speaking with Chryl Laird, Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. We are discussing her co-authored book with Ismail White, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior. Published in 2020, this book remains highly relevant for understanding American political behavior. While Trump did make significant gains among black voters in 2024, particularly male voters, African American voters still overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party. Chryl has appeared on the NBN in the past, so while we will discuss the book, we will also discuss it in the context of today.

Chryl Laird is Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850" (UNC Press, 2025)

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Most US history textbooks contain a familiar map: shaded colors stretch across North America, clearly and neatly demarcating the extent of US expansion from 1776 thru the late nineteenth century. In The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limites of Manifest Destiny (UNC Press, 2025), University of Kansas distinguished historian Andrew Isenberg asks us to rethink the clean lines and simple borders of the North American past. By examing the stories of escaped enslaved people, Christian missionaries, government vaccination campaigns, anti-slavery schemes, and even well worn historical events like Lewis and Clark and the Lousiana Purchase, Isenberg shows that American power at its borders fell far short of expectations in Washington, and often doesn't match up to historical interpretations in our present day. Rather, American hegemony in the borderlands was contingent, weak, and anything but assured, until well into the nineteenth century. Rather than Manifest Destiny, Isenberg argues that American expansion both west and south should be viewed as one of just many possible outcomes of the boistrous mess that was early North American politics.

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Jeffrey Thomas Perry, "Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Most Americans today would not think of their local church as a site for arbitration and would probably be hesitant to bring their property disputes, moral failings, or personal squabbles to their kin and neighbors for judgment. But from the Revolutionary Era through the mid-nineteenth century, many Protestants imbued local churches with immense authority. Through their ritual practice of discipline, churches insisted that brethren refrain from suing each other before "infidels" at local courts and claimed jurisdiction over a range of disputes: not only moral issues such as swearing, drunkenness, and adultery but also matters more typically considered to be under the purview of common law and courts of equity, including disputes over trespass, land, probate, slave warranty, and theft.

In Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), Jeffrey Thomas Perry explores the ways that ordinary Americans--Black and white, enslaved and free--understood and created law in their local communities, uncovering a vibrant marketplace of authority in which church meetinghouses played a central role in maintaining their neighborhoods' social peace. Churches were once prominent sites for the creation of local law and in this period were a primary arena in which civil and religious authority collided and shaped one another. When church discipline failed, the wronged parties often pushed back, and their responses highlight the various forces that ultimately hindered that venue's ability to effectively arbitrate disputes between members. Relying primarily on a deep reading of church records and civil case files, Perry examines how legal transformations, an expanding market economy, and religious controversy led churchgoers to reimagine their congregations' authority. By the 1830s, unable to resolve doctrinal quibbles within the fellowship, church factions turned to state courts to secure control over their meetinghouses, often demanding that judges wade into messy ecclesiastical disputes.

Tracking changes in disciplinary rigor in Kentucky Baptist churches from that state's frontier period through 1845, and looking beyond statutes and court decrees, Law in American Meetinghouses is a fresh take on church-state relations. Ultimately, it highlights an oft-forgotten way that Americans subtly repositioned religious institutions alongside state authority.

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Benjamin Heber Johnson, "Texas: An American History" (Yale UP, 2025)

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

There's more to Texas than hats, oil, and BBQ, writes Benjamin Johnson in his sweeping new synthesis, Texas: An American History (Yale UP: 2025) - though, those all matter too. The state's reach has traveled globally, Johnson argues, influencing everything from how people around the world eat, to how they pray, to the music they listen to. In his new book, Johnson describes the long history of the Lone Star State, from its thousands of years of Indigenous habitation up through the present day. Along the way, he makes some surprising detours, including explaining how Indigenous Texas was anything but a backwater to Mesoamerica, and demonstrating the long progressive legacy in a state known today for its ardent conservatism. Texas is a book as big as its topic, trekking through centuries of history via noteworthy anecdotes which provide a window into a place that defies stereotypes.

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The Soundworld of Harriet Tubman

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Just in time for Black History Month, we share an episode we’ve been excitedly working on for a number of months now. Ethnomusicologist Maya Cunningham brings us “The Sound World of Harriet Tubman.” Maya Cunningham is an activist and jazz singer currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in Afro-American studies with a concentration in ethnomusicology.

We first came across Maya’s work last year as part of The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project, an online initiative from Ms. magazine honoring the 200th anniversary of Harriet Tubman’s birth in 1822. It’s a remarkable package that adds many dimensions of understanding of the underground railroad conductor and feminist icon: Her experience of disability due to a blow to the head by a white overseer; her creation of a home for the aged; her love of the natural world; and much more. And to us, the richest of these essays was Maya’s the “Sound World of Harriet Tubman,” which used field recordings, historical research, and ethnomusicological research to explore the roles of sound and music, and voice in Tubman’s life and leadership. The piece included a Spotify playlist so you could listen as you read.

Today, we’re thrilled to bring you what we hope will be an even more immersive experience: Maya Cunningham reading her essay, and thanks to the editing and mixing skills of Phantom Power producer Ravi Krishnaswami, her field recordings and playlist selections are mixed into the story.

And just a quick note, you’re going to hear about the American Christian revival known as the Second Great Awakening, which stirred both Black and white people from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s. You’ll also hear about the Invisible Church, where enslaved African Americans were able to worship secretly and autonomously and through the singing of folk spirituals, which differed greatly from white religious music at the time, but would go on to influence not only gospel music but pretty much every form of popular music we know today. If you want to learn more about this history, a great place to start is a book edited by two professors Mack studied with at Indiana University, Drs. Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby. It’s called African American Music: An Introduction.

And today, we share our Patrons-only segment, “What’s Good,” in our main feed. Maya will recommend something good to read, listen to, and do.

Today’s musical selections and soundscapes are by Maya Cunningham. The show was mixed and edited by Ravi Krishnaswami. The Harriet Tubman image was created by Maddie Haynes.

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The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Our book is: The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) by award-winning historian Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers. Dr. Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson. Johnson was the owner of Blue Spring Farm, a veteran of the War of 1812, and the US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds of the estate. This meant that Chinn, although enslaved herself, oversaw Blue Spring's slave labor force and had substantial control over economic, social, financial, and personal affairs within the couple's world. Chinn's relationship with Johnson was unlikely to have been consensual since she was never manumitted. What makes Chinn's life exceptional is the power that Johnson invested in her, the opportunities the couple's relationship afforded her and her daughters, and their community's tacit acceptance of the family—up to a point. When the family left their farm, they faced steep limits: pews at the rear of the church, burial in separate graveyards, exclusion from town dances, and more. Johnson’s relationship with Chinn ruined his political career but as Dr. Myers compellingly demonstrates, it wasn't interracial sex that led to his downfall but his refusal to keep it—and Julia Chinn—behind closed doors.

Our guest is: Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, who is the Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of History and gender studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, and The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Hiroshi Motomura, "Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair, Realistic, and Sustainable Immigration Policy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex responses to the phenomenon. Too many observers assume imaginary consensus, avoid basic questions, or disregard the larger context for human migration.

In Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2025), Hiroshi Motomura offers a complex and fair-minded account of immigration, its root causes, and the varying responses to it. Taking stock of the issue's complexity, while giving credence to the opinions of immigration critics, he tackles a series of important questions that, when answered, will move us closer to a more realistic and sustainable immigration policy. Motomura begins by affirming a basic concept—national borders—and asks when they might be ethical borders, fostering fairness but also responding realistically to migration patterns and to the political forces that migration generates. In a nation with ethical borders, who should be let in or kept out? How should people forced to migrate be treated? Should newcomers be admitted temporarily or permanently? How should those with lawful immigration status be treated? What is the best role for enforcement in immigration policy? To what extent does the arrival of newcomers hurt long-time residents? What are the "root causes" of immigration and how can we address them?

Realistic about the desire of most citizens for national borders, this book is an indispensable guide for moving toward ethical borders and better immigration policy.

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Anthony E. Kaye, "Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History" (FSG, 2024)

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In August 1831, a group of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, rose up to fight for their freedom. They attacked the plantations on which their enslavers lived and attempted to march on the county seat of Jerusalem, from which they planned to launch an uprising across the South. After the rebellion was suppressed, well over a hundred people, Black and white, lay dead or were hanged. As news of the revolt spread, it became apparent that it was the idea of a single man: Nat Turner. An enslaved preacher, he was as enigmatic as he was brilliant. He was also something more—a prophet, one who claimed to have received visions from the Spirit urging him to act.

Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History (FSG, 2024) is the fullest recounting to date of Turner’s uprising, and the first that refuses to tame or overlook his divine visions. Instead, it takes those visions seriously, tracing their emergence from the world of nineteenth-century Methodism, with its revivals, camp meetings, interracial churches, and Black preachers. The rebellion and its aftermath would hasten the end of this world, as Southern states further restricted the personal freedoms of the enslaved, even as the ongoing threat of revolt shaped the country’s politics. With this work of narrative history, the late historian Anthony E. Kaye and his collaborator Gregory P. Downs have given us a new understanding of one of the nineteenth century's most decisive events.

Nat Turner, Black Prophet was named a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year and one of Literary Hub's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year.

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Derek W. Black, "Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy" (Yale UP, 2025)

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Few have ever valued literacy as much as the enslaved Black people of the American South. For them, it was more than a means to a better life; it was a gateway to freedom and, in some instances, a tool for inspiring revolt. And few governments tried harder to suppress literacy than did those in the South. Everyone understood that knowledge was power: power to keep a person enslaved in mind and body, power to resist oppression. In the decades before the Civil War, Southern governments drove Black literacy underground, but it was too precious to be entirely stamped out.

Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy (Yale UP, 2025) describes the violent lengths to which southern leaders went to repress Black literacy and the extraordinary courage it took Black people to resist. Derek W. Black shows how, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of Reconstruction, literacy evolved from a subversive gateway to freedom to a public program to extend citizenship and build democratic institutions—and how, once Reconstruction was abandoned, opposition to educating Black children depressed education throughout the South for Black and white students alike. He also reveals the deep imprint those events had on education and how this legacy is resurfacing today.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a PhD student in the History department at UC Davis.

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Leonne M. Hudson, "Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln" (Southern Illinois UP, 2024)

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth carried out the first presidential assassination in United States history. The euphoria resulting from General Lee's surrender evaporated at the news of Abraham Lincoln's murder. The nation--excepting many white Southerners--found itself consumed with grief, and no group mourned Lincoln more deeply than people of color. African Americans did not speak with a monolithic voice on social or political issues, but even Lincoln's Black contemporaries who may not have approved of him while he was alive mourned his death, understanding its implications for their future.

Beginning with the assassination itself and chronicling Lincoln's three-week-long national funeral, historian Leonne M. Hudson captures the profound sadness of Black Americans as they mourned the crafter of the Emancipation Proclamation and the man they thought of as their earthly Moses, father, friend, and benefactor. Hudson continues the narrative by detailing the postwar efforts of African Americans to gain citizenship and voting rights.

Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Southern Illinois UP, 2024) includes the tributes of prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Elizabeth Keckley, who raised their voices to honor Lincoln, as well as formal expressions of grief by institutions and organizations such as the United States Colored Troops. In a triumph of research, Hudson also features the voices of lesser-known Black people who mourned Lincoln across the country, showing that the outpouring of individual and collective grief helped set the stage for his enduring glorification.

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Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, "America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) follows this ubiquitous but largely overlooked institution to reveal how, across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, price became an accepted expression of value. From the earliest days of colonial conquest, auctions put Native land and human beings up for bidding alongside material goods, normalizing new economic practices that turned social relations into economic calculations and eventually became recognizable as nineteenth-century American capitalism.

Starting in the eighteenth century, neighbors collectively turned speculative value into economic “facts” in the form of concrete prices for specific items, thereby establishing ideas about fair exchange in their communities. This consensus soon fractured: during the Revolutionary War, state governments auctioned loyalist property, weaponizing local group participation in pricing and distribution to punish political enemies. By the early nineteenth century, suspicion that auction outcomes were determined by manipulative auctioneers prompted politicians and satirists to police the boundaries of what counted as economic exchange and for whose benefit the economy operated. Women at auctions—as commodities, bidders, or beneficiaries—became a focal point for gendering economic value itself. By the 1830s, as abolitionists attacked the public sale of enslaved men, women, and children, auctions had enshrined a set of economic ideas—that any entity could be coded as property and priced through competition—that have become commonsense understandings all too seldom challenged.

In contrast to histories focused on banks, currencies, or plantations, America Under the Hammer highlights an institution that integrated market, community, and household in ways that put gender, race, and social bonds at the center of ideas about economic worth. Women and men, enslaved and free, are active participants in this story rather than bystanders, and their labor, judgments, and bodies define the resulting contours of the American economy.

Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy (EF, JP)

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs. He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is imminently forthcoming from Cambridge UP.

Greg's historical and hemispheric perspective helped bring out the differences between calling an event “sedition,” “seditious conspiracy” and “insurrection,” the new “Lost Cause” that many of those attacking the Capitol seem to hold on to and the particularities of Whiteness in the United States, as compared to elsewhere in the Americas. Greg even proposes a new word for what happened January 6th, 2021: counterinsurgency.

Mentioned in this episode:

Legitimation Crisis (1974), Jurgen Habermas
On Revolution (1963), Hannah Arendt
The Machiavellian Moment (1975), J. G. A. Pocock
Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004), Stephanie Camp
Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834 (1998), Charles Tilly
The Possessive Investment of Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (orig. 1998) 20th anniversary edition, George Lipsitz

Listen and Read.

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Andrew Gomez, "Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

How Black and white Cubans navigated issues of race, politics, and identity during the post-Civil War and early Jim Crow eras in South Florida.

On July 4, 1876, during the centennial celebration of US independence, the city of Key West was different from other cities. In some of post–Civil War Florida, Black residents were hindered from participating in 4th of July festivities, but Key West's celebration, “led by a Cuban revolutionary mayor working in concert with a city council composed of Afro-Bahamians, Cubans, African Americans, and Anglos,” represented a profound exercise in interracial democracy amid the Radical Reconstruction era.

Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945 (U Texas Press, 2024) examines the first Cuban American communities in South Florida—Key West and Tampa—and how race played a central role in shaping the experiences of white and Black Cubans. Andrew Gomez argues that factors such as the Cuban independence movement and Radical Reconstruction produced interracial communities of Cubans that worked alongside African Americans and Afro-Bahamians in Florida, yielding several successes in interracial democratic representation, even as they continued to wrestle with elements of racial separatism within the Cuban community. But the conclusion of the Cuban War of Independence and early Jim Crow laws led to a fracture in the Cuban-American community. In the process, both Black and white Cubans posited distinct visions of Cuban-American identity.

Andrew Gomez is an associate professor of history at the University of Puget Sound.

Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University.

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Jennie Lightweis-Goff, "Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election year—centuries or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities —similarly polyglot and cosmopolitan—resist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts.

Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) explores the paths of slavery in coastal cities, arguing that captivity haunts the “hospitality” cultures of Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Baltimore. It is not a history of urban slavery, but a literary reflection that argues for coastal cities as a distinct region that scrambles time, resisting the “post” in postindustrial and the “neo” in neoliberalism. Jennie Lightweis-Goff offers a cultural exploration bound by American literature, especially life-writing by the enslaved, as well as compelling reassessments of works by canonical writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur.

Lightweis-Goff reveals how the preserved yet fragile landscapes of these cities are haunted—not simply by the ghost tours that are signature stops for travelers in their historic districts—but by the echoes of slavery in their economies and built environments.

Jennie Lightweis-Goff is a scholar, lyric essayist, and, most essentially, a New Orleans flâneur. She is the author of two scholarly books, Blood at the Root and Captive City. Her essays have appeared in the major journals of U.S. literature, including Signs, American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, minnesota review, and south. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, Liberties, and at her Substack, The Butcher's Darling, where she writes on grief, precarious labor, sobriety, and intellectual work that was "born in the back of the house."

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Joshua D. Rothman, "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America" (Basic Book, 2021)

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Joshua Rothman’s The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America was published by Basic Books in 2021, and tells a sprawling history of slave traders in America. Often presented as outcasts and social pariahs, slave traders were often instead wealthy and respected members of their communities. Rothman explores the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard to show just what the work of a domestic slave trader looked like and the devastating affects their actions had on enslaved people. By weaving together a history the lives of men who created one of the most powerful slave trading operations in America, Rothman is able to show how slavery’s expansion and growth occurred up to the Civil War.

Joshua Rothman is a professor of history at the University of Alabama.

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Carl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934" (UVA Press, 2020)

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

As a novelist, short story author, screenwriter, and Nobel laureate, William Faulkner looms large in modern American literature. Yet the very range of his work and the sources for his rich literary worlds often defy easy assessment. In The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), Carl Rollyson uses both an extensive range of archival collections and Faulkner’s wide-ranging literary output to assess the author’s life and the development of his many famous works. Growing up in Mississippi, young William absorbed his family’s tales and the larger history of the region to which it was tied. Yet it took Faulkner’s journeys outside of his community – first to Canada to train as a pilot for the Royal Air Force, then his extended visits to New York and Europe – to gain the perspective necessary to best use them in his writing. After an early foray into poetry Faulkner focused on writing prose, emerging by the end of the 1920s as an acclaimed author of novels and short stories. As Rollyson shows, this fame brought Faulkner to Hollywood, where he demonstrated quickly his ability to write as well for the rapidly emerging medium of talking pictures.

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Kent Michael Shaw, "Missiology Reimagined: The Missions Theology of the Nineteenth-Century African American Missionary" (Pickwick, 2024)

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

In Missiology Reimagined: The Missions Theology of the Nineteenth-Century African American Missionary (Pickwick, 2024), Kent Michael Shaw I examines the lives and theology of early African American missionaries of the Antebellum and Reconstruction era. The enslaved and formerly enslaved constructed a hermeneutic and interpreted the sacred text through a lens that contradicted the enslaver's version of Christianity. They engaged Scripture on their own terms and embraced a theology of mission that compelled them to risk death and re-enslavement to pursue a global mandate from God. These pioneering missionaries were not only mission workers but missiologists. The reader will discover an applied missiology with relevance not only for the African American church of that day but for the church as a whole today.

Dave Broucek is a retired cross-cultural missionary/coordinator of continuing education/international ministries director, having served on the staff of two faith-based nonprofits, The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM) and South America Mission (SAM). He holds a PhD in Intercultural Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

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Randy M. Browne, "The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor from captive workers who had every reason to resist. In this system, enslaved Black drivers were tasked with supervising and punishing other enslaved laborers.

In The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Randy M. Browne illuminates the predicament and harrowing struggles of these men―and sometimes women―at the heart of the plantation world. What, Browne asks, did it mean to be trapped between the insatiable labor demands of white plantation authorities and the constant resistance of one’s fellow enslaved laborers?

In this insightful and unsettling account of slavery and racial capitalism, Browne shows that on plantations across the Americas, drivers were at the center of enslaved people’s working lives, social relationships, and struggles against slavery. Drivers enforced labor discipline and confronted the resistance of their fellow enslaved laborers, aiming to maintain a position that helped them survive in a world where enslaved people were treated as disposable. Drivers also protected the people they supervised, negotiating workloads and customary rights to essentials like food and rest with white authorities. Within the slave community, drivers helped other enslaved people create a sense of belonging, as husbands and fathers, as Big Men, and as leaders of diasporic African “nations.” Sometimes, drivers even organized rebellions, sabotaging the very system they were appointed to support.

Compelling and original, The Driver’s Story enriches our understanding of the never-ending war between enslavers and enslaved laborers by focusing on its front line. It also brings us face-to-face with the horror of capitalist labor exploitation.

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Crystal R. Sanders, "A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs" (UNC Press, 2024)

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs (UNC Press, 2024) tells the little-known story of "segregation scholarships" awarded by states in the US South to Black students seeking graduate education in the pre-Brown v. Board of Education era. Under the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, decades earlier, southern states could provide graduate opportunities for African Americans by creating separate but equal graduate programs at tax-supported Black colleges or by admitting Black students to historically white institutions. Most did neither and instead paid to send Black students out of state for graduate education.

Crystal R. Sanders examines Black graduate students who relocated to the North, Midwest, and West to continue their education with segregation scholarships, revealing the many challenges they faced along the way. Students that entered out-of-state programs endured long and tedious travel, financial hardship, racial discrimination, isolation, and homesickness. With the passage of Brown in 1954, segregation scholarships began to wane, but the integration of graduate programs at southern public universities was slow. In telling this story, Sanders demonstrates how white efforts to preserve segregation led to the underfunding of public Black colleges, furthering racial inequality in American higher education.

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Susanna Ashton, "A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin" (New Press, 2024)

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In December of 1850, a faculty wife in Brunswick, Maine, named Harriet Beecher Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house. While John Andrew Jackson stayed for only one night, he made a lasting impression: drawing from this experience, Stowe began to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most influential books in American history and the novel that helped inspire the overthrow of slavery in the United States.

A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New Press, 2024) unfolds as a historical detective story, as Susanna Ashton combs obscure records for evidence of Jackson’s remarkable flight from slavery to freedom, his quest to liberate his enslaved family, and his emergence as an international advocate for abolition. This fresh and original work takes us through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the restoration of white supremacy—where we last glimpse Jackson losing his freedom again on a Southern chain gang.

In the spirit of Tiya Miles’s prizewinning All That She Carried and Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught, Susanna Ashton breathes life into a striving and nuanced American character, one unmistakably rooted in the vast sweep of nineteenth-century America.

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Stephen Jackson, "The Patchwork of World History in Texas High Schools" (Routledge, 2022)

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The Patchwork of World History in Texas High Schools (Routledge, 2022) traces the historical development of the World History course as it has been taught in high school classrooms in Texas, a populous and nationally influential state, over the last hundred years.

Arguing that the course is a result of a patchwork of competing groups and ideas that have intersected over the past century, with each new framework patched over but never completely erased or replaced, the author crucially examines themes of imperialism, Eurocentrism, and nationalism in both textbooks and the curriculum more broadly. The first part of the book presents an overview of the World History course supported by numerical analysis of textbook content and public documents, while the second focuses on the depiction of non-Western peoples, and persistent narratives of Eurocentrism and nationalism. It ultimately offers that a more global, accurate, and balanced curriculum is possible, despite the tension between the ideas of professional world historians, who often de-center the nation-state in their quest for a truly global approach to the subject, and the historical core rationale of state-sponsored education in the United States: to produce loyal citizens.

Offering a new, conceptual understanding of how colonial themes in World History curriculum have been dealt with in the past and are now engaged with in contemporary times, it provides essential context for scholars and educators with interests in the history of education, curriculum studies, and the teaching of World History in the United States.

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Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper, "The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai" (NYU Press, 2024)

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Emma Mordecai lived an unusual life. She was Jewish when Jews comprised less than 1 percent of the population of the Old South, and unmarried in a culture that offered women few options other than marriage. She was American born when most American Jews were immigrants. She affirmed and maintained her dedication to Jewish religious practice and Jewish faith while many family members embraced Christianity. Yet she also lived well within the social parameters established for Southern white women, espoused Southern values, and owned enslaved African Americans.

The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai is one of the few surviving Civil War diaries by a Jewish woman in the antebellum South. It charts her daily life and her evolving perspective on Confederate nationalism and Southern identity, Jewishness, women's roles in wartime, gendered domestic roles in slave-owning households, and the centrality of family relationships. While never losing sight of the racist social and political structures that shaped Emma Mordecai's world, the book chronicles her experiences with dislocation and the loss of her home.

Bringing to life the hospital visits, food shortages, local sociability, Jewish observances, sounds and sights of nearby battles, and the very personal ramifications of emancipation and its aftermath for her household and family, The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai offers a valuable and distinct look at a unique historical figure from the waning years of the Civil War South.

Dianne Ashton was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and World Religions at Rowan University. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including Hanukkah in America: A History and Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America.

Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Rowan University. She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920; Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism, 1890-1940; Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925; and Ballet Class: An American History.

Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.

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Ana Lucia Araujo, "Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them onshore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (U Chicago Press, 2024) grapples with this history by foregrounding the lived experience of enslaved people in tracing the long, complex history of slavery in the Americas.

Based on twenty years of research, this book not only serves as a comprehensive history; it also expands that history by providing a truly transnational account that emphasizes the central role of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, it is deeply informed by African history and shows how African practices and traditions survived and persisted in the Americas among communities of enslaved people. Drawing on primary sources including travel accounts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, slave narratives, and visual sources such as artworks and artifacts, Araujo illuminates the social, cultural, and religious lives of enslaved people working in plantations and urban areas, building families and cultivating affective ties, congregating and re-creating their cultures, and organizing rebellions.

Humans in Shackles puts the lived experiences of enslaved peoples at the center of the story and investigates the heavy impact these atrocities have had on the current wealth disparity of the Americas and rampant anti-Black racism.

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Holly M. Karibo, "Rehab on the Range: A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West" (U Texas Press, 2024)

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 1929, the United States government approved two ground-breaking and controversial drug addiction treatment programs. At a time when fears about a supposed rise in drug use reached a fevered pitch, the emergence of the nation’s first “narcotic farms” in Fort Worth, Texas, and Lexington, Kentucky, marked a watershed moment in the treatment of addiction. Rehab on the Range is the first in-depth history of the Fort Worth Narcotic Farm and its impacts on the American West. Throughout its operation from the 1930s to the 1970s, the institution was the only federally funded drug treatment center west of the Mississippi River. Designed to blend psychiatric treatment, physical rehabilitation, and vocational training, the Narcotic Farm, its proponents argued, would transform American treatment policies for the better. The reality was decidedly more complicated.

In Rehab on the Range: A History of Addiction and Incarceration in the American West (University of Texas Press, 2024) Dr. Holly M. Karibo tells the story of how this institution—once framed as revolutionary for addiction care—ultimately contributed to the turn towards incarceration as the solution to the nation’s drug problem. Blending an intellectual history of addiction and imprisonment with a social history of addicts’ experiences, Rehab on the Range provides a nuanced picture of the Narcotic Farm and its cultural impacts. In doing so, it offers crucial historical context that can help us better understand our current debates over addiction, drug policy, and the rise of mass incarceration.

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Deondra Rose, "The Power of Black Excellence: HBCUs and the Fight for American Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

From their founding, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) educated as many as 90 percent of Black college students in the United States. Although many are aware of the significance of HBCUs in expanding Black Americans' educational opportunities, much less attention has been paid to the vital role that they have played in enhancing American democracy.

In The Power of Black Excellence: HBCUs and the Fight for American Democracy (Oxford UP, 2024), Deondra Rose provides an authoritative history of HBCUs and the unique role they have played in shaping American democracy since 1837. Drawing on over six years of deep research, Rose brings into view the historic impact that government support for HBCUs has had on the American political landscape, arguing that they have been essential for not only empowering Black citizens but also reshaping the distribution of political power in the United States. Rose challenges the conventional wisdom that, prior to the late twentieth century, the federal government took a laissez-faire approach to education. Instead, governmental action contributed to the expansion of HBCUs in an era plagued by racist policies and laws. Today, HBCUs remain extremely important, as evidenced by the outsized number of black political leaders--including Kamala Harris--who attended them. Rose stresses that policymakers promote democracy itself when they support HBCUs and their unique approach to postsecondary education, which includes a commitment to helping students develop politically empowering skills, promoting political leadership, and fostering a commitment to service.

A fresh look into the relationship between education and democracy, The Power of Black Excellence is essential reading for anyone interested not just in HBCUs, but the broader trajectory of Black citizenship in American history.

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Maria Angela Diaz, "A Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War–Era Gulf South" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

From 1845 to 1865 the Gulf of Mexico was at the center of American expansion and southern imperialism. A Continuous State of War: Empire Building and Race Making in the Civil War–Era Gulf South (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Dr. Maria Angela Diaz tells the story of several communities, such as Galveston, New Orleans, and Pensacola, as well as countries such as Mexico and Cuba, to uncover the way that wars within the upper rim of the Gulf of Mexico facilitated American and southern attempts to conquer Latin American nations. In the push for westward expansion that preceded the Civil War, white southerners along with other Americans engaged in violent conquest in Latin America and the American West. Through the wars that are chronicled here, white southern concepts of race became more rigidly fixed.

Dr. Maria Angela Diaz covers several conflicts leading up to the Civil War with Mexicans, Cubans, and Native Americans. She places the Civil War within this framework and follows the trajectory of relations with Latin America through the end of the Civil War and ex-Confederates’ attempts to emigrate abroad. Gulf Coast communities facilitated both the physical efforts to seize territory and the construction of the highly racialized imperialist ideas that reimagined Latin America as a region that could secure the South’s future. Yet the pursuit of that territory created a fluctuating and uncertain situation that shaped the choices of the diverse peoples who lived along the upper rim of the Gulf of Mexico in ways they did not expect.

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Mary Ellen Curtin, "She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

During her keynote speech at the 1976 Democratic Party convention, Barbara Jordan of Texas stood before a rapt audience and reflected on where Americans stood in that bicentennial year. "Are we to be one people bound together by a common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor, or will we become a divided nation? For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future." The civil rights movement had changed American politics by opening up elected office to a new generation of Black leaders, including Jordan, the first Black woman from the South to serve in Congress. Though her life in elected politics lasted only twelve years, in that short time, Jordan changed the nation by showing that Black women could lead their party and legislate on behalf of what she called "the common good."

In She Changed the Nation: Barbara Jordan's Life and Legacy in Black Politics (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024), biographer Mary Ellen Curtin offers a new portrait of Jordan and her journey from segregated Houston, Texas, to Washington, DC, where she made her mark during the Watergate crisis by eloquently calling for the impeachment of President Nixon. Recognized as one of the greatest orators of modern America, Jordan inspired millions, and Black women became her most ardent supporters. Many assumed Jordan would rise higher and become a US senator, Speaker of the House, or a Supreme Court justice. But illness and disability, along with the obstacles she faced as a Black woman, led to Jordan's untimely retirement from elected office--though not from public life. Until her death at the age of fifty-nine, Jordan remained engaged with the cause of justice and creating common ground, proving that Black women could lead the country through challenging times.

No change in the law alone could guarantee the election of Black leaders. It took courage and ambition for Barbara Jordan to break into politics. This important new biography explores the personal and the political dimensions of Jordan's life, showing how she navigated the extraordinary pressures of office while seeking to use persuasion, governance, and popular politics as instruments of social change and betterment.

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Beverly Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick, "New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization" (UP of Florida, 2017)

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization (UP of Florida, 2017) examines the movement to resettle black Americans in Africa, an effort led by the American Colonization Society during the nineteenth century and a heavily debated part of American history. Some believe it was inspired by antislavery principles, but others think it was a proslavery reaction against the presence of free Black people in society.

Moving beyond this simplistic debate, contributors link the movement to other historical developments of the time, revealing a complex web of different schemes, ideologies, and activities behind the relocation of African Americans to Liberia. They explain what colonization, emigration, immigration, abolition, and emancipation meant within nuanced nineteenth-century contexts, looking through many lenses to more accurately reflect the past.

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Benjamin Barson, "Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons" (Wesleyan UP, 2024)

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan UP, 2024) recasts the birth of jazz, unearthing vibrant narratives of New Orleans musicians to reveal how early jazz was inextricably tied to the mass mobilization of freedpeople during Reconstruction and the decades that followed. Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below," following the musicians as they built communes, performed at Civil Rights rallies, and participated in general strikes. Perhaps most importantly, Barson locates the first emancipatory revolution in the Americas—Haiti—as a nexus for cultural and political change in nineteenth-century Louisiana. In dialogue with the work of recent historians who have inverted traditional histories of Latin American and Caribbean independence by centering the influence of Haitian activists abroad, this work traces the impact of Haitian culture in New Orleans and its legacy in movements for liberation.

Brassroots Democracy demonstrates how Black musicians infused participatory music practice with innovative forms of grassroots democracy. Late nineteenth-century Black brass bands and activists rehearsed these participatory models through collective performance that embodied the democratic ethos of Black Reconstruction. Termed "Brassroots Democracy," this fusion of political and musical spheres revolutionized both. Brassroots Democracy illuminates the Black Atlantic struggles that informed music-as-world-making from the Haitian Revolution through Reconstruction to the jazz revolution. The work theorizes the roots of the New Orleans brass band tradition in the social relations grown in maroon ecologies across the Americas. Their fruits contributed to the socio-sonic commons of the music we call jazz today

BENJAMIN BARSON is a historian, baritone saxophonist, and political activist. He is an assistant professor of music at Bucknell University. His work has been published in Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party (2020), Routledge Handbook on Jazz and Gender (2021) and Routledge Guide to Ecosocialism (2021).

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. Twitter.

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D. Andrew Johnson, "Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 1708, the governor of South Carolina responded to a request from London to provide a detailed account of the colony's population. Among the groups included in this report was an often-overlooked segment—Native Americans, who comprised roughly a quarter of the colony’s enslaved population. However, not long after, references to enslaved Native people largely disappeared from the historical record.

In Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), D. Andrew Johnson argues that Native Americans played a pivotal role in shaping South Carolina's economy and culture. Through extensive research, including a database of over 15,000 references to enslaved individuals, Dr. Johnson employs an interdisciplinary approach to expand the historical narrative and center the experiences of enslaved Native people. In addition to his archival work, he uses spatial analysis and archaeological evidence to explore Native slavery within the context of plantation life.

While much of their impact was erased from mainstream history, the contributions of enslaved Native people were evident in the agricultural technologies they introduced, their influence on Creole culture, and the wealth and power amassed by early colonists as a result of their labor.

D. Andrew Johnson is a historian of early-modern America and the Atlantic. He is the coeditor of Atlantic Environments and the American South.

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We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Today’s book is: We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, 2024) by Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson.

Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse, historian Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women. The dismissal of “Black violence” as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy, a distraction from the insidious, unrelenting violence of structural racism. Force—from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt—has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the American and Haitian Revolutions. But violence is only one tool among many. Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away. Clear-eyed, impassioned, and ultimately hopeful, We Refuse offers a fundamental corrective to the historical record, a love letter to Black resilience, and a path toward liberation.

Our guest is: Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson, who is the Michael and Denise Kellen ’68 Associate Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. Her book Force and Freedom was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award. She is the cohost of the Radiotopia podcast “This Day in Esoteric Political History.” She lives outside of Boston with her husband and three children.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Texas Book Festival 2024: November 16-17

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

I spoke with Hannah Gabel, Literary Director of the Texas Book Festival. The Festival first began in 1995, and has since donated over $3.5 million to Texas public libraries and hundreds of thousands of books to students across the state. This year, more than 250 authors will speak and 40,000 people are expected to attend. The festival takes place in downtown Austin, Texas on November 16th and 17th this year and is free and open to all who wish to attend. I’m excited today to speak with Hannah about what people can expect from this incredible event.

Books mentioned in this intervew:

Bone of the Bone by Sarah Smarsh
Trippy by Ernesto Londoño
We Are Home by Ray Suarez
Our Hidden Conversations by Michele Norris
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Real Americans by Rachel Khong
Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

Hannah Gabel is the Literary Director of Texas Book Festival. She also runs the book blog, Bookmarkparty.

Caleb Zakarin is Editor of the New Books Network.

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Aran Robert Shetterly, "Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul" (Amistad, 2024)

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

On November 3, 1979, as activist Nelson Johnson assembled people for a march adjacent to Morningside Homes in Greensboro, North Carolina, gunshots rang out. A caravan of Klansmen and Neo-Nazis sped from the scene, leaving behind five dead. Known as the "Greensboro Massacre," the event and its aftermath encapsulate the racial conflict, economic anxiety, clash of ideologies, and toxic mix of corruption and conspiracy that roiled American democracy then--and threaten it today.

In 88 seconds, one Southern city shattered over irreconcilable visions of America's past and future. When the shooters are acquitted in the courts, Reverend Johnson, his wife Joyce, and their allies, at odds with the police and the Greensboro establishment, sought alternative forms of justice. As the Johnsons rebuilt their lives after 1979, they found inspiration in Nelson Mandela's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Martin Luther King Jr's concept of Beloved Community and insist that only by facing history's hardest truths can healing come to the city they refuse to give up on.

This intimate, deeply researched, and heart-stopping account draws upon survivor interviews, court documents, and the files from one of the largest investigations in FBI history. The persistent mysteries of the case touch deep cultural insecurities and contradictions about race and class. A quintessentially American story, Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul (Amistad, 2024) explores the courage required to make change and the evolving pursuit of a more inclusive and equal future.

Arran Shetterly is the author of the critically acclaimed The Americano: Fighting with Castro for Cuba’s Freedom, the founder of the Mexico City-based magazine, Inside Mexico, and a member of the board of the Americans Who Tell the Truth organization. He has received numerous fellowships, including the Virginia Humanities Fellowship and the 2019 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Aran holds a BA in literature from Harvard College, and an MA in American Studies. He currently he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his son and wife, the New York Times bestselling author Margot Lee Shetterly.

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Justene Hill Edwards, "Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank" (Norton, 2024)

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank (W. W. Norton, 2024), Justene Hill Edwards exposes how the rise and tragic failure of the Freedman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America. In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman’s Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman’s Bank collapsed.

Fully informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman’s Bank and its depositors. She illuminates the hope with which the bank was first envisioned and demonstrates the significant setback that the sabotage of the bank caused in the fight for economic autonomy. Hill Edwards argues for a new interpretation of its tragic failure: the bank’s white financiers drove the bank into the ground, not Fredrick Douglass, its final president, or its Black depositors and cashiers. A page-turning story filled with both well-known figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jay and Henry Cooke, and General O. O. Howard, and less well-known figures like Dr. Charles B. Purvis, John Mercer Langston, Congressman Robert Smalls, and Ellen Baptiste Lubin. Savings and Trust is necessary reading for those seeking to understand the roots of racial economic inequality in America.

Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and the author of both Unfree Markets and a forthcoming Norton Short on the history of inequality in America. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Twitter. Website.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Ashli Quesinberry Stokes and Wendy Atkins-Sayre, "Hungry Roots: How Food Communicates Appalachia's Search for Resilience" (U South Carolina Press, 2024)

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A journey through Southern Appalachia to explore the complex messages food communicates about the region. Depictions of Appalachian food culture and practices often romanticize people in the region as good, simple, and, often, white. These stereotypes are harmful to the actual people they are meant to describe as well as to those they exclude.

In Hungry Roots: How Food Communicates Appalachia's Search for Resilience (U South Carolina Press, 2024), Ashli Quesinberry Stokes and Wendy Atkins-Sayre tell a more complicated story. The authors embark on a cultural tour through food and drinking establishments to investigate regional resilience in and through the plurality of traditions and communities that form the foodways of Southern Appalachia. They visit cafes serving cornbread and beans, a critically acclaimed soul food restaurant, distilleries, festivals celebrating Cherokee and Scottish heritage, a community center and garden serving under-resourced neighbors, and many other food and drinking venues. Hungry Roots demonstrates why Appalachian food matters.

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Steven T. Katz, "The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History, Volume 2" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Holocaust and New World Slavery: Volume 2 (Cambridge UP, 2019) second volume of the first, in-depth comparison of the Holocaust and new world slavery. Providing a reliable view of the relevant issues, and based on a broad and comprehensive set of data and evidence, Steven T. Katz analyses the fundamental differences between the two systems and re-evaluates our understanding of the Nazi agenda. Among the subjects he examines are: the use of black slaves as workers compared to the Nazi use of Jewish labor; the causes of slave demographic decline and growth in different New World locations; the main features of Jewish life during the Holocaust relative to slave life with regard to such topics as diet, physical punishment, medical care, and the role of religion; the treatment of slave women and children as compared to the treatment of Jewish women and children in the Holocaust.

Katz shows that slave women were valued as workers, as reproducers of future slaves, and as sexual objects, and that slave children were valued as commodities. For these reasons, neither slave women nor children were intentionally murdered. By comparison, Jewish slave women and children were viewed as the ultimate racial enemy and therefore had to be exterminated. These and other findings conclusively demonstrate the uniqueness of the Holocaust compared with other historical instances of slavery.

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Michael J. Alarid, "Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power in the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837-1860" (U New Mexico Press, 2022)

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power in the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837-1860 (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), historian Dr. Michael J. Alarid examines New Mexico's transition from Spanish to Mexican to US control during the nineteenth century and illuminates how emerging class differences played a crucial role in the regime change.

After Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, trade between Mexico and the United States attracted wealthy Hispanos into a new market economy and increased trade along El Camino Real, turning it into a burgeoning exchange route. As landowning Hispanos benefited from the Santa Fe trade, traditional relationships between wealthy and poor Nuevomexicanos--whom Alarid calls patrónes and vecinos--started to shift. Far from being displaced by US colonialism, wealthy Nuevomexicanos often worked in concert with new American officials after US troops marched into New Mexico in 1846, and in the process, Dr. Alarid argues, the patrónes abandoned their customary obligations to vecinos, who were now evolving into a working class. Wealthy Nuevomexicanos, the book argues, succeeded in preserving New Mexico as a Hispano bastion, but they did so at the expense of poor vecinos.

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Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga, "A Good Reputation: How Residents Fight for an American Barrio" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Neighborhoods have the power to form significant parts of our worlds and identities. A neighborhood's reputation, however, doesn't always match up to how residents see themselves or wish to be seen. The distance between residents' desires and their environment can profoundly shape neighborhood life.

In A Good Reputation: How Residents Fight for an American Barrio (U Chicago Press, 2024), sociologists Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga delve into the development and transformation of the reputation of Northside, a predominantly Latinx barrio in Houston. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with residents, developers, and other neighborhood stakeholders, the authors show that people's perceptions of their neighborhoods are essential to understanding urban inequality and poverty. Korver-Glenn and Mayorga's empirically detailed account of disputes over neighborhood reputation helps readers understand the complexity of high-poverty urban neighborhoods, demonstrating that gentrification is a more complicated and irregular process than existing accounts of urban inequality would suggest. Offering insightful theoretical analysis and compelling narrative threads from understudied communities, A Good Reputation will yield insights for scholars of race and ethnicity, urban planning, and beyond.

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Steven T. Katz, "The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Holocaust and New World Slavery: A Comparative History (Cambridge UP, 2019) offers the first, in-depth comparison of the Holocaust and new world slavery. Providing a reliable view of the relevant issues, and based on a broad and comprehensive set of data and evidence, Steven Katz analyzes the fundamental differences between the two systems and re-evaluates our understanding of the Nazi agenda.

Among the subjects he examines are: the use of black slaves as workers compared to the Nazi use of Jewish labor; the causes of slave demographic decline and growth in different New World locations; the main features of Jewish life during the Holocaust relative to slave life with regard to such topics as diet, physical punishment, medical care, and the role of religion; the treatment of slave women and children as compared to the treatment of Jewish women and children in the Holocaust. Katz shows that slave women were valued as workers, as reproducers of future slaves, and as sexual objects, and that slave children were valued as commodities. For these reasons, neither slave women nor children were intentionally murdered. By comparison, Jewish slave women and children were viewed as the ultimate racial enemy and therefore had to be exterminated. These and other findings conclusively demonstrate the uniqueness of the Holocaust compared with other historical instances of slavery.

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Wayne A. Wiegand, "In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries" (UP of Mississippi, 2024)

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Librarians around the country are currently on a battleground, defending their right to purchase and circulate books dealing with issues of race and systemic racism. Despite this work, the library community has often overlooked—even ignored—its own history of White supremacy and deliberate inaction on the part of White librarians and library leadership. Author Wayne A. Wiegand takes a crucial step to amend this historical record. In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries (University of Mississippi Press, 2024) analyzes and critiques the world of professional librarianship between 1954 and 1974.

Wiegand begins by identifying racism in the practice and customs of public school libraries in the years leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. This culture permeated the next two decades, as subsequent Supreme Court decisions led to feeble and mostly unsuccessful attempts to integrate Jim Crow public schools and their libraries. During this same period, the profession was honing its national image as a defender of intellectual freedom, a proponent of the freedom to read, and an opponent of censorship. Still, the community did not take any unified action to support Brown or to visibly oppose racial segregation. As Black school librarians and their Black patrons suffered through the humiliations and hostility of the Jim Crow educational establishment, the American library community remained largely ambivalent and silent.

The book brings to light a distressing history that continues to impact the library community, its students, and its patrons. Currently available school library literature skews the historical perspective that informs the present. In Silence or Indifference is the first attempt to establish historical accountability for the systemic racism contemporary school librarianship inherited in the twenty-first century.

Wayne A. Wiegand is F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies Emeritus at Florida State University. Often referred to as “the Dean of American library historians,” he is author of many scholarly articles and books, including Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey; Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library; and American Public School Librarianship: A History.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Anne Byrn, "Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories" (Harper Celebrate, 2024)

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Witness the rise of Southern baking from the humble, make-do recipes of earlier generations to its place as one of the world's richest culinary traditions through Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories (Harper Celebrate, 2024), a new essential cookbook from bestselling author Anne Byrn. With 200 recipes and more than 150 photos from 14 states, this cookbook has the biscuits, cornbread, cakes, and rolls that will help home cooks bake like a Southerner, whether or not they come from below the Mason-Dixon line.

As Anne Byrn explains on New Books Network, recipes can tell you volumes if you pay attention—the crops raised, languages spoken, family customs, old world flavors, and, often, religion. Did you know that where a mill was located affected the recipes handed down from that area? Or that baking and selling pound cakes directly impacted the Civil Rights Movement? She shares these stories and recipes, developed from good times and bad, having diligently uncovered them using the investigative expertise she earned as a journalist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Tennessean

She provides a fascinating dive into the history of 14 Southern states—Texas, Florida, Kentucky, and more—discussing the places, the people, the products and the culture of the moment that influenced what people baked. Anne talks about African-American women and the monumental contributions they have made to the art of Southern baking, about home cooks and how they've kept traditions alive wherever they settle by baking family recipes each year for holidays and celebrations. She shares stories about Jewish families that came to the South and reinterpreted traditional baked goods to incorporate local ingredients, and she also talks about the pastry chefs who have thoughtfully reimagined how the South bakes.

Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at Vittlesvamp.com.

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The Epic Story of America's Great Migration: A Talk by Isabel Wilkerson

Sat, 07 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 2010, Isabel Wilkerson spoke to the Institute about the fifteen years she spent reporting and writing her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Knopf, 2010). The book won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction,

In 1994, Wilkerson was the New York Times Chicago Bureau Chief when she won the Pulitzer Prize for her profile of a fourth-grader from Chicago's South Side, and for two stories on the Midwestern floods of 1993. She was the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

Her 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents argues that racial stratification in the United States is best understood as a caste system, akin to those in India and in Nazi Germany

She has taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston universities.

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Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia" (NYU Press, 2019)

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught Between Cultures in Early Virginia(New York University Press, 2019), Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Silver Professor of History Emerita at New York University, shifts the lens on the well-known narrative of Virginia’s founding to reveal the previously untold and utterly compelling story of the youths who, often unwillingly, entered into cross-cultural relationships—and became essential for the colony’s survival. Their story gives us unprecedented access to both sides of early Virginia. Here for the first time outside scholarly texts is an accurate portrayal of Pocahontas, who, from the age of ten, acted as emissary for her father, who ruled over the local tribes, alongside the never-before-told intertwined stories of Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole, young English boys who were forced to live with powerful Indian leaders to act as intermediaries. As Pocahontas, Thomas, Henry, and Robert collaborated and conspired in carrying messages and trying to smooth out difficulties, they never knew when they might be caught in the firing line of developing hostilities. While their knowledge and role in controlling communication gave them status and a degree of power, their relationships with both sides meant that no one trusted them completely.

Written by an expert in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic history, Pocahontas and the English Boys unearths gems from the archives—Henry Spelman’s memoir, travel accounts, letters, and official reports and records of meetings of the governor and council in Virginia—and draws on recent archaeology to share the stories of the young people who were key influencers of their day and who are now set to transform our understanding of early Virginia.

Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Edwin P Rutan II, "High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor" (Kent State UP, 2024)

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In his recent book, High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor (The Kent State University Press, 2024), Edwin P. Rutan II rehabilitates the motivations and contributions of late-war Union soldiers and reframes our understanding of how the Union won the Civil War.

For more than a century, historians have disparaged the men who joined the Union army in the later days of the Civil War –– when higher bounty payments and the conditional draft were in effect –– as unpatriotic mercenaries who made poor soldiers and contributed little to the Union victory. However, as Rutan explains, historians have relied on the accounts of 1861 and 1862 veterans who resented these new recruits who had not yet suffered the hardships of war, and they were jealous of the higher bounties those recruits received. The result, he argues, is a long-standing mischaracterization of the service of 750,000 Union soldiers.

High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac offers a much-needed correction to the historical record, providing a more balanced assessment of the “high-bounty” replacements in the Army of the Potomac. Rutan argues, using combat-effectiveness methodology, that they were generally competent soldiers and indispensable in defeating the Army of Northern Virginia. He also examines the issue of financial motivation, concluding that the volunteers of 1862 may have been more driven by economic incentives than once thought, and 1864 recruits were less driven by this than typically described. Thus, Rutan concludes that the Union “high-bounty” men do not deserve the scorn heaped on them by early volunteers and subsequent generations of historians.

Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.

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James Barrera, "'We Want Better Education!': The 1960s Chicano Student Movement, School Walkouts, and the Quest for Educational Reform in South Texas" (Texas A&M UP, 2023)

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 'We Want Better Education!': The 1960s Chicano Student Movement, School Walkouts, and the Quest for Educational Reform in South Texas (Texas A&M UP, 2023), James B. Barrera offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the educational, cultural, and political issues of the Chicano Movement in Texas, which remains one of the lesser-known social and political efforts of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This movement became the political training ground for greater Chicano empowerment for students. By the 1970s, it was these students who helped to organize La Raza Unida Party in Texas. This book explores the conditions faced by students of Mexican origin in public schools throughout the South Texas region, including Westside San Antonio, Edcouch-Elsa, Kingsville, and Crystal City.

Barrera focuses on the relationship of Chicano students and their parents with the school systems and reveals the types of educational deficiencies faced by such students that led to greater political activism. He also shows how school-related issues became an important element of the students' political and cultural struggle to gain a quality education and equal treatment. Protests enabled students and their supporters to gain considerable political leverage in the decision-making process of their schools. Barrera incorporates information collected from archives throughout the state of Texas, including statistical data, government documents, census information, oral history accounts, and legal records. Of particular note are the in-depth interviews he conducted with numerous former students and community activists who participated or witnessed the various "walkouts" or student protests. "We Want Better Education!" is a major contribution to the historiography of social movements, Mexican American studies, and twentieth-century Texas and American history.

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Edward Pearson, "The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670-1825" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670-1825 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony.

The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution’s development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them.

Throughout South Carolina’s long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Crystal Wilkinson, "Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks" (Clarkson Potter, 2023)

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Poet Laureate of Kentucky Crystal Wilkinson’s food memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks (Clarkson Potter, 2023), honors her kitchen ghosts, five generations of Black Appalachian women. She contends, “The concept of the kitchen ghost came to me years ago, when I realized that my ancestors are always with me and that the women are most present while I’m chopping or stirring or standing at the stove.” Wilkinson shares nearly forty family recipes like Corn Pudding, Chicken and Dumplings, and Granny Christine’s Jam Cake, with stories and family photos to bring to life the rich heritage of Black Appalachia.

Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.

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Tore C. Olsson, "Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II, set in 1911 and 1899, are the most-played American history video games since The Oregon Trail. Beloved by millions, they’ve been widely acclaimed for their realism and attention to detail. But how do they fare as re-creations of history?

In Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past (St Martin's Press, 2024), award-winning American history professor Dr. Tore Olsson takes up that question and more. Weaving the games’ plots and characters into an exploration of American violence between 1870 and 1920, Dr. Olsson shows that it was more often disputes over capitalism and race, not just poker games and bank robberies, that fueled the bloodshed of these turbulent years. As such, this era has much to teach us today. From the West to the Deep South to Appalachia, Olsson reveals the gritty and brutal world that inspired the games, but sometimes lacks context and complexity on the digital screen. Colourful, fast-paced, and dramatic, Red Dead’s History sheds light on dark corners of the American past for gamers and history buffs alike.

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Nik Ribianszky, "Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865" (U Georgia Press, 2021)

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865 (U Georgia Press, 2021), Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865.

Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America's system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one's status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual's continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system.

Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together—by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies—these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property—including that most precious, themselves.

For more, see the "Generations of Freedom" website.

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Sheila Curran Bernard, "Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous - as was, according to legend, the temper that landed him in two of the South's most brutal prisons, while his immense talent twice won him pardons.

But, as Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies (Cambridge UP, 2024) shows, these stories were shaped by the white folklorists who 'discovered' Lead Belly and, along with reporters, recording executives, and radio and film producers, introduced him to audiences beyond the South. Through a revelatory examination of arrest, trial, and prison records; sharecropping reports; oral histories; newspaper articles; and more, author Sheila Curran Bernard replaces myth with fact, offering a stunning indictment of systemic racism in the Jim Crow era of the United States and the power of narrative to erase and distort the past.

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Donald L. Miller, "Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy" (Simon and Schuster, 2019)

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Donald L. Miller explains in great detail how Grant ultimately succeeded in taking the city and turning the tide of the war in favor of the Union. Miller begins his tale with events in Cairo and leads the reader through all the important events that lead to success at Vicksburg. He also discusses Grant’s background, personal characteristics, and the influential people surrounding General Grant during this crucial time.

Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Emeritus Professor of History at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Miller’s work includes books on World War II, the war in the Pacific, America’s air war against Germany, studies of Chicago and Jazz Age Manhattan.

Jessica Moloughney is a graduate student in history and library science at Queens College in New York

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Toby Green, "A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Toby Green draws upon a range of underutilized sources to describe the evolution of West Africa over a period of four transformative centuries. With these sources Green demonstrates that the region was integrated into the developing transcontinental trade networks far earlier than is often portrayed in more Western-centric accounts, and in ways that influenced the development of local communities long before European ships arrived off of their coast. The arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century, however, shifted the dynamics of this trade in dramatic ways, changing kingdoms and reshaping economic priorities. While West Africa was an equal partner for the first two and a half centuries of this period, Green shows how the growing demand for slaves and the very different nature of slavery in the West during this period combined increasingly disadvantaged the region, while simultaneously changing the internal political dynamics of kingdoms and the societies within them.

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Theresa McCulla, "Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor.

In Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans (U Chicago Press, 2024), Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploitation of working-class people. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details how enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans’s culinary history to focus on how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power.

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Kellie Carter Jackson, "We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance" (Seal Press, 2024)

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, 2024), historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of the breadth of Black responses to white oppression, particularly those pioneered by Black women.

The dismissal of “Black violence” as an illegitimate form of resistance is itself a manifestation of white supremacy, a distraction from the insidious, unrelenting violence of structural racism. Force—from work stoppages and property destruction to armed revolt—has played a pivotal part in securing freedom and justice for Black people since the days of the American and Haitian Revolutions. But violence is only one tool among many. Carter Jackson examines other, no less vital tactics that have shaped the Black struggle, from the restorative power of finding joy in the face of suffering to the quiet strength of simply walking away.

Clear-eyed, impassioned, and ultimately hopeful, We Refuse offers a fundamental corrective to the historical record, a love letter to Black resilience, and a path toward liberation.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Felicia Arriaga, "Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America" (UNC Press, 2023)

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In recent years, dozens of counties in North Carolina have partnered with federal law enforcement in the criminalization of immigration--what many have dubbed "crimmigration." Southern border enforcement still monopolizes the national immigration debate, but immigration enforcement has become common within the United States as well. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations are a major part of American immigration enforcement, Felicia Arriaga maintains that ICE relies on an already well-established system--the use of local law enforcement and local governments to identify, incarcerate, and deport undocumented immigrants.

In Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America (UNC Press, 2023), Arriaga contends that the long-term partnership between local sheriffs and immigration law enforcement in places like North Carolina has created a form of racialized social control of the Latinx community. Arriaga uses data from five county sheriff's offices and their governing bodies to trace the creation and subsequent normalization of ICE and local law enforcement partnerships. Arriaga argues that the methods used by these partnerships to control immigration are employed throughout the United States, but they have been particularly visible in North Carolina, where the Latinx population increased by 111 percent between 2000 and 2010. Arriaga's evidence also reveals how Latinx communities are resisting and adapting to these systems.

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Jeremy Schipper, "Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial" (Princeton UP, 2022)

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt that Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial (Princeton UP, 2022), Dr. Jeremy Schipper tells the story of a free Black man accused of plotting an anti-slavery insurrection in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. Vesey was found guilty and hanged along with dozens of others accused of collaborating with him.

At the center of the book is an examination of how former slave Denmark Vesey used interpretations of the Bible to justify the revolt while members of the white establishment in South Carolina use that same Bible to support the slaveholders view of themselves as benevolent biblical patriarchs.

The book is a riveting account of a key moment in antebellum American history that underscores deep racial inequities and the assumed supremacy of white Christians during a time of violence, fear, and conflicting understandings of moral superiority and biblical truth.

Paula Marie Seniors, "Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores the significant contributions of African American women radical activists from 1955 to 1995. It examines the 1961 case of African American working-class self-defense advocate Mae Mallory, who traveled from New York to Monroe, North Carolina, to provide support and weapons to the Negroes with Guns Movement. Accused of kidnapping a Ku Klux Klan couple, she spent thirteen months in a Cleveland jail, facing extradition. African American women radical activists Ethel Azalea Johnson of Negroes with Guns, Audrey Proctor Seniors of the banned New Orleans NAACP, the Trotskyist Workers World Party, Ruthie Stone, and Clarence Henry Seniors of Workers World founded the Monroe Defense Committee to support Mallory. Mae’s daughter, Pat, aged sixteen also participated, and they all bonded as family. When the case ended, they joined the Tanzanian, Grenadian, and Nicaraguan World Revolutions. Using her unique vantage point as Audrey Proctor Seniors’s daughter, Paula Marie Seniors blends personal accounts with theoretical frameworks of organic intellectual, community feminism, and several other theoretical frameworks in analyzing African American radical women’s activism in this era.

Essential biographical and character narratives are combined with an analysis of the social and political movements of the era and their historical significance. Seniors examines the link between Mallory, Johnson, and Proctor Seniors’s radical activism and their connections to national and international leftist human rights movements and organizations. She asks the underlying question: Why did these women choose radical activism and align themselves with revolutionary governments, linking Black human rights to world revolutions?

Seniors’s historical and personal account of the era aims to recover Black women radical activists’ place in history. Her innovative research and compelling storytelling broaden our knowledge of these activists and their political movements.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Sally Stocksdale, "When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate" (McFarland, 2022)

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate (McFarland, 2022), readers will find a case-study comparison of the emancipation of Russian serfs on the Yazykovo Selo estate and American slaves at the Palmyra Plantation. Although state policies and reactions may not follow the same paths in each area, there were striking thematic parallels. These findings add to our understanding of what happens throughout an emancipation process in which the state grants freedom, and therefore speaks to the universality of the human experience.

Despite the political and economic differences between the two countries, as well as their geographic and cultural distances, this book re-conceptualizes emancipation and its aftermath in each country: from a history that treats each as a separate, self-contained story to one with a unified, global framework.

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Shannon Bontrager, "Death at the Edges of Empire: Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863-1921" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead.

In Death at the Edges of Empire: Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863-1921 (U Nebraska Press, 2020) Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions emerging within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials negotiating the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death as well as how they used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.

Alex Beckstrand is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Connecticut and an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves.

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Financial Institutions and Enslavement

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this special episode, we talk to two authors about the role of financial institutions in enslavement. Sharon Ann Murphy, associate professor of history, argues in Banking on Slavery Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (University of Chicago Press, 2023) that Southern banks’ willingness to use enslaved people as loan collateral led to the exponential growth of Southern enslavement during the 1820-30s. In filmmaker, producer, and author David Montero’s book, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations (Hatchette Book Group, 2024), he follows Wall Street bankers and large Northern banks were critical to the financing of slavery and, in turn, who massed incredible wealth from enslavement.

Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator and assistant professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.

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"Southern Humanities Review" magazine

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Justin Gardiner is the author of two nonfiction books and a collection of poetry. His most recent title is the book-length lyric essay Small Altars, published by Tupelo Press in 2024. Besides his role as Nonfiction Editor for Southern Humanities Review, Justin is also an Associate Professor at Auburn University.

Founded in 1967, SHR considers subject matter both within and beyond the South. The magazine has had Justin Gardiner as its nonfiction editor for the past half decade. Four essays are discussed in the episode, with most of all of them showing evidence of the associative qualities that Gardiner, as a poet, enjoys in whatever genre. In this case, we started with Lisa Greenwell’s essay “Your Soul Doesn’t Need You.” While ostensibly an essay about a carjacking she experienced, it goes wider to consider alike how well both more cognitively based therapy and poetry that speaks to one’s soul can aid recovery. In Leslie Stainton’s “Here with You,” an understanding of how the artist Joseph Cornell’s boxes reflect his life with a brother who suffered from cerebral palsy parallels the circumstances of the author’s own, younger sister. Delicacy is the order of the day. In Ceridwen Hall’s essay, “Submarine Reconnaissance: Bodies, Permutations, Voyages,” Hall delves into whether submarines are “female” (as her mom believes) or a “he” when in combat, along with many fascinating aspects of serving aboard a submarine and the “aquatic” nature of our memories and the way we must constantly “refit” our thinking. The other, remaining essay, Jennifer Taylor-Skinner’s “I Don’t Want Somebody in My House,” highlights the grand piano that serves as her companion, in contrast to how an esoteric French composer (Erik Satie) had two baby grand pianos stacked atop each other in his southern France villa. Again, expect the unexpected.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.

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Matthew D. Morrison, "Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States" (U California Press, 2024)

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (U California Press, 2024) explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.

Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music.

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).

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Robert Cochran, "Haunted Man's Report: Reading Charles Portis" (U Arkansas Press, 2024)

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Robert Cochran’s Haunted Man's Report: Reading Charles Portis (U Arkansas Press, 2024) is a pioneering study of the novels and other writings of Arkansan Charles Portis (1933–2020), best known for the novel True Grit and its film adaptations. Hailed by one critic as “the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain” and as America’s “least-known great novelist,” Portis has garnered a devoted fan base with his ear for language, picaresque characters, literary Easter eggs, and talent for injecting comedy into even the smallest turn of phrase. As a former Marine who served on the front lines of the Korean War and as a journalist who observed firsthand the violent resistance to the civil rights movement, Portis reported on atrocities that came to inform his fiction profoundly. His novels take aim at colonialism and notions of American exceptionalism, focusing on ordinary people, often vets, searching for safe havens in a fallen world.

Haunted Man’s Report, a deeply insightful literary exploration of Portis’s singular and underexamined oeuvre, celebrates this novelist’s great achievement and is certain to prove a valuable guide for readers new to Portis as well as aficionados.

Robert Cochran is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989, and has been awarded three Fulbright lecturing assignments (Romania in 1985, Hungary in 1986, and Korea in 1995). Professor Cochran has refused to specialize decently, writing books on topics as remote from one another as Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and Ozark folklore collector Vance Randolph.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers (2016), he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. His work also appears on Pages and Frames.

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Stephen J. Silvia, "The UAW's Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants" (IRL Press, 2023)

Wed, 29 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The UAW's Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants (IRL Press, 2023) is the first in-depth assessment of the United Auto Workers' efforts to organize foreign vehicle plants (Daimler-Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volkswagen) in the American South since 1989, an era when union membership declined precipitously. Stephen J. Silvia chronicles transnational union cooperation between the UAW and its counterparts in Brazil, France, Germany, and Japan and documents the development of employer strategies that have proven increasingly effective at thwarting unionization.

Silvia shows that when organizing, unions must now fight on three fronts: at the worksite; in the corporate boardroom; and in the political realm. The UAW's Southern Gamble makes clear that the UAW's failed campaigns in the South can teach hard-won lessons about challenging the structural and legal roadblocks to union participation and effectively organizing workers within and beyond the auto industry.

Stephen J. Silvia is a Professor at American University's School of International Service, where he teaches international economics, international trade relations, and comparative politics. He is the author of Holding the Shop Together.

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The History of Washington D.C., America’s New Rome

Wed, 29 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Renowned Asia expert Michael Auslin is pivoting from Asia instead of towards it: today, he joins Madison's Notes to discuss his new project on the history of Washington, D.C., which, like ancient Rome or Victorian London, is a world capital of a nation at the height of its power. He explores the city's development from its early days to its role during pivotal moments in American history, including the Civil War and the Cold War, building on the research he shares in his Substack The Patowmack Packet.

Dr. Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is the author of six books, including Asia's New Geopolitics and The End of the Asian Century, as well as the host of The Pacific Century podcast. Previously, he was an associate professor of history at Yale University, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo. He is also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the senior advisor for Asia at the Halifax International Security Forum, a senior fellow at London’s Policy Exchange, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

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Dan Chapman, "A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir's Journey Through an Endangered Land" (Island Press, 2022)

Sat, 11 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In 1867, John Muir set out on foot to explore the botanical wonders of the South, keeping a detailed journal of his adventures as he traipsed from Kentucky southward to Florida. One hundred and fifty years later, on a similar whim, veteran Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman, distressed by sprawl-driven environmental ills in a region he loves, recreated Muir’s journey to see for himself how nature has fared since Muir’s time. Channeling Muir, he uses humor, keen observation, and a deep love of place to celebrate the South’s natural riches. But he laments that a treasured way of life for generations of Southerners is endangered as long-simmering struggles intensify over misused and dwindling resources. Chapman seeks to discover how Southerners might balance surging population growth with protecting the natural beauty Muir found so special.

Each chapter touches upon a local ecological problem—at-risk species in Mammoth Cave, coal ash in Kingston, Tennessee, climate change in the Nantahala National Forest, water wars in Georgia, aquifer depletion in Florida—that resonates across the South. Chapman delves into the region’s natural history, moving between John Muir’s vivid descriptions of a lush botanical paradise and the myriad environmental problems facing the South today. Along the way he talks to locals with deep ties to the land—scientists, hunters, politicians, and even a Muir impersonator—who describe the changes they’ve witnessed and what it will take to accommodate a fast-growing population without destroying the natural beauty and a cherished connection to nature.

A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir's Journey Through an Endangered Land (Island Press, 2022) is part travelogue, part environmental cri de coeur, and paints a picture of a South under siege. It is a passionate appeal, a call to action to save one of the loveliest and most biodiverse regions of the world by understanding what we have to lose if we do nothing.

Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel University where he teaches courses in U.S. and public history. His research interests focus on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South. Connect with him at Matthew Simmons | LinkedIn.

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Robert K. D. Colby, "An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Fri, 10 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery and, after a four-year struggle to become an independent slaveholding republic, died as emancipation dawned. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting the American South.

An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South (Oxford UP, 2024) shows, slave trading helped Southerners survive and fight the Civil War, as well as to build the future for which they fought. They mitigated the crises the war spawned by buying and selling enslaved people, using this commerce to navigate food shortages, unsettled gender roles, the demands of military service, and other hardships on the homefront. Some Rebels speculated wildly in human property, investing in slaves to ward off inflation and to buy shares in the slaveholding nation they hoped to create. Others traded people to counter the advance of emancipation. Given its centrality to their nationhood, Confederates went to great lengths to prolong the slave trade, which, in turn, supported the Confederacy. For those held in slavery, the surviving slave trade dramatically shaped their pursuit of freedom, inserting a retrograde movement into some people's journeys toward liberty while inspiring others to make the risky decision to escape.

Offering an original perspective on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, the Civil War, and emancipation, Robert K.D. Colby illuminates the place of the peculiar institution within the Confederate mind, the ways in which it underpinned the CSA's war effort, and its impact on those attempting to seize their freedom.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Kendra Y. Hamilton, "Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Fri, 10 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Kendra Y. Hamilton’s Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess (University of Georgia Press, 2024) is a literary and cultural history of the Gullah Geechee Coast, a four-state area that is one of only a handful of places that can truly be said to be the “cradle of Black culture” in the United States. An African American ethnic group who predominantly live in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida within the coastal plain and the Sea Islands, the Gullah people have preserved a significant influence of Africanisms because of their unique geographic isolation.

This book seeks to fill a significant cultural gap in Gullah history. While there is a veritable industry of books on literary Charleston and on the Lowcountry, along with a plenitude of Gullah-inspired studies in history, anthropology, linguistics, folklore, and religion, there has never been a comprehensive study of the region’s literary influence, particularly in the years of the Harlem and Charleston Renaissance. By giving voice to artists and culture makers, uncovering buried histories, and revealing secret cross-racial connections amid official practices of Jim Crow, Hamilton sheds new light on an incomplete cultural history.

Dr. Kendra Y. Hamilton is an associate professor of English and Director of Southern Studies at Presbyterian College.

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Crystal Wilkinson, "Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks" (Clarkson Potter, 2023)

Thu, 02 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Years ago, when O. Henry Prize-winning writer Crystal Wilkinson was baking a jam cake, she felt her late grandmother’s presence. She soon realized that she was not the only cook in her kitchen; there were her ancestors, too, stirring, measuring, and braising alongside her. These are her kitchen ghosts, five generations of Black women who settled in Appalachia and made a life, a legacy, and a cuisine.

An expert cook, Wilkinson shares nearly forty family recipes rooted deep in the past, full of flavor—delicious favorites including Corn Pudding, Chicken and Dumplings, Granny Christine’s Jam Cake, and Praisesong Biscuits, brought to vivid life through stunning photography. Together, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks (Clarkson Potter, 2023) honors the mothers who came before, the land that provided for generations of her family, and the untold heritage of Black Appalachia.

As the keeper of her family’s stories and treasured dishes, Wilkinson shares her inheritance in Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts. She found their stories in her apron pockets, floating inside the steam of hot mustard greens and tucked into the sweet scent of clove and cinnamon in her kitchen. Part memoir, part cookbook, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts weaves those stories together with recipes, family photos, and a lyrical imagination to present a culinary portrait of a family that has lived and worked the earth of the mountains for over a century.

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John H. Cable, "Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi" (UP of Kansas, 2023)

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Historians of the American South have come to consider the mechanization and consolidation of cotton farming—the “Southern enclosure movement”—to be a watershed event in the region’s history. In the decades after World War II, this transition pushed innumerable sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and smallholders off the land, redistributing territory and resources upward to a handful of large, mainly white operators. By disproportionately displacing Black farmers, enclosure also slowed the progress of the civil rights movement and limited its impact.

Dr. John Cable’s Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (University Press of Kansas, 2023) is among the first studies to explore that process through the interpretive lens of settler colonialism. Focusing on east-central Mississippi, home of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Dr. Cable situates enclosure in the long history of dispossession that began with Indian Removal. The book follows elite white landowners and Black and Choctaw farmers from World War II to 1960—the period when the old, labor-intensive farm structure collapsed. By acknowledging that this process occurred on taken land, Dr. Cable demonstrates that the records of agricultural agents, segregationist politicians, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) are traces of ongoing colonization.

The settler colonial framework, rarely associated with the postwar South, sheds important light on the shifting categories of race and class. It also prompts comparisons with other settler societies (states in southern and eastern Africa, for instance) whose timelines, racial regimes, and agrarian transitions were similar to those of the South. This postwar history of the South suggests ways in which the BIA’s termination policy dovetailed with Southern segregationism and, at the same time, points to some of the shortcomings of the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies.

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Joseph M. Thompson, "Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism" (UNC Press, 2024)

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Country music maintains a special, decades-long relationship to American military life, but these ties didn't just happen. This readable history reveals how country music's Nashville-based business leaders on Music Row created partnerships with the Pentagon to sell their audiences on military service while selling the music to service members. Beginning in the 1950s, the military flooded armed forces airwaves with the music, hosted tour dates at bases around the world, and drew on artists from Johnny Cash to Lee Greenwood to support recruitment programs.

Over the last half of the twentieth century, the close connections between the Defense Department and Music Row gave an economic boost to the white-dominated sounds of country while marginalizing Black artists and fueling divisions over the meaning of patriotism. This story is filled with familiar stars like Roy Acuff, Elvis Presley, and George Strait, as well as lesser-known figures: industry executives who worked the halls of Congress, country artists who dissented from the stereotypically patriotic trappings of the genre, and more.

In Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism (UNC Press, 2024), Joseph M. Thompson argues convincingly that the relationship between Music Row and the Pentagon helped shape not only the evolution of popular music but also race relations, partisanship, and images of the United States abroad.

Joseph M. Thompson is assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University.

Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University.

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Greg Jarrell, "Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods" (Fortress Press, 2024)

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Greg Jarrell's book Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods (Fortress Press, 2024) uncovers how race, geography, policy, and religion have created haunted landscapes in Charlotte, North Carolina, and throughout the United States. How do we value our lands, livelihoods, and communities? How does our theology inform our capacity--or lack thereof--for memory? What responsibilities do we bear toward those who have been harmed, not just by individuals but by our structures and collective ways of being in the world?

Abram and Annie North, both born enslaved, purchased a home in the historically Black neighborhood of Brooklyn in the years following the Civil War. Today, the site of that home stands tucked beneath a corner of the First Baptist Church property on a site purchased under the favorable terms of Urban Renewal campaigns in the mid-1960s. How did FBC wind up in what used to be Brooklyn--a neighborhood that no longer exists? What happened to the Norths? How might we heal these hauntings? This is an American story with implications far beyond Brooklyn, Charlotte, or even the South. By carefully tracing the intertwined fortunes of First Baptist Church and the formerly enslaved North family, Jarrell opens our eyes to uncomfortable truths with which we all must reckon.

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Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, "Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America" (UNC Press, 2023)

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Boardinghouse Women: How Southern Keepers, Cooks, Nurses, Widows, and Runaways Shaped Modern America (UNC Press, 2023), Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South; some also carried the institution to far-flung places like California, New York, and London. Owned and operated by Black, Jewish, Native American, and white women, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, these lodgings were often hubs of business innovation and engines of financial independence for their owners. Within their walls, boardinghouse residents and owners developed the region's earliest printed cookbooks, created space for making music and writing literary works, formed ad hoc communities of support, tested boundaries of race and sexuality, and more. Engelhardt draws on a vast archive to recover boardinghouse women's stories, revealing what happened in the kitchens, bedrooms, hallways, back stairs, and front porches as well as behind closed doors—legacies still with us today.

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Max Fraser, "Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The “hillbilly highway” was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians. In Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class (Princeton University Press, 2023), Dr. Max Fraser recovers the long-overlooked story of this massive demographic event and reveals how it has profoundly influenced American history and culture—from the modern industrial labour movement and the postwar urban crisis to the rise of today’s white working-class conservatives.

The book draws on a diverse range of sources—from government reports, industry archives, and union records to novels, memoirs, oral histories, and country music—to narrate the distinctive class experience that unfolded across the Transappalachian migration during these critical decades. As the migration became a terrain of both social advancement and marginalisation, it knit together white working-class communities across the Upper South and the Midwest—bringing into being a new cultural region that remains a contested battleground in American politics to the present.

The compelling story of an important and neglected chapter in American history, Hillbilly Highway upends conventional wisdom about the enduring political and cultural consequences of the great migration of white southerners in the twentieth century.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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.

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Whitney Nell Stewart, "This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations" (UNC Press, 2023)

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US national story, however, has shifted the meaning of these sites. Plantations are no longer simply seen as places of beauty and grandiose hospitality; their reality as spaces of enslavement, exploitation, and violence is increasingly at the forefront of our scholarly and public narratives. Yet even this reckoning obscures what these sites meant to so many forced to live and labor on them: plantations were Black homes as much as white.

Insightfully reading the built environment of plantations, considering artifact fragments found in excavations of slave dwellings, and drawing on legal records and plantation owners' papers, Whitney Nell Stewart illuminates how enslaved people struggled to make home amid innumerable constraints and obstacles imposed by white southerners.

In This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations (UNC Press, 2023), Stewart demonstrates how homemaking was a crucial part of the battle over slavery and freedom, a fight that continues today in consequential confrontations over who has the right to call this nation home.

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Jonathan W. White, "Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), historian Jonathan W. White tells the riveting story of Appleton Oaksmith, a swashbuckling sea captain whose life intersected with some of the most important moments, movements, and individuals of the mid-19th century, from the California Gold Rush, filibustering schemes in Nicaragua, Cuban liberation, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Most importantly, the book depicts the extraordinary lengths the Lincoln Administration went to destroy the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Using Oaksmith’s case as a lens, White takes readers into the murky underworld of New York City, where federal marshals plied the docks in lower Manhattan in search of evidence of slave trading. Once they suspected Oaksmith, federal authorities had him arrested and convicted, but in 1862 he escaped from jail and became a Confederate blockade-runner in Havana. The Lincoln Administration tried to have him kidnapped in violation of international law, but the attempt was foiled. Always claiming innocence, Oaksmith spent the next decade in exile until he received a presidential pardon from U.S. Grant, at which point he moved to North Carolina and became an anti-Klan politician. Through a remarkable, fast-paced story, this book will give readers a new perspective on slavery and shifting political alliances during the turbulent Civil War Era.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Thomas Mareite, "Conditional Freedom: Free Soil and Fugitive Slaves from the U.S. South to Mexico's Northeast, 1803-1861" (Brill, 2024)

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

While the literature on slave flight in nineteenth-century North America has commonly focused on fugitive slaves escaping to the U.S. North and Canada, Conditional Freedom: Free Soil and Fugitive Slaves from the U.S. South to Mexico's Northeast, 1803-1861 (Brill, 2024) provides new insights on the social and political geography of freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century North America by exploring the development of southern routes of escape from slavery in the U.S. South and the experiences of self-emancipated slaves in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. In Conditional Freedom, Thomas Mareite offers a social history of U.S. refugees from slavery, and provides a political history of the clash between Mexican free soil and the spread of slavery west of the Mississippi valley during the nineteenth-century.

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Sean M. Kelley, "American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644-1865" (Yale UP, 2023)

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral to the larger story of American slavery.

In American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644-1865 (Yale UP, 2023), Kelley examines the experience of captivity, drawing on more than a hundred African narratives to offer a portrait of enslavement in the regions of Africa frequented by American ships. Kelley also provides a social history of the two American ports where slave trading was most intensive, Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island.

In telling this tragic, brutal, and largely unknown story, Kelley corrects many misconceptions while leaving no doubt that Americans were a nation of slave traders.

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Ilyon Woo, "Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom" (Simon and Schuster, 2023)

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom (Simon and Schuster, 2023) tells the remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his” slave.

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.

Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day—among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again—this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher.

With three epic journeys compressed into one monumental bid for freedom, Master Slave Husband Wife is an American love story—one that would challenge the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all—one that challenges us even now.

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Edda Fields-Black, "Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.

In Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford UP, 2023), Edda L. Fields-Black--herself a descendent of one of the participants in the raid--shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina's Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.

Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman's US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida.

After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, married, and buried each other. These formerly enslaved peoples on the Sea Island indigo and cotton plantations, together with those in the semi-urban port cities of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and on rice plantations in the coastal plains, created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity--perhaps the most significant legacy of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid.

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Kristine M. McCusker, "Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955" (U Illinois Press, 2023)

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Kristine M. McCusker's book Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955 (U Illinois Press, 2023) takes, as its focus, the combined history of death and health in the American South between 1900 and 1955. The text is ambitious in scope, and weaves together multiple oral histories to create a nuanced and engaging narrative. McCusker charts the ways in which low life expectancy in the South was regarded as problematic by commercial life insurance firms, concerned that their customers were paying insufficient dues before mortality provoked funeral expenditures, and the various Churches seeking to save souls before an untimely demise robbed them of the opportunity. Both agencies were heavily invested in health care. McCusker expertly weaves further threads into this complex narrative: Southern funeral practices, the theological basis for strong belief in family re-union at death, and racial divides that created exclusions and opportunities for the Black Americans to express their own deathways, increasingly supported through commercial enterprise. Two World Wars test and refine common frameworks for organizing the dead, and McCusker underlines the importance, amongst other things, of etiquette guidance on the correct ways to grieve and to express condolence. This is a remarkably rich text that will intrigue a more general readership and prove essential to death scholars in the US and further afield.

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Neema Avashia, "Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place" (West Virginia UP, 2022)

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003 and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in March 2022. It has been called “A timely collection that begins to fill the gap in literature focused mainly on the white male experience” by Ms. Magazine, and “A graceful exploration of identity, community, and contradictions,” by Scalawag. The book was named Best LGBTQ Memoir of 2022 by BookRiot, was one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, and was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Weatherford Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. Neema lives in Boston with her partner, Laura, and her daughter, Kahani.

Julia H. Lee is professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of three books: Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (New York University Press, 2011), Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston (University of South Carolina Press, 2018), and The Racial Railroad (New York University Press, 2022). With Professor Josephine Lee, she is co-editor of Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022. You can find her on Instagram @julia.x.lee.

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Matthew Fox-Amato, "Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Sat, 24 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Shortly after its introduction, photography transformed the ways Americans made political arguments using visual images. In the mid-19th century, photographs became key tools in debates surrounding slavery. Yet, photographs were used in interesting and sometimes surprising ways by a range of actors. Matthew Fox-Amato, an Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho, examines the role of photography in the politics of slavery during the 19th century and the important legacies of those uses on later visual politics in his new book, Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Oxford University Press, 2019). The book examines the use of photographs by slaves, abolitionists, slaveholders, and Union soldiers to explore the rich complexities of the visual politics of the moment. He also considers the legacies of this use of the new medium.

In this episode of the podcast, Fox-Amato discusses the ways these various groups used photography for individual purposes and to shape the debates surrounding slavery in the antebellum period. He explains how photographs also highlight how union soldiers were beginning to think about a post-slavery racial hierarchy during the war. The book demonstrates the importance of thinking about photographs as both visual images and material objects. In the interview, Fox-Amato discusses the research necessary to analyze the photographs in both these ways and the broader importance of studying visual and material culture in all their historical complexity.

Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.

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Gregory D. Smithers, "Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In his book, Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal(University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Dr. Gregory D. Smithers effectively articulates the complex history of Native Southerners. Smithers conveys the history of Native Southerners through numerous historical eras while properly reinterpreting popular misconceptions about the past in a way that is compelling and easy to understand. Smithers expresses the rich and complex history of Native Southerners as it was while exposing the reality of settler colonialism and U.S. removal policies. As shown throughout the book, Native Southerners were constantly adapting to a changing world. But ultimately Native Southerners flourished, leading Smither to state, “My, how the architects of removal and assimilation failed.”

Gregory D. Smithers is an American historian with a particular interest in the rich history of the Cherokee people, Indigenous history in the Southeast, and environmental history. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis. He has taught in California, Hawaii, Scotland, and Ohio. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he is a professor of American history and Eminent Scholar in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Colin Mustful has an M.A. in history from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is currently a candidate for an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Augsburg University. You can learn more about his work at his website: www.colinmustful.com.

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Norman Hill and Velma Murphy Hill, "Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain: The Extraordinary Story of Love, Civil Rights, and Labor Activism" (Regalo Press, 2023)

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The remarkable story of a couple who came together during the civil rights movement and made fighting for equality and civil and workers' rights their purpose for more than sixty years, overcoming adversity--with the strength of their love and commitment--to bring about meaningful change,

When Velma Murphy was knocked unconscious by a brick thrown by a man from an angry white mob and was carried away by Norman Hill, it was the beginning of a six-decade-long love story and the turmoil, excitement, and struggle for civil rights and labor movements. In Climbing the Rough Side of the Mountain: The Extraordinary Story of Love, Civil Rights, and Labor Activism (Regalo Press, 2023), the Hills reflect upon their more than half a century of fighting to make America realize the best of itself.

Through profound conversations between the two, Velma and Norman Hill share their earliest memories of facing racial segregation in the 1960s, working with Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph, crossing paths with Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. They also reveal how they kept white supremacists like David Duke from taking office, organized workers into unions, met with Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and continued to work tirelessly, fighting the good fight and successfully challenging power with truth.

Norman Hill was the national program director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), staff coordinator for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, staff representative of the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, and president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute from 1980 to 2004, the longest tenure in the organization’s history. He remains its president emeritus.

Velma Murphy Hill, a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was a leader of the Chicago Wade-In to integrate Rainbow Beach, East Coast field secretary for CORE, and assistant to the president of the United Federation of Teachers, where she unionized 10,000 paraprofessionals, mostly Black and Hispanic, working in New York public schools. She was vice president of the American Federation of Teachers and International Affairs and civil rights director of the Service Employees International Union.

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Jeanne Theoharis, "The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South" (NYU Press, 2019)

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In this New Books Network/Gotham Center for NYC History podcast, guest host Beth Harpaz, editor of the City University of New York website SUM, interviews Jeanne Theoharis, distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College. Their topic is a new book just out from NYU Press, co-edited by Theoharis, called The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South (NYU Press, 2019).

The book looks at the history of institutionalized racism around the U.S., showing that laws, policies, and entitlements in every region of the country not only created segregated communities, but also promoted affluence and opportunities for white Americans while keeping African Americans out of the middle class.

“There did not need to be a ‘no coloreds’ sign for hotels, restaurants, pools, parks, housing complexes, schools, and jobs to be segregated across the North as well,” wrote Theoharis and her co-editor Professor Brian Purnell of Bowdoin College.

In the podcast, Theoharis shows how African-Americans have faced discrimination in everything from pre-Civil War legal codes in New York, to 20th-century government programs like Social Security and the G.I. bill. She and Harpaz also discuss the ways in which the legacy of these racist policies persist today in public education, the criminal justice system, and other aspects of American society.

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Todd Mildfelt and David D. Schafer, "Abolitionist of the Most Dangerous Kind: James Montgomery and His War on Slavery" (U Oklahoma Press, 2023)

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A controversial character largely known (as depicted in the movie Glory) as a Union colonel who led Black soldiers in the Civil War, James Montgomery (1814-71) waged a far more personal and radical war against slavery than popular history suggests. It is the true story of this militant abolitionist that Todd Mildfelt and David D. Schafer tell in Abolitionist of the Most Dangerous Kind: James Montgomery and His War on Slavery (U Oklahoma Press, 2023), summoning a life fiercely lived in struggle against the expansion of slavery into the West and during the Civil War.

This book follows a harrowing path through the turbulent world of the 1850s and 1860s as Montgomery, with the fervor of an Old Testament prophet, inflicts destructive retribution on Southern slaveholders wherever he finds them, crossing paths with notable abolitionists John Brown and Harriet Tubman along the way. During the tumultuous years of "Bleeding Kansas," he became a guerilla chieftain of the antislavery vigilantes known as Jayhawkers. When the war broke out in 1861, Montgomery led a regiment of white troops who helped hundreds of enslaved people in Missouri reach freedom in Kansas. Drawing on regimental records in the National Archives, the authors provide new insights into the experiences of African American men who served in Montgomery's next regiment, the Thirty-Fourth United States Colored Troops (formerly Second South Carolina Infantry).

Montgomery helped enslaved men and women escape via one of the least-explored underground railways in the nation, from Arkansas and Missouri through Kansas and Nebraska. With support of abolitionists in Massachusetts, he spearheaded resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in Kansas. And, when war came, he led Black soldiers in striking at the very heart of the Confederacy. His full story thus illuminates the actions of both militant abolitionists and the enslaved people fighting to destroy the peculiar institution.

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Elizabeth Varon, "Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South" (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

An authoritative biography of the controversial Confederate general, who later embraced Reconstruction and became an outcast in the South.

It was the most remarkable political about-face in American history. During the Civil War, General James Longstreet fought tenaciously for the Confederacy. He was alongside Lee at Gettysburg (and counseled him not to order the ill-fated attacks on entrenched Union forces there). He won a major Confederate victory at Chickamauga and was seriously wounded during a later battle.

After the war Longstreet moved to New Orleans, where he dramatically changed course. He supported Black voting and joined the newly elected, integrated postwar government in Louisiana. When white supremacists took up arms to oust that government, Longstreet, leading the interracial state militia, did battle against former Confederates. His defiance ignited a firestorm of controversy, as white Southerners branded him a race traitor and blamed him retroactively for the South's defeat in the Civil War.

Although he was one of the highest-ranking Confederate generals, Longstreet has never been commemorated with statues or other memorials in the South because of his postwar actions in rejecting the Lost Cause mythology and urging racial reconciliation. He is being rediscovered in the new age of racial reckoning. Elizabeth Varon's Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023) is the first biography in decades and the first to give proper attention to Longstreet's long post-Civil War career.

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Ethel Morgan Smith, "Path to Grace: Reimagining the Civil Rights Movement" (UP of Mississippi, 2023)

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The civil rights movement is often defined narrowly, relegated to the 1950s and 1960s, and populated by such colossal figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Many forget that the movement was bigger than the figures on the frontline and that it grew from intellectual and historical efforts that continue today. In Path to Grace: Reimagining the Civil Rights Movement (UP of Mississippi, 2023), Ethel Morgan Smith shines a light on unsung heroes of the civil rights movement, the ordinary citizens working behind the scenes to make an impact in their communities.

Through eleven original interviews with teachers, parents hosting fundraisers for civil rights workers, volunteers helping with voter registration, and more, Smith highlights the contributions these figures made to the civil rights movement. Some of these brave warriors worked at the elbows of icons while others were clearing new paths, all passing through history without wide recognition. Path to Grace introduces readers to new witnesses and largely neglected voices. Also included are interviews with such esteemed but less studied figures as writer Gloria Naylor, poet Nikki Giovanni, fashion designer Ann Lowe, and educator Constance Curry.

This work of social change situates these narratives in both the past and present. Indeed, many of Smith’s subjects, such as Emma Bruce, John Canty, Andrea Lee, Ann Lowe, and Blanche Virginia Franklin Moore, can trace their ancestry back to enslavement, which provides a direct chain of narrators and firmly plants the roots of the civil rights movement in the country’s foundation. Through historical contextualization and an analysis of contemporary sociopolitical events, Path to Grace celebrates the contributions of some of the nameless individuals, generation after generation, who worked to make the United States better for all its citizens.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a Doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.

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Joseph C. Russo, "Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas" (Duke UP, 2022)

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas (Duke UP, 2022) (Duke UP, 2023), Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of Southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke. His informants’ stories cover a wide swath of experiences, from histories of LGBTQ+ life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the Refinery Belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backward victims of circumstances. Russo demonstrates that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.

Joseph C. Russo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University.

Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor.

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Bradley R. Clampitt, "Lost Causes: Confederate Demobilization and the Making of Veteran Identity" (LSU Press, 2022)

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Lost Causes: Confederate Demobilization and the Making of Veteran Identity (LSU Press, 2022) by Dr. Bradley R. Clampitt is a groundbreaking analysis of Confederate demobilisation. The book examines the state of mind of Confederate soldiers in the immediate aftermath of war. Having survived severe psychological as well as physical trauma, they now faced the unknown as they headed back home in defeat. Lost Causes analyses the interlude between soldier and veteran, suggesting that defeat and demobilisation actually reinforced Confederate identity as well as public memory of the war and southern resistance to African American civil rights.

Intense material shortages and images of the war’s devastation confronted the defeated soldiers-turned-veterans as they returned home to a revolutionised society. Their thoughts upon homecoming turned to immediate economic survival, a radically altered relationship with freedpeople, and life under Yankee rule—all against the backdrop of fearful uncertainty. Dr. Clampitt argues that the experiences of returning soldiers helped establish the ideological underpinnings of the Lost Cause and create an identity based upon shared suffering and sacrifice, a pervasive commitment to white supremacy, and an aversion to Federal rule and all things northern. As Lost Causes reveals, most Confederate veterans remained diehard Rebels despite demobilization and the demise of the Confederate States of America.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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.

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Scott Gac, "Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Scott Gac's Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America (Cambridge UP, 2023) investigates one of history's most violent undertakings: The United States of America. People the world over consider violence in the United States as measurably different than that which troubles the rest of the globe, citing reasons including gun culture, the American West, Hollywood, the death penalty, economic inequality, rampant individualism, and more. This compelling examination of American violence explains a political culture of violence from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age, illustrating how physical force, often centered on racial hierarchy, sustained the central tenets of American liberal government. It offers an important story of nationhood, told through the experiences and choices of civilians, Indians, politicians, soldiers, and the enslaved, providing historical context for understanding how violence has shaped the United States from its inception.

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Aimee Loiselle, "Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class" (UNC Press, 2023)

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a blockbuster 1979 film, Norma Rae, featuring Sally Field in the title role. This fascinating book reveals how the film and the popular icon it created each worked to efface the labor history that formed the foundation of the film's story. Drawing on an impressive range of sources--union records, industry reports, film scripts, and oral histories--Aimee Loiselle's cutting-edge scholarship shows how gender, race, culture, film, and mythology have reconfigured and often undermined the history of the American working class and their labor activism.

While Norma Rae constructed a powerful image of individual defiance by a white working-class woman, Loiselle's Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) demonstrates that female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds understood the significance of cultural representation and fought to tell their own stories. Loiselle painstakingly reconstructs the underlying histories of working women in this era and makes clear that cultural depictions must be understood as the complicated creations they are.

Aimee Loiselle is assistant professor of history at Central Connecticut State University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Kami Fletcher and Ashley Towle, "Grave History: Death, Race, and Gender in Southern Cemeteries" (U Georgia Press, 2023)

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Kami Fletcher and Ashley Towle’s edited collection Grave History: Death, Race and Gender in Southern Cemeteries (University of Georgia Press, 2023), demonstrates how Jim Crow laws extended into the realms of the dead. Cemeteries throughout the Southern states either relegated Black funerals to the margins in existing cemeteries or excluded the community altogether, often citing the excuse that inclusion would create unrest amongst white lot-holders, and disturb the peace of the cemetery. Burial spaces become demonstrative of oppression, but could also signal resistance to oppression. This impressive text provides an essential primer in African American cemetery history and illustrates how the Black community created frameworks of community support to ensure that homegoing services were dignified and affordable. Chapters also explore the historic importance of African American burial grounds, where grave markers are uniquely important to the recreation of otherwise poorly documented communities. The chapters also lean into the problems intrinsic to interpreting the material culture of oppression, where historic Black identities risk becoming fixed within narratives of victimhood.

The book includes workshop guidance for teachers, for use with students at all stages in the education process.

Dr Julie Rugg is Director of the Cemetery Research Group, University of York, UK.

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Amy Von Lintel, "Georgia O'Keeffe's Wartime Texas Letters" (Texas A&M UP, 2020)

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 1912, at age 24, Georgia O’Keeffe boarded a train in Virginia and headed west, to the prairies of the Texas Panhandle, to take a position as art teacher for the newly organized Amarillo Public Schools. Subsequently she would join the faculty at what was then West Texas State Normal College (now West Texas A&M University). Already a thoroughly independent-minded woman, she maintained an active correspondence with her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and other friends back east during the years she lived in Texas.

In Georgia O'Keeffe's Wartime Texas Letters (Texas A&M UP, 2020), Amy Von Lintel brings to readers the collected O’Keeffe correspondence and added commentary and analysis, shining fresh light on a period of the artist’s life she characterizes as “some of the least appreciated in the vast O’Keeffe scholarship,” but also as “a time when she discovered her own voice as a young, successful, and independent woman . . . a dedicated faculty member at a brand-new college . . . a vibrant social butterfly . . . a progressive woman who spoke her mind and fought for her beliefs to be heard.”

Although selected paintings by O’Keeffe that support the narrative are featured, this work focuses on O’Keeffe’s words. By doing so, Von Lintel aims to allow the artist’s voice to “emerge as a powerful witness of her own life, but also of western America in a pivotal moment of its development.” The result is an important new examination of one of our most beloved artists during a time when she was in the process of discovering her future identity.

Amy Von Lintel is the Doris Alexander Endowed Professor of Fine Arts at West Texas A&M University. She is the author of Georgia O’Keeffe: Watercolors and coauthor of Robert Smithson in Texas. She resides in Amarillo, Texas.

Kirstin L. Ellsworth is an Associate Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills.

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Laurent Dubois, “The Banjo: America’s African Instrument” (Harvard UP, 2016)

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Most scholars of popular music use songs, artists, and clubs as the key texts and sites in their exploration of the social, cultural, political, and economic effects of music. Laurent Dubois‘ new book looks at the history of an instrument, the banjo, to help us better understand American history and culture. Dubois also helps readers understand the banjo as part of an Afro-Atlantic musical heritage.

In The Banjo: Americas African Instrument (Harvard University Press, 2015), Dubois examines how the banjo came into existence in the Americas and what it reveals about debates about American culture. Dubois book starts in Africa with a wide range of instruments that shaped the banjo. He then follows these instruments as they cross the Atlantic in the Middle Passage, winding up in the Caribbean and in North America. Sifting through travelers accounts and documents in archives, Dubois shows how the banjo brought together African peoples in the Americas, creating a familiar but new instrument and sound. He describes the banjo as the product of parallel development in which many enslaved musicians deployed similar instrument-making strategies to create what we now know as the banjo.

The story, however, does not stop there. The banjo came to represent authentic Africa American and American culture and became a key symbol in abolitionist rhetoric and minstrelsy. As a result, the banjo was not simply an instrument but a powerful marker of identity within American culture. Dubois traces how the banjo played a significant role in jazz, country, bluegrass, and folk music, symbolizing a diverse set of values and politics. From the minstrel Joel Walker Sweeney to the political activist Pete Seeger, the history of the banjo is the history of American popular culture.

Laurent Dubois is Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University. He is also the author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. More information about his work on the banjo can be found at Banjology and Musical Passage.

Richard Schur, Professor of English at Drury University, is the host for this podcast.

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Claudia Smith Brinson, "Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina" (U South Carolina Press, 2020)

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

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.

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Carl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962" (U Virginia Press, 2020)

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

By 1935 William Faulkner was well established as an author of critically praised novels, yet the low volume of his sales forced him to seek work in Hollywood. As Carl Rollyson details in The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), this led to an itinerant life divided between Mississippi and Hollywood. Rollyson shows how his encounters with the politicized writers and European refugees who populated the film industry helped broaden his outlook, which was reflected in the injection of anti-fascist elements into his scripts and novels. By the end of the Second World War, Faulkner enjoyed a growing international status that culminated with receiving the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, which cemented his place at the forefront of American literature. Though a reluctant celebrity, Faulkner embraced his status by becoming an informal ambassador of American values abroad, while using his position as an unofficial spokesperson of the South to criticize the mistreatment of Blacks in the region and call for improvements in race relations.

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Yael A. Sternhell, "War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War" (Yale UP, 2023)

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Yael A. Sternhell's War on Record: The Archive and the Aftermath of the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2023) is a history of the United States' greatest archival project and how it has shaped what we know about the Civil War. The Civil War generated a vast archive of official records--documents that would shape the postwar era and determine what future generations would know about the war. Yael Sternhell traces these records from their creation during wartime through their deployment in a host of postwar battles, including those between the federal government and Southerners seeking reparations and between veterans blaming each other for defeat.

These documents were eventually published in the most important historical collection ever to have been assembled in the United States: The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and the Confederate Armies. Known as the OR, it is the ultimate source for generations of scholars and writers and ordinary citizens researching the war. By delving into the archive, Sternhell reveals its power to shape myths, hide truths, perpetuate rancor, and foster reconciliation. Far more than a storehouse of papers, the Civil War archive is a major historical actor in its own right.

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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Michelle R. Scott, "T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners' Booking Association in Jazz-Age America" (U Illinois Press, 2023)

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Black vaudevillians and entertainers joked that T.O.B.A. stood for "tough on black artists." But the Theater Owner's Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) played a foundational role in the African American entertainment industry. T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners’ Booking Association in Jazz-Age America by Michelle R. Scott (University of Illinois Press, 2023) examines this circuit of vaudeville theaters active between 1920 and 1930 which booked blues singers, comedians, dancers, and many other kinds of entertainers into Black-serving theaters throughout the United States. T.O.B.A. launched and nurtured the careers of many Black performers including Cab Calloway, Sammy Davis Jr., Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Hattie McDaniel. Scott traces T.O.B.A.’s antecedents in the first decades of the twentieth century and documents the ten years of its existence. She contextualizes T.O.B.A. within the politics of segregated America, the Black communities served by its theaters, and its effect on the lives and careers of thousands of Black performers.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Jack D. Noe, "Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South" (LSU Press, 2021)

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Examining identity and nationalism in the Reconstruction-era South, Jack Noe’s Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South (Louisiana State University Press, 2021) investigates debates concerning the One Hundredth Anniversary of American Independence. This commemoration, which came only seven years after the conclusion of the Civil War, provided a crucible for whites, Blacks, northerners, and southerners to reflect on their identity as Americans and their memories of the recent conflict.

Using a rich archive, including a variety of newspapers, Contesting Commemoration illustrates how the Centennial became embroiled in the fierce political and racial debates of Reconstruction. African Americans celebrated this opportunity to assert their Americanness, while White Southerners approached the celebration with a profound pragmatism and flexibility, only partially re-embracing American nationalism as they attempted to maintain Southern distinctiveness.

Contesting Commemoration follows events in Philadelphia, where ten million visitors came to celebrate the Centennial, and in communities across the South. It is a searching interrogation of the powers of American memory, the bitter debates of Reconstruction, and continued contestations over Southern distinctiveness.

Jack Noe is a Teaching Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London and also lectures at Durham University. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, but a long-time resident of the United Kingdom, he earned his PhD from the University of Leeds in 2018.

Thomas Cryer is a PhD Student in American History at University College London, where he studies race, nationhood, and memory through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin.

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Rachel Stephens, "Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture" (U Arkansas Press, 2023)

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists crafted a variety of visual messages about the plight of enslaved people, portraying the violence, familial separation, and dehumanisation that they faced. In response, proslavery southerners attempted to counter these messages either through idealisation or outright erasure of enslaved life.

In Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture (University of Arkansas Press, 2023), Dr. Rachel Stephens addresses an enormous body of material by tracing themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera, connecting long overlooked artworks with both the abolitionist materials to which they were responding and archival research across a range of southern historical narratives.

Dr. Stephens begins her fascinating study with an examination of the ways that slavery was visually idealised and defended in antebellum art. She then explores the tyranny—especially that depicted in art—enacted by supporters of enslavement, introduces a range of ways that artwork depicting slavery was tangibly concealed, considers photographs of enslaved female caretakers with the white children they reared, and investigates a printmaker’s confidential work in support of the Confederacy. Finally, she delves into an especially pernicious group of proslavery artists in Richmond, Virginia. Reading visual culture as a key element of the antebellum battle over slavery, Hidden in Plain Sight complicates the existing narratives of American art and history.

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Edward L. Ayers, "American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860" (Norton, 2023)

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860 (Norton, 2023) is a revealing history of the formative period when voices of dissent and innovation defied power and created visions of America still resonant today.

With so many of our histories falling into dour critique or blatant celebration, here is a welcome departure: a book that offers hope as well as honesty about the American past. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest.

Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs. So, Lydia Maria Child condemned the racism of her fellow northerners at great personal cost. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse all charted new paths for America in the realms of art, nature, belief, and technology. It was Henry David Thoreau who, speaking of John Brown, challenged a hostile crowd "Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong?" Through decades of award-winning scholarship on the Civil War, Edward L. Ayers has himself ventured beyond the interpretative status quo to recover the range of possibilities embedded in the past as it was lived. Here he turns that distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today.

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William S. Kiser, "Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The 19th-century Mexican-American borderlands were a complicated place. By the 1860s, Confederates, Americans, Mexicans, French, and various Native societies were all scheming and vying for control of the region bifurcated by the Rio Grande. In Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the U.S.- Mexico Borderlands (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), Texas A&M-San Antonio history professor William Kiser untangles the knotty history of this place at this time. For the United States, the Mexican borderlands were a problem - porous, difficult to control, and threatening to American sovereignty. For the Confederacy, the borderlands were a screen onto which they could project their dreams of a southern empire of slavery. For Mexicans, the borderlands represented their lack of control and political instability, while for Native people, they were homelands, to be defended at all costs. The borderlands were thus a contested space, where that same contestation shaped policy and outcomes of international crises, including the Civil War and the French Intervention. Kiser asks us to expand the boundaries of "Greater Reconstruction" to include not just the American West, but to cross international boundaries as well.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History.

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Jennifer E. Brooks, "Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama" (LSU Press, 2022)

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Immigrant laborers who came to the New South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves poised uncomfortably between white employers and the Black working class, a liminal and often precarious position. Campaigns to recruit immigrants primarily aimed to suppress Black agency and mobility. If that failed, both planters and industrialists imagined that immigrants might replace Blacks entirely. Thus, white officials, citizens, and employers embraced immigrants when they acted in ways that sustained Jim Crow. However, when they directly challenged established political and economic power structures, immigrant laborers found themselves ostracized, jailed, or worse, by the New South order. Both industrial employers and union officials lauded immigrants' hardworking and noble character when it suited their purposes, and both denigrated and racialized them when immigrant laborers acted independently.

Jennifer E. Brooks's Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama (LSU Press, 2022) restores immigrant laborers to their place in the history of the New South, considering especially how various immigrant groups and individuals experienced their time in New South Alabama. Brooks utilizes convict records, censuses, regional and national newspapers, government documents, and oral histories to construct the story of immigrants in New South Alabama. The immigrant groups she focuses on appeared most often as laborers in the records, including the Chinese, southern Italians, and the diverse nationals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with a sprinkling of others. Although recruitment crusades by Alabama's employers and New South boosters typically failed to bring in the vast numbers of immigrants they had envisioned, significant populations from around the world arrived in industries and communities across the state, especially in the coal- and ore-mining district of Birmingham.

Resident Strangers reveals that immigrant laborers' presence and individual agency complicated racial categorization, disrupted labor relations, and diversified southern communities. It also presents a New South that was far from isolated from the forces at work across the nation or in the rest of the world. Immigrant laborers brought home to New South Alabama the turbulent world of empire building, deeply embedding the region in national and global networks of finance, trade, and labor migration.

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Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter.

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Matthew J. Clavin, "Symbols of Freedom: Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War" (NYU Press, 2023)

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In the early United States, anthems, flags, holidays, monuments, and memorials were powerful symbols of an American identity that helped unify a divided people. A language of freedom played a similar role in shaping the new nation. The Declaration of Independence’s assertion “that all men are created equal,” Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty, or give me death!,” and Francis Scott Key’s “star-spangled banner” waving over “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” were anthemic celebrations of a newly free people. Resonating across the country, they encouraged the creation of a republic where the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was universal, natural, and inalienable.

For enslaved people and their allies, the language and symbols that served as national touchstones made a mockery of freedom. Deriding the ideas that infused the republic’s founding, they encouraged an empty American culture that accepted the abstract notion of equality rather than the concrete idea. Yet, as award-winning author Matthew J. Clavin reveals, it was these powerful expressions of American nationalism that inspired forceful and even violent resistance to slavery.

Symbols of Freedom: Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War (NYU Press, 2023) is the surprising story of how enslaved people and their allies drew inspiration from the language and symbols of American freedom. Interpreting patriotic words, phrases, and iconography literally, they embraced a revolutionary nationalism that not only justified but generated open opposition. Mindful and proud that theirs was a nation born in blood, these disparate patriots fought to fulfill the republic’s promise by waging war against slavery.

In a time when the US flag, the Fourth of July, and historical sites have never been more contested, this book reminds us that symbols are living artifacts whose power is derived from the meaning with which we imbue the

Matthew J. Clavin is Professor of History at the University of Houston and the author of The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers, and Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution.

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Greg Beets and Richard Whymark, "A Curious Mix of People: The Underground Scene of '90s Austin" (U Texas Press, 2023)

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Ask anyone outside of Austin what they know about the city and chances are the first thing they'll mention is the music. While the Armadillo Era has been well-chronicled, there is no book about Austin music in the 90s. In their new book, A Curious Mix of People: The Underground Scene of '90s Austin (University of Texas Press, 2023), veterans of the sccene Greg Beets and Richard Whymark have put together an oral history of the decade. Beets and Whymark are not trying to cover all of the music made in Austin during the 1990s; they're most interested in the underground/punk community in which they participated. While a few of those bands got big (e.g., Spoon), the music remained mostly local, DIY. It was driven by live shows, though local media (radio, TV, print), record stores, and a few labels were also important to the story. Beets and Whymark devote chapters to those elements, but almost half of the chapters are based around a particular club. Organizing the book around physical spaces is not only appropriate for telling the story of the music, it is nice framing for the larger story of Austin. As the authors note, the city was still a relatively sleepy place in the early 1990s, with vacant blocks downtown and loads of small clubs that opened and closed simply because music-minded people wanted a place to play. By 1999, longtime venues like the Electric Lounge and Liberty Lunch were bulldozed to make way for development and tech companies.

Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

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Drew A. Swanson, "A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction" (UNC Press, 2023)

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden's impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina. In A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction (UNC Press, 2023), Drew A. Swanson tells a story of race, politics, and social power shaped by violence and profit. The struggle for dominance in Reconstruction-era rural North Carolina, Swanson argues, was an economic and ecological transformation. Arson, beating, and murder became tools to control people and landscapes, and the ramifications of this violence continued long afterward. The failure to prosecute anyone for decades after John Stephens's assassination left behind a vacuum, as each side shaped its own memory of Stephens and his murder.

The malleability of and contested storytelling around Stephens's legacy presents a window into the struggle to control the future of the South.

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Nikki M. Taylor, "Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and experiences, Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance (Cambridge UP, 2023) strongly challenges assumptions that enslaved women only participated in covert, non-violent forms of resistance, when in fact they consistently seized justice for themselves and organized toward revolt.

Nikki M. Taylor expertly reveals how women killed for deeply personal instances of injustice committed by their owners. The stories presented, which span centuries and legal contexts, demonstrate that these acts of lethal force were carefully pre-meditated. Enslaved women planned how and when their enslavers would die, what weapons and accomplices were necessary, and how to evade capture in the aftermath. Original and compelling, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge presents a window into the lives and philosophies of enslaved women who had their own ideas about justice and how to achieve it.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Marisel C. Moreno, "Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art" (U Texas Press, 2022)

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Debates over the undocumented migration of Latin Americans invariably focus on the southern US border, but most migrants never cross that arbitrary line. Instead, many travel, via water, among the Caribbean islands. The first study to examine literary and artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean, Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art (U Texas Press, 2022) relates a journey that remains silenced and largely unknown.

Analyzing works by novelists, short-story writers, poets, and visual artists replete with references to drowning and echoes of the Middle Passage, Marisel Moreno shines a spotlight on the plight that these migrants face. In some cases, Puerto Rico takes on a new role as a stepping-stone to the continental United States and the society migrants will join there. Meanwhile the land border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the only terrestrial border in the Hispanophone Caribbean, emerges as a complex space within this cartography of borders. And while the Border Patrol occupies US headlines, the Coast Guard occupies the nightmares of refugees.

An untold story filled with beauty, possibility, and sorrow, Crossing Waters encourages us to rethink the geography and experience of undocumented migration and the role that the Caribbean archipelago plays as a border zone.

Marisel C. Moreno is the Rev. John O'Brien Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Family Matters: Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the Mainland.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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Danielle N. Boaz, "Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

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Nick Tabor, "Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created" (St. Martin's Press, 2023)

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

An evocative and epic story, Nick Tabor's Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created (St. Martin's Press, 2023) charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution.

In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon.

That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates’ direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive. Many community members believe the pollution from the heavy industry surrounding their homes has caused a cancer epidemic among residents, and companies are eyeing even more land for development.

At the same time, after the discovery of the remains of the Clotilda in the riverbed nearby, a renewed effort is underway to create a living memorial to the community and the lives of the slaves who founded it.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Kristen Green, "The Devil's Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave Jail" (Seal Press, 2022)

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The inspiring true story of an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation’s first HBCUs. In The Devil's Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave Jail (Seal Press, 2022), New York Times bestselling author Kristen Green draws on years of research to tell the extraordinary and little-known story of young Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who blazed a path of liberation for thousands. She was forced to have the children of a brutal slave trader and live on the premises of his slave jail, known as the “Devil’s Half Acre.”

When she inherited the jail after the death of her slaveholder, she transformed it into “God’s Half Acre,” a school where Black men could fulfill their dreams. It still exists today as Virginia Union University, one of America’s first Historically Black Colleges and Universities. A sweeping narrative of a life in the margins of the American slave trade, The Devil’s Half Acre brings Mary Lumpkin into the light. This is the story of the resilience of a woman on the path to freedom, her historic contributions, and her enduring legacy.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Robert Greene and Tyler D. Parry, "Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina" (U South Carolina Press, 2021)

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Since its founding in 1801, African Americans have played an integral, if too often overlooked, role in the history of the University of South Carolina. Robert Greene and Tyler D. Parry's edited volume Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina (U South Carolina Press, 2021) seeks to recover that historical legacy and reveal the many ways that African Americans have shaped the development of the university. The essays in this volume span the full sweep of the university's history, from the era of slavery to Reconstruction, Civil Rights to Black Power and Black Lives Matter. This collection represents the most comprehensive examination of the long history and complex relationship between African Americans and the university.

Like the broader history of South Carolina, the history of African Americans at the University of South Carolina is about more than their mere existence at the institution. It is about how they molded the university into something greater than the sum of its parts. Throughout the university's history, Black students, faculty, and staff have pressured for greater equity and inclusion. At various times they did so with the support of white allies, other times in the face of massive resistance; oftentimes, there were both.

Between 1868 and 1877, the brief but extraordinary period of Reconstruction, the University of South Carolina became the only state-supported university in the former Confederacy to open its doors to students of all races. This "first desegregation," which offered a glimpse of what was possible, was dismantled and followed by nearly a century during which African American students were once again excluded from the campus. In 1963, the "second desegregation" ended that long era of exclusion but was just the beginning of a new period of activism, one that continues today. Though African Americans have become increasingly visible on campus, the goal of equity and inclusion—a greater acceptance of African American students and a true appreciation of their experiences and contributions—remains incomplete. Invisible No More represents another contribution to this long struggle.

A foreword is provided by Valinda W. Littlefield, associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of South Carolina. Henrie Monteith Treadwell, research professor of community health and preventative medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine and one of the three African American students who desegregated the university in 1963, provides an afterword.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Alejandra Dubcovsky, "Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South" (Yale UP, 2023)

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Historian Alejandra Dubcovsky tells a story of war, slavery, loss, remembrance, and the women whose resilience and resistance transformed the colonial South. In exploring their lives she rewrites early American history, challenging the established male-centered narrative.

In Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale UP, 2023), Dubcovsky reconstructs the lives of Native women—Timucua, Apalachee, Chacato, and Guale—to show how they made claims to protect their livelihoods, bodies, and families. Through the stories of the Native cacica who demanded her authority be recognized; the elite Spanish woman who turned her dowry and household into a source of independent power; the Floridiana who slapped a leading Native man in the town square; and the Black woman who ran a successful business at the heart of a Spanish town, Dubcovsky reveals the formidable women who claimed and used their power, shaping the history of the early South.

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Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, "The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn" (UNC Press, 2023)

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (UNC Press, 2023), award-winning historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson, owner of Blue Spring Farm, veteran of the War of 1812, and US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds of the estate. This meant that Chinn, although enslaved herself, oversaw Blue Spring's slave labor force and had substantial control over economic, social, financial, and personal affairs within the couple's world. Chinn's relationship with Johnson was unlikely to have been consensual since she was never manumitted.

What makes Chinn's life exceptional is the power that Johnson invested in her, the opportunities the couple's relationship afforded her and her daughters, and their community's tacit acceptance of the family—up to a point. When the family left their farm, they faced steep limits: pews at the rear of the church, burial in separate graveyards, exclusion from town dances, and more. Johnson’s relationship with Chinn ruined his political career and Myers compellingly demonstrates that it wasn't interracial sex that led to his downfall but his refusal to keep it—and Julia Chinn—behind closed doors.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Scott Creney and Brigette Adair Herron, "The Story of the B-52s: Neon Side of Town" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Story of the B-52s: Neon Side of Town (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) is the first critical history of one of the most legendary and influential bands in American popular music. Locating The B-52s in the intellectual climate of their hometown of Athens, GA and following the band from New York's downtown scene in the early 1980s to their upcoming farewell tour, the book argues that The B-52s are much more significant political and musical influences on American society than their reputation as a silly party band suggests, and that their ongoing commitment to values including cooperation, mutual support, and using disruptive fun as a form of social change are an antidote to the neoliberalization sweeping both Athens and the rest of the Western world.

For example, the book shows how the band synthesized influences from the modern artists displayed at the University of Georgia art museum, early queer activism on campus in the 1970s, and their experiences as queer people living through the AIDS crisis to create music that continues to be artistically and politically influential today. The authors are active members of the Athens, GA music scene, and the book includes original interviews with a range of number close to the band.

Scott Creney is author of the work of creative nonfiction Dear Al-Qaeda: Letters to the World's Most Notorious Terror Organization (Black Ocean). They have written about music, books, and film for Clash Music, The Fanzine, Collapse Board, and Ablaze!, among others, and contributed six entries to 101 Albums You Should Die Before You Hear. Scott was also the bass player for the Athens band Tunabunny.

Scott on Twitter.

Brigette Adair Herron holds a Ph.D. in Adult Education from the University of Georgia and is author/co-author of numerous peer reviewed academic articles and a scholarly monograph. Her writing on music has been featured in the book 101 Albums You Should Die Before You Hear, and on the web publications Collapse Board, Vice, and Eldredge Atlanta. She is a multi-instrumentalist with a long history in the Athens music scene.

Brigette on Instagram.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, "Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution" (Polity, 2023)

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In their remarkable new book Slavery, Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution (Polity, 2023), Professor Maxine Berg and Professor Pat Hudson “follow the money” to document in revealing detail the role of slavery in the making of Britain’s industrial revolution. Slavery was not just a source of wealth for a narrow circle of slave owners who built grand country houses and filled them with luxuries. The forces set in motion by the slave and plantation trades seeped into almost every aspect of the economy and society.

In textile mills, iron and copper smelting, steam power, and financial institutions, slavery played a crucial part. Things we might think far removed from the taint of slavery, like 18th century fashions for indigo- patterned cloth, sweet tea, snuff boxes, mahogany furniture, ceramics and silverware, were intimately connected. Even London’s role as a centre for global finance was partly determined by the slave trade as insurance, financial trading and mortgage markets were developed in the City to promote distant and risky investments in enslaved people.

The result is a bold and unflinching account of how Britain became a global superpower, and how the legacy of slavery persists. Acknowledging Britain’s role in slavery is not just about toppling statues and renaming streets. We urgently need to come to terms with slavery’s inextricable links with Western capitalism, and the ways in which many of us continue to benefit from slavery to this day.

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Rebecca J. Fraser, "Black Female Intellectuals in 19th Century America: Born to Bloom Unseen?" (Routledge, 2022)

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Drawing on letters, personal testimony, works of art, novels, and historic Black newspapers, this book is an interdisciplinary exploration of Black women’s contributions to the intellectual life of nineteenth-century America.

Rebecca J Fraser's book Black Female Intellectuals in 19th Century America: Born to Bloom Unseen? (Routledge, 2022) reconceptualizes the idea of what the term "intellectual" means through its discussions of both familiar and often forgotten Black women, including Edmonia Lewis, Harriet Powers, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, amongst others. This re-envisioning brings those who have previously been excluded from the scholarship of Black intellectualism more generally, and Black female intellectuals specifically, into the center of the debate. Importantly, it also situates the histories of Black women participating in the intellectual cultures of the United States much earlier than most previous scholarship.

This book will be of interest to both undergraduate and postgraduate specialists and students in the fields of African American history, women’s and gender history, and American studies, as well as general readers interested in historical and biographical works.

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Dylan C. Penningroth, "Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights" (Liveright, 2023)

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A prize-winning scholar draws on astonishing new research to demonstrate how Black people used the law to their advantage long before the Civil Rights Movement.

The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America’s legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn’t join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome power to be avoided whenever possible. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law. Soon, ordinary African Americans, awakened by Supreme Court victories and galvanized by racial justice activists, launched the civil rights movement.

In Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023), acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these “rights of everyday use,” Penningroth demonstrates, they made Black rights seem unremarkable. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself—the laws all of us live under today.

Penningroth’s narrative, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of his own family. Challenging accepted understandings of Black history framed by relations with white people, he puts Black people at the center of the story—their loves and anger and loneliness, their efforts to stay afloat, their mistakes and embarrassments, their fights, their ideas, their hopes and disappointments, in all their messy humanness. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life—a vision allied with, yet distinct from, “the freedom struggle.”

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Laura F. Edwards, "The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South" (UNC Press, 2009)

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Do individuals have the right to “keep and bear” arms? Do “the people” have any collective rights to public safety? Now that the United States Supreme Court requires each side to argue based on the “history” and “tradition” of 1791 and 1868, what do scholars tell us about legal practices and public understanding in those times? Dr. Laura F. Edwards argues that Americans in the South transformed their understanding of inequality during the half century following the Revolutionary War. Drawing on extensive archival research in North and South Caroline, she outlines the changes in the legal system, highlighting the importance of localized legal practices that favored maintaining the "peace”: a concept intended to protect the social order and its patriarchal hierarchies. Ordinary people, rather than legal professionals and political leaders, were central to its workings. People without rights – even those enslaved – “had influence within the system because of their positions of subordination, not in spite of them.” Edwards documents how, by the 1830s, state leaders secured support for a more centralized system that excluded people who were not specifically granted individual rights, including women, African Americans, and the poor. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (UNC Press, 2009) concludes that the emphasis on rights affirmed and restructured existing patriarchal inequalities, giving them new life within state law with implications that affected all Americans.

This award-winning 2009 book is now central to a new Supreme Court case (United States v. Rahimi) dealing with domestic violence and guns – and has been cited in the legal briefs.

Dr. Laura F. Edwards is the Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University and the award-winning author of four books. Most recently, she wrote Only the Clothes on Her Back: Textiles, Law, and Commerce in the Nineteenth-Century United States published by Oxford in 2022.

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Diane Flynt, "Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived: The Surprising Story of Apples in the South" (UNC Press, 2023)

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

For anyone who's ever picked an apple fresh from the tree or enjoyed a glass of cider, writer and orchardist Diane Flynt offers a new history of the apple and how it changed the South and the nation. Showing how southerners cultivated over 2,000 apple varieties from Virginia to Mississippi, Flynt shares surprising stories of a fruit that was central to the region for over 200 years. Colorful characters abound in this history, including aristocratic Belgian immigrants, South Carolina plantation owners, and multiple presidents, each group changing the course of southern orchards.

In Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived: The Surprising Story of Apples in the South (UNC Press, 2023), she shows how southern apples, ranging from northern varieties that found fame on southern soil to hyper-local apples grown by a single family, have a history beyond the region, from Queen Victoria's court to the Oregon Trail. Flynt also tells us the darker side of the story, detailing how apples were entwined with slavery and the theft of Indigenous land. She relates the ways southerners lost their rich apple culture in less than the lifetime of a tree and offers a tentatively hopeful future.

Alongside unexpected apple history, Flynt traces the arc of her own journey as a pioneering farmer in the southern Appalachians who planted cider apples never grown in the region and founded the first modern cidery in the South. Flynt threads her own story with archival research and interviews with orchardists, farmers, cidermakers, and more. The result is not only the definitive story of apples in the South but also a new way to challenge our notions of history.

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Christopher F. Zurn, "Splitsville USA: A Democratic Argument for Breaking Up the United States" (Routledge, 2023)

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

At the end of the day, I have faith in the wisdom of democracy: the idea that good political solutions only arise from widely dispersed discussion, debate and decision among the broadest group of those affected. This book is intended, then, not as a finalized blueprint or technical report delivered from on high but as a conversation opener for democratic debate among my fellow citizens.

– Christopher F. Zurn, Splitsville USA (2023)

Splitsville USA: A Democratic Argument for Breaking Up the United States (Routledge, 2023) argues that it’s time for us to break up to save representative democracy, proposing a mutually negotiated, peaceful dissolution of the current United States into several new nations. Zurn begins by examining the United States’ democratic predicament, a road most likely headed for electoral authoritarianism, with distinct possibilities of ungovernability and violent civil strife. Unlike others who share this diagnosis, Zurn presents a realistic picture of how we can get to reform and what it would involve. It is argued that “Splitsville” represents the most plausible way for American citizens to continue living under a republican form of government. Despite recent talk of secession and civil war, this book offers the most extensive treatment yet of the issues we need to think through to enable a peacefully negotiated political divorce.

The publisher’s summary above of Professor Zurn’s latest book is a worthy overview, even more are the insightful thoughts and comments he shares in this interview. There is something here for everyone, as he shares insights about two key influences on his work - Honneth and Habermas, as well as his gratitude for his Northwestern graduate school experience under Thomas McCarthy in heady times when Nancy Fraser was still there.

Zurn explains his argument ‘that democracy minimally requires a widely shared precommitment to obeying and accepting the outcomes of free, fair and regular elections for political representatives’ and contends ‘if we look frankly at our current situation, we—the United States ‘we’—no longer sufficiently share this democratic precommitment.’

The professor elaborates on ideas and concepts such as ‘conflict entrepreneurs’ and their manipulation of an existential framing of our political struggles to gain and maintain power. However, he also makes clear that the American public agrees at a ‘high level on the basic values of American society’ and he expands his argument to ‘think about the complex constellation of values we want to realize in our politics’. As you will hear, Splitsville USA was written by an articulate and passionate voice that is both supportive and highly committed to saving representative government.

Some of Professor Zurn’s other books and chapters in edited books mentioned in this interview:

Deliberative Democracy and the Institutions of Judicial Review (2007)
Axel Honneth: A Critical Theory of the Social (2015)
Chapter 12: ‘Social Pathologies as Second-Order Disorders’ in Axel Honneth: Critical Essays - With a Reply by Axel Honneth (2011)
Introduction to The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2009)

Christopher Zurn is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

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Robert F. Moss, "The Lost Southern Chefs: A History of Commercial Dining in the Nineteenth-Century South" (U Georgia Press, 2022)

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In recent years, food writers and historians have begun to retell the story of southern food. Heirloom ingredients and traditional recipes have been rediscovered, the foundational role that African Americans played in the evolution of southern cuisine is coming to be recognized, and writers are finally clearing away the cobwebs of romantic myth that have long distorted the picture. The story of southern dining, however, remains incomplete.

The Lost Southern Chefs: A History of Commercial Dining in the Nineteenth-Century South (U Georgia Press, 2022) begins to fill that niche by charting the evolution of commercial dining in the nineteenth-century South. Robert F. Moss punctures long-accepted notions that dining outside the home was universally poor, arguing that what we would today call “fine dining” flourished throughout the region as its towns and cities grew. Moss describes the economic forces and technological advances that revolutionized public dining, reshaped commercial pantries, and gave southerners who loved to eat a wealth of restaurants, hotel dining rooms, oyster houses, confectionery stores, and saloons.

Most important, Moss tells the forgotten stories of the people who drove this culinary revolution. These men and women fully embodied the title “chef,” as they were the chiefs of their kitchens, directing large staffs, staging elaborate events for hundreds of guests, and establishing supply chains for the very best ingredients from across the expanding nation. Many were African Americans or recent immigrants from Europe, and they achieved culinary success despite great barriers and social challenges. These chefs and entrepreneurs became embroiled in the pitched political battles of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and then their names were all but erased from history.

Kelly Spivey is a writer and documentarian.

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A Better Way to Buy Books

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.

Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Race and Electrical Infrastructure in the Jim Crow South

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Conor Harrison, Associate Professor of Geography and the School of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of South Carolina, talks about his research into the racist development of electrical systems in the Jim Crow South with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. The pair discuss how Harrison’s research fits within larger trends in the academic discipline of geography and the kinds of empirical research Harrison did to support his articles on the racial dimensions of electricity infrastructure. They also discuss how Harrison’s research has shifted in recent years to focus on the financial structures of the electricity industry.

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. His first book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in July 2019.

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Padraic X. Scanlan, "Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain" (Robinson, 2021)

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But this claim that the British empire was 'free' and that, for all its flaws, it promised liberty to all its subjects was never true. The British empire was built on slavery.

Padraic X. Scanlan's book Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain (Robinson, 2021) puts enslaved people at the centre the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In intimate, human detail, the chapters show how British imperial power and industrial capitalism were inextricable from plantation slavery. With vivid original research and careful synthesis of innovative historical scholarship, Slave Empire shows that British freedom and British slavery were made together.

In the nineteenth century, Britain abolished its slave trade, and then slavery in its colonial empire. Because Britain was the first European power to abolish slavery, many Victorian Britons believed theirs was a liberal empire, promoting universal freedom and civilisation. And yet, the shape of British liberty itself was shaped by the labour of enslaved African workers. There was no bright line between British imperial exploitation and the 'civilisation' that the empire promised to its subjects. Nineteenth-century liberals were blind to the ways more than two centuries of colonial slavery twisted the roots of 'British liberty'.

Freedom - free elections, free labour, free trade - were watchwords in the Victorian era, but the empire was still sustained by the labour of enslaved people, in the United States, Cuba and elsewhere. Modern Britain has inherited the legacies and contradictions of a liberal empire built on slavery. Modern capitalism and liberalism emphasise 'freedom' - for individuals and for markets - but are built on human bondage.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Isabel Machado, "Carnival in Alabama: Marked Bodies and Invented Traditions in Mobile" (UP of Mississippi, 2023)

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Mobile is simultaneously a typical and unique city in the postwar United States. It was a quintessential boomtown during World War II. That prosperity was followed by a period of rapid urban decline and subsequent attempts at revitalizing (or gentrifying) its downtown area. As in many other US cities, urban renewal, integration, and other socioeconomic developments led to white flight, marginalized the African American population, and set the stage for the development of LGBTQ+ community building and subculture. Yet these usually segregated segments of society in Mobile converged once a year to create a common identity, that of a Carnival City.

Carnival in Alabama: Marked Bodies and Invented Traditions in Mobile (UP of Mississippi, 2023) looks not only at the people who participated in Mardi Gras organizations divided by race, gender, and/or sexual orientation, but also investigates the experience of “marked bodies” outside of these organizations, or people involved in Carnival through their labor or as audiences (or publics) of the spectacle. It also expands the definition of Mobile’s Carnival “tradition” beyond the official pageantry by including street maskers and laborers and neighborhood cookouts.

Using archival sources and oral history interviews to investigate and analyze the roles assigned, inaccessible to, or claimed and appropriated by straight-identified African American men and women and people who defied gender and sexuality normativity in the festivities (regardless of their racial identity), this book illuminates power dynamics through culture and ritual. By looking at Carnival as an “invented tradition” and as a semiotic system associated with discourses of power, it joins a transnational conversation about the phenomenon.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Jeanne K. Firth, "Feeding New Orleans: Celebrity Chefs and Reimagining Food Justice" (UNC Press, 2023)

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many high-profile chefs in New Orleans pledged to help their city rebound from the flooding. Several formed their own charitable organizations, including the John Besh Foundation, to help revitalize the region and its restaurant scene. A year and a half after the disaster when the total number of open restaurants eclipsed the pre-Katrina count, it was embraced as a sign that the city itself had survived, and these chefs arguably became the de facto heroes of the city's recovery. Meanwhile, food justice organizations tried to tap into the city's legendary food culture to fundraise, marketing high-end dining events that centered these celebrity chefs.

In Feeding New Orleans: Celebrity Chefs and Reimagining Food Justice (UNC Press, 2023), Jeanne K. Firth documents the growth of celebrity humanitarianism, viewing the phenomenon through the lens of feminist ethnography to understand how elite philanthropy is raced, classed, and gendered. Firth finds that cultures of sexism in the restaurant industry also infuse chef-led philanthropic initiatives. As she examines this particular flavor of elite, celebrity-based philanthropy, Firth illuminates the troubled relationships between consumerism, food justice movements, and public-private partnerships in development and humanitarian aid.

Kelly Spivey is a writer and documentarian.

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Kidada E. Williams, "I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked very different to African Americans in the South transitioning from bondage to freedom after 1865. They were besieged by a campaign of white supremacist violence that persisted through the 1880s and beyond. For too long, their lived experiences have been sidelined, impoverishing our understanding of the obstacles post-Civil War Black families faced, their inspiring determination to survive, and the physical and emotional scars they bore because of it.

In I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kidada E. Williams offers a breakthrough account of the much-debated Reconstruction period, transporting readers into the daily existence of formerly enslaved people building hope-filled new lives. Drawing on overlooked sources and bold new readings of the archives, Williams offers a revelatory and, in some cases, minute-by-minute record of nighttime raids and Ku Klux Klan strikes. And she deploys cutting-edge scholarship on trauma to consider how the effects of these attacks would linger for decades-indeed, generations-to come. For readers of Carol Anderson, Tiya Miles, and Clint Smith, I Saw Death Coming is an indelible and essential book that speaks to some of the most pressing questions of our times.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Kathryn J. Edin et al., "The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America" (Mariner Books, 2023)

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.

Three of the nation’s top scholars – known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.

This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. Immersing themselves in these communities, pouring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America—including inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the “internal colonies” in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse. The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America (Mariner Books, 2023) is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation’s places of deepest need.

Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Ana Lucia Araujo, "Museums and Atlantic Slavery" (Routledge, 2021)

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Ana Lucia Araujo's book Museums and Atlantic Slavery (Routledge, 2021) explores how slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved people are represented through words, visual images, artifacts, and audiovisual materials in museums in Europe and the Americas.

Divided into four chapters, the book addresses four recurrent themes: wealth and luxury; victimhood and victimization; resistance and rebellion; and resilience and achievement. Considering the roles of various social actors who have contributed to the introduction of slavery in the museum in the last thirty years, the analysis draws on selected exhibitions, and institutions entirely dedicated to slavery, as well as national, community, plantation, and house museums in the United States, England, France, and Brazil. Engaging with literature from a range of disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology, art history, tourism and museum studies, Araujo provides an overview of a topic that has not yet been adequately discussed and analysed within the museum studies field.

Museums and Atlantic Slavery encourages scholars, students, and museum professionals to critically engage with representations of slavery in museums. The book will help readers to recognize how depictions of human bondage in museums and exhibitions often fail to challenge racism and white supremacy inherited from the period of slavery.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst, "I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America" (UNC Press, 2023)

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Carl Ernst’s and Mbaye Lo’s new book I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar Ibn Said's America (UNC Press, 2023) is a fascinating and rivetting book that offers the most authoritative account to date of the life and Arabic writings of Omar Ibn Said, a scholar from what is today Senegal who was sold to slavery in the early 19th century and brought to Southern US. Moreover, this path paving book offers critical correctives to dominant perceptions of Said’s remarkable life narrative. Rather than understand Omar Ibn Said as a Muslim slave who had made peace with his new life in the US or had even converted to Christianity, Ernst and Lo demonstrate the deep imprints of Islam and Islamicate knowledge traditions in Omar Ibn Said’s varied writings such as his reflections on his life and his letters. This book, written in lyrical and engaging prose, makes available for the first time comprehensive translations of Omar Ibn Said’s Arabic writings into English. It also makes a compelling and convincing case for taking seriously Arabic texts from Africa as part of world literature.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Christopher C. Sellers, "Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis" (U Georgia Press, 2023)

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis (U Georgia Press, 2023) turns an environmental lens on Atlanta’s ascent to thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century. Uniquely wide ranging in scale, from the city’s variegated neighborhoods up to its place in regional and national political economies, this book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser known one on behalf of “the environment.” Arising out of Atlanta’s Black and white middle classes respectively, both movements owed much to New Deal capitalism’s undermining of concentrated wealth and power, if not racial segregation, in the Jim Crow South.

Placing these two movements on the same historical page, Christopher C. Sellers spotlights those environmental inequities, ideals, and provocations that catalyzed their divergent political projects. He then follows the intermittent, sometimes vital alliances they struck as civil rights activists tackled poverty, as a new environmental state arose, and as Black politicians began winning elections. Into the 1980s, as a wealth-concentrating style of capitalism returned to the city and Atlanta became a national “poster child” for sprawl, the seedbeds spread both for a national environmental justice movement and for an influential new style of antistatism. Sellers contends that this new conservativism, sweeping the South with an anti-environmentalism and budding white nationalism that echoed the region’s Jim Crow past, once again challenged the democracy Atlantans had achieved.

Christopher Sellers is professor of history at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Hazards of the Job, Crabgrass Crucible, Dangerous Trade, and Landscapes of Exposure, among other publications. He is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including those from the National Science Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Library of Medicine. He lives in Stony Brook, New York. Website. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Jennifer Cearns, "Circulating Culture: Transnational Cuban Networks of Exchange" (UP of Florida, 2023)

Sun, 20 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

“In this subtle and beautifully crafted ethnography, Cearns invites us to travel through the many Cuban circuits of exchange that give shape to mutating histories of connection within and between Havana and Miami. The result is an exhilarating and illuminating journey into the changing contours and expansive terrain of contemporary cubanidad.”—Jeffrey S. Kahn, author of Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire

Despite decades of diplomatic hostilities and economic sanctions, the border between Cuba and the United States—arguably one of the most politicized in the world—is in a state of constant flux. Tracing the flows of people, material items, and digital content between Havana and Miami, as well as between Cuba and Panama, Guyana, and Mexico, Circulating Culture: Transnational Cuban Networks of Exchange (UP of Florida, 2023) explores how and why these circuits are a part of everyday life for millions of Cubans who negotiate extraordinary circumstances daily.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic research in these locations, Jennifer Cearns highlights groups of Cuban society that are often overlooked, considering what Cuban culture and identity mean in a transnational setting. Weaving evocative vignettes into her discussion of these larger questions, Cearns pieces together the story of the creators of an emerging and dynamic network that punctures geopolitical boundaries and has outlasted a period of rapid social change—from the Obama administration through the death of Fidel Castro and into the Trump administration.

Ultimately, by focusing on everyday objects and the strategies used to move them across borders, this book reveals how new cultural forms can develop from the cracks in societies often seen as “broken.” It demonstrates the worldmaking of marginalized Cuban communities who have long been building their own infrastructures of possibility.

Jennifer Cearns is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at University College London and an associate research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute.

Katie Coldiron is based at Florida International University. She is Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean at FIU Libraries and doctoral student in the FIU Department of History.

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Carl Van Ness, "The Making of Florida's Universities: Public Higher Education at the Turn of the Twentieth Century" (UP of Florida, 2023)

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In The Making of Florida's Universities: Public Higher Education at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (UP of Florida, 2023), Carl Van Ness describes the remarkable formative years of higher education in Florida, comparing the trajectory to that of other states and putting it in context within the broader history and culture of the South. Central to this story is the Buckman Act of 1905, a state law that consolidated government support to three institutions and prompted decades of conflicts over where Florida’s public colleges and universities would be located, who would head them, and who would manage their affairs.

Van Ness traces the development of the schools that later became the University of Florida, Florida State University, and Florida A&M University. He describes little-known events such as the decision to move the University of Florida from its original location in Lake City, as well as a dramatic student rebellion at Florida A&M University in response to attempts to restrict Black students to vocational education and the subsequent firing of the president in 1923. The book also reflects on the debates regarding Florida’s normal schools, which provided coursework and practical training to teachers, a majority of whom were women. Utilizing rare historical records, Van Ness brings to light events in Florida’s history that have not been examined and that continue to affect higher education in the state today.

Carl Van Ness is university librarian emeritus at the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries.

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Bobby J. Smith II, "Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2023)

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Bobby J. Smith II's book Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2023 )unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Smith re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to sociopolitical and economic conditions. For decades, white economic and political actors used food as a weapon against Black sharecropping communities in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, but members of these communities collaborated with activists to transform food into a tool of resistance. Today, Black youth are building a food justice movement in the Delta to continue this story, grappling with inequalities that continue to shape their lives.

Drawing on multiple disciplines including critical food studies, Black studies, history, sociology, and southern studies, Smith makes critical connections between civil rights activism and present-day food justice activism in Black communities, revealing how power struggles over food empower them to envision Black food futures in which communities have the full autonomy and capacity to imagine, design, create, and sustain a self-sufficient local food system.

Kelly Spivey is a writer and documentarian.

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Jennifer Ritterhouse, "Discovering the South: One Man's Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s" (UNC Press, 2017)

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.

On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself. In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels's unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. Jennifer Ritterhouse's book Discovering the South: One Man's Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s (UNC Press, 2017) is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era. For more information on this book, see www.discoveringthesouth.org.

Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel University where he teaches courses in U.S. and public history. His research focuses on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Linda Skeens, "Linda Skeens' Blue Ribbon Kitchen: Recipes & Tips from America's Favorite County Fair Champion" (83 Press, 2023)

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Appalachian grandmother Linda Skeens became an internet sensation in the summer of 2022 after taking home dozens of blue ribbons in canning, baking, and crafting at the Virginia-Kentucky District Fair. The world soon learned that Linda had been entering county fairs for decades, frequently taking home the highest honors. Her first-ever published collection of recipes and family stories, Linda Skeens' Blue Ribbon Kitchen: Recipes & Tips from America's Favorite County Fair Champion (83 Press, 2023), answers the question that’s been on everyone’s mind.

In her new book, she shares over 100 of her prize-winning and family-favorite recipes along with helpful tips, unique crafts, cherished memories and uplifting poems. The book features more than 30 of her prize-winning recipes in addition to more than 70 other family-favorite dishes. From canning and fudges to stews and casseroles, this cookbook features a lifetime of recipes collected and perfected by Linda Skeens.

She joins New Books Network to talk about finding comfort in your kitchen, favorite cookbooks, tried-and-true ingredients that you can find on any supermarket shelf, and insights into how to win a blue ribbon or two at the next county fair.

Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at Vittlesvamp.com.

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Driving While Black: African Americans and the Automobile

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Gretchen Sorin, Director and Distinguished Professor of the Cooperstown Graduate Program at the State University of New York - Oneonta, talks about her book, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (Liveright, 2020), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Driving While Black examines how cars fit into black lives and sheds light on how this technology fits into much larger patterns of history, including the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements. Sorin and Vinsel also talk about the field of public history and communicating to non-academic audiences.

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Thurka Sangaramoorthy, "Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America" (UNC Press, 2023)

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America (UNC Press, 2023) examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, navigate the healthcare system in the United States. Since 1990, immigration to the United States has risen sharply, and rural areas have seen the highest increases. Thurka Sangaramoorthy reveals that the corporatization of healthcare delivery and immigration policies are deeply connected in rural America. Drawing from fieldwork that centers on Maryland's sparsely populated Eastern Shore, Sangaramoorthy shows how longstanding issues of precarity among rural health systems along with the exclusionary logics of immigration have mutually fashioned a "landscape of care" in which shared conditions of physical suffering and emotional anxiety among immigrants and rural residents generate powerful forms of regional vitality and social inclusion. Sangaramoorthy connects the Eastern Shore and its immigrant populations to many other places around the world that are struggling with the challenges of global migration, rural precarity, and health governance. Her extensive ethnographic and policy research shows the personal stories behind health inequity data and helps to give readers a human entry point into the enormous challenges of immigration and rural health.

This book is open access, courtesy of the TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) project. You can learn more about open-access books published by the University of North Carolina Press here.

Thurka Sangaramoorthy is professor of anthropology at American University.

Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican.

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Blair Kelley, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class" (LIveright, 2023)

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

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Finola O'Kane, "Landscape Design and Revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688-1815" (Paul Mellon Centre, 2023)

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Landscape Design and Revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688-1815 (Yale University Press, 2023) by Dr. Finola O’Kane explores how revolutionary ideas were translated into landscape design, encompassing liberty, equality, improvement and colonialism.

Spanning the designed landscapes of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution of 1776 and the Irish rebellion of 1798, with some detours into revolutionary France, this book traces a comparative history of property structures and landscape design across the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and evolving concepts of plantation and improvement within imperial ideology. Revolutionaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Washington, Arthur Young, Lord Edward FitzGerald and Pierce Butler constructed houses, farms and landscape gardens—many of which have since been forgotten or selectively overlooked. How did the new republics and revolutionaries, having overthrown social hierarchies, translate their principles into spatial form?

As the eighteenth-century ideology of improvement was applied to a variety of transatlantic and enslaved environments, new landscape designs were created—stretching from the suburbs of Dublin to the sea islands of the state of Georgia. Yet these revolutionary ideas of equality and freedom often contradicted reality, particularly where the traditional design of the great landed estate—the building block of aristocratic power throughout Europe—intersected with that of the farm and the plantation.

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Erica Abrams Locklear, "Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People" (U Georgia Press, 2023)

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

When her mother passed along a cookbook made and assembled by her grandmother, Erica Abrams Locklear thought she knew what to expect. But rather than finding a homemade cookbook full of apple stack cake, leather britches, pickled watermelon, or other “traditional” mountain recipes, Locklear discovered recipes for devil’s food cake with coconut icing, grape catsup, and fig pickles. Some recipes even relied on food products like Bisquick, Swans Down flour, and Calumet baking powder. Where, Locklear wondered, did her Appalachian food script come from? And what implicit judgments had she made about her grandmother based on the foods she imagined she would have been interested in cooking?

Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People (U Georgia Press, 2023) argues, in part, that since the conception of Appalachia as a distinctly different region from the rest of the South and the United States, the foods associated with the region and its people have often been used to socially categorize and stigmatize mountain people. Rather than investigate the actual foods consumed in Appalachia, Locklear instead focuses on the representations of foods consumed, implied moral judgments about those foods, and how those judgments shape reader perceptions of those depicted. The question at the core of Locklear’s analysis asks, How did the dominant culinary narrative of the region come into existence and what consequences has that narrative had for people in the mountains?

Kelly Spivey is a writer and documentarian.

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Rebecca Sharpless, "Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South" (UNC Press, 2022)

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

While a luscious layer cake may exemplify the towering glory of southern baking, like everything about the American South, baking is far more complicated than it seems. In Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South (UNC Press, 2022), Rebecca Sharpless here weaves a brilliant chronicle, vast in perspective and entertaining in detail, revealing how three global food traditions—Indigenous American, European, and African—collided with and merged in the economies, cultures, and foodways of the South to create what we know as the southern baking tradition.

Recognizing that sentiments around southern baking run deep, Sharpless takes delight in deflating stereotypes as she delves into the surprising realities underlying the creation and consumption of baked goods. People who controlled the food supply in the South used baking to reinforce their power and make social distinctions. Who used white cornmeal and who used yellow, who put sugar in their cornbread and who did not had traditional meanings for southerners, as did the proportions of flour, fat, and liquid in biscuits. By the twentieth century, however, the popularity of convenience foods and mixes exploded in the region, as it did nationwide. Still, while some regional distinctions have waned, baking in the South continues to be a remarkable, and remarkably tasty, source of identity and entrepreneurship.

Kelly Spivey is a writer and documentarian.

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African American Women on the American Railroad: A Conversation with Miriam Thaggert

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Miriam Thaggert, Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, talks about her book, Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad (University of Illinois Press, 2022), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Riding Jane Crow features creative uses of a wide variety of sources to reconstruct how African American women interacted with Jim Crow railroads as both riders and workers. Thaggert and Vinsel also discuss what kinds of research were necessary to reconstruct these stories and why so many previous histories of the railroad passed over the lives of black women, even when they were noticing black men.

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Nikki M. Taylor, "Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

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Thomas A. Castillo, "Working in the Magic City: Moral Economy in Early Twentieth-Century Miami" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In the early twentieth century, Miami cultivated an image of itself as a destination for leisure and sunshine free from labor strife. In Working in the Magic City: Moral Economy in Early Twentieth-Century Miami (U Illinois Press, 2022), Thomas A. Castillo unpacks this idea of class harmony and the language that articulated its presence by delving into the conflicts, repression, and progressive grassroots politics of the time. Castillo pays particular attention to how class and race relations reflected and reinforced the nature of power in Miami. Class harmony argued against the existence of labor conflict, but in reality obscured how workers struggled within the city's service-oriented seasonal economy. Castillo shows how and why such an ideal thrived in Miami's atmosphere of growth and boosterism and amidst the political economy of tourism. His analysis also presents class harmony as a theoretical framework that broadens our definitions of class conflict and class consciousness.

This episode was produced for "Working History," the podcast of the Southern Labor Studies Association.

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Sarah L. Hall, "Sown in the Stars: Planting by the Signs" (UP of Kentucky, 2023)

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted."—Ecclesiastes 3:1–2

The Appalachian region is deeply rooted in customs that have been handed down for generations. "Planting by the signs," a practice predicated on the belief that moon phases and astrological signs exert a powerful influence on the growth and well-being of crops, is deemed superstitious by some but has been considered essential to gardeners and farmers for centuries and is still in use today.

Sown in the Stars: Planting by the Signs (UP of Kentucky, 2023) brings together the collective knowledge of farmers in central and eastern Kentucky about the custom of planting by the signs. Sarah Hall interviews nearly two dozen contemporary Kentuckians who still follow the signs of the moon and stars to guide planting, harvesting, canning and food preservation, butchering, and general farmwork. Hall explores the roots of this system in both astrology and astronomy and the profound connections felt to the stars, moon, planets, and the earth. Revealed in the personal narratives are the diverse interpretations of the practice. Some farmers and gardeners believe that the moon's impact on crop behavior is purely scientific, while others favor a much wider interpretation of the signs and their impact on our lives. Featuring photographs by Meg Wilson, this timely book bridges the past, present, and future by broadening our understanding of this practice and revealing its potential to increase the resiliency of our current agricultural food systems.

Sarah L. Hall is associate professor of agriculture and natural resources at Berea College. Her scholarly articles on the restoration of native forests and grasslands in Kentucky have been published in a wide range of journals, including Restoration Ecology and New Forests.

Candy Boatwright is currently studying for a M.A. History degree at Clemson University. Her research focus is early South Carolina trade and commerce. She is also interested in material culture and memory. A long-time resident of the upstate she enjoys hiking and exploring the natural beauty as well as the historical places of South Carolina. Her personal website is www.candyrboatwright.net/blog and she is also on Twitter at @CandyBoatwright.

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Kathryn Olivarius, "Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom" (Harvard UP, 2022)

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the brutal inequities of slave-powered capitalism.

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses—and meager public health infrastructure—a person’s only protection against the scourge was to “get acclimated” by surviving the disease. About half of those who contracted yellow fever died.

Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans’s strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, what Kathryn Olivarius terms “immunocapital.” As this highly original analysis shows, white survivors could leverage their immunity as evidence that they had paid their biological dues and could then pursue economic and political advancement. For enslaved Blacks, the story was different. Immunity protected them from yellow fever, but as embodied capital, they saw the social and monetary value of their acclimation accrue to their white owners. Whereas immunity conferred opportunity and privilege on whites, it relegated enslaved people to the most grueling labor.

The question of good health—who has it, who doesn’t, and why—is always in part political. Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard UP, 2022) shows how powerful nineteenth-century white Orleanians—all allegedly immune—pushed this politics to the extreme. They constructed a society that capitalized mortal risk and equated perceived immunity with creditworthiness and reliability. Instead of trying to curb yellow fever through sanitation or quarantines, immune white Orleanians took advantage of the chaos disease caused. Immunological discrimination therefore became one more form of bias in a society premised on inequality, one more channel by which capital disciplined and divided the population.

Kendall Dinniene is an English PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work, revealing the contours of citizenship and paths toward liberation.

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Kidada E. Williams, "I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Joel Lafayette Fletcher III, "With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life" (UP of Mississippi, 2023)

Sun, 28 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Queer Voices I talk to Joel Lafayette Fletcher III about his book With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life (UP of Mississippi, 2023)

About the Author:

Joel Lafayette Fletcher, III served as an officer in the US Navy and lived abroad for a dozen years. He co-owned a language school in Florence, Italy, and worked in the field of educational exchange in Paris and London. For the past 40-plus years he has been an art dealer specializing in American and European art of the 20th Century.

About the Book:

With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life chronicles the fortunate life of a man born in the Cajun country of Louisiana and his interaction with the three distinct parts of his home state: the swampy, laissez-faire South where he was born, the red clay hills and piney woods of northern Louisiana where his relatives lived, and exotic New Orleans, where he was educated.

Author Joel Lafayette Fletcher III examines his childhood on the campus of what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where his father, Joel Lafayette Fletcher Jr., was president for twenty-five years, to his time as a student at Tulane. The book follows Fletcher through his service as a naval officer—when he began to admit to himself, accept, and explore who he really was—to his life in Europe and, eventually, Virginia where he now resides. With Hawks and Angels intimately explores the life of a young man growing up in the racially segregated Deep South while coming to terms with being gay at a time when being out was not socially acceptable.

Based on his personal journals and recollections and filled with the unique characters he met along the way, With Hawks and Angels is the culmination of writing that, for Fletcher, was a way of holding onto an important part of his true self that for many years he felt compelled to hide.

About the Host:

Morris Ardoin is the author of Stone Motel – Memoirs of a Cajun Boy (2020, University Press of Mississippi; paperback coming October 2023), which has been optioned for TV/film development. He also writes about medicine and health care, immigration and asylum, and higher education. He lives in Upstate New York. His blog, “Parenthetically Speaking,” which focuses on life as a writer, cook, and a bayou boy living in New York, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Instagram: morrisardoin.

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Ed Mitchell et al., "Ed Mitchell's Barbeque" (Ecco, 2023)

Fri, 26 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Ed Mitchell’s journey in the barbeque business began in 1991 with a lunch for his mama, who was grieving the loss of Ed’s father. Ed drove to the nearby Piggly Wiggly to buy a thirty-five-pound pig—that’s a small one—and fired up the coals. As smoke filled the air and the pork skin started to crackle, the few customers at the family bodega started to inquire about lunch and what smelled so good. More than thirty years later, Ed is known simply as “The Pitmaster” in barbeque circles and is widely considered one of the best at what he does.

From cracklin to hush puppies, fried green tomatoes to deviled eggs, okra poppers, skillet cornbread, potato salad, and pickled pigs’ feet, Ed Mitchell's Barbeque (Ecco, 2023) is filled with delicious and essential recipes honed over decades. And, of course, there is the barbeque—mouth-watering baby back ribs, smoked pork chops, backyard brisket, and barbequed chicken—all paired with lively and warmly told stories from the Mitchell family. Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque is rich with the history of Wilson, North Carolina, and yet promises to bring barbeque to the next level.

Ed’s son Ryan Mitchell, who is a renowned pitmaster in his own right, co-authored the book with his father, along with Zella Palmer.

Ryan talks to New Books Network about the unwritten chapters of the rich and complex history of North Carolina whole-hog barbeque – a method passed down through generations over the course of 125 years and hearkens back even further than that, to his ancestors who were plantation sharecroppers and, before that, enslaved. He shares stories of his father’s journey and his own, discusses the impetus behind the cookbook, and offers his views on the future of barbecue.

Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger at Vittlesvamp.com.

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Rebecca Brückmann, "Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation" (U Georgia Press, 2021)

Mon, 22 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood: White Women, Class, and Segregation (U Georgia Press, 2021) offers a comparative sociocultural and spatial history of white supremacist women involved in massive resistance. The book focuses on segregationist grassroots activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Charleston, South Carolina from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Dr. Rebecca Brückmann combines theory and detailed case studies to interrogate the “roles, actions, self-understandings, and media representations” of these segregationist women.

Dr. Brückmann argues that these women – motivated by an everyday culture of white supremacy – created performative spaces for their segregationist agitation in the public sphere to legitimize their actions. Unlike other studies of mass resistance that have focused on maternalism, Dr. Brückmann argues that women’s invocation of motherhood was varied and primarily served as a tactical tool to continuously expand these women’s spaces. Her book carefully differentiates the circumstances, tactics, and representations used in the creation of performative spaces by working-class, middle-class, and elite women engaged in massive resistance. Brückmann contrasts the transgressive “street politics” of working-class female activists in Little Rock and New Orleans with the more traditional political actions of segregationist, middle-class, and elite women in Charleston. While these women aligned white supremacist agitation with long-standing experience in conservative women’s clubs (e.g., United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution), working-class women’s groups (who lacked the economic, cultural, and social capital) chose consciously transgressive strategies, including violence, to elicit shock value and create states of emergency to further legitimize their actions and push for white supremacy. Dr. Brückmann’s nuanced work of history uses scholarship from sociology, political science, law, and other relevant disciplines to demonstrate how “interactions between class and status concerns, race, space, and gender shaped these women’s views and actions.”

Dr. Rebecca Brückmann is an Associate Professor of History at Carleton College. Her research and teachings interrogate African American history, the transnational history of the Black Diaspora, Southern US history, White Supremacy, and gender.

Daniela Lavergne assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Book Talk 60: Cleo McNellly Kearns on Mark Twain’s "Huckleberry Finn"

Sat, 20 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.” Toni Morrison explained that “the brilliance of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises…. The cyclical attempts to remove the novel from classrooms extend Jim’s captivity on into each generation of readers.” Ernest Hemingway claimed “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn… There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Ralph Waldo Ellison added that “Hemingway missed completely the structural, symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys rescue Jim. Yet it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance.”

I spoke with Cleo McNelly Kearns, author of a seminal essay on Jim’s role in the book, about Huckleberry Finn as a challenge and an opportunity for 21st-century readers to understand ourselves, our country, and our moral obligations more accurately.

Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer.

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The Life and Legacy of Robert E. Lee: A Conversation with Allen C. Guelzo

Tue, 16 May 2023 22:38:46 -0000

Why should we study Robert E. Lee? Why did he make the fateful decision to betray his country? How should we judge Robert E. Lee? Allen C. Guelzo, Director of the James Madison Program's Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship, joins Madison's Notes to answer these questions and others.

Guezlo is the author of Robert E. Lee: A Life.

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Bill Steigerwald, "30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South" (Lyons Press, 2017)

Sat, 13 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The dangerous, trailblazing work of a white journalist and black leader who struck a shocking early blow against legal segregation In 1948, most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for 10 million African Americans living in the Jim Crow South. Then, Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and alongside Atlanta s black civil rights pioneer John Wesley Dobbs lived as a black man in the South for thirty days. His impassioned newspaper series shocked millions and sparked the first nationally aired television-and-radio debate about ending America s shameful system of apartheid.

With 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South (Lyons Press, 2017), author Bill Steigerwald returns this long-forgotten part of American history to its rightful place among the seminal events of the Civil Rights movement. For 30 days and 3,000 miles, Sprigle and Dobbs traveled among dirt-poor sharecroppers, principals of ramshackle black schools, and families of lynching victims. The nationally syndicated newspaper series hit the media like an atom bomb, eliciting a fierce response from the Southern media. Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven years before the murder of Emmett Till, eight years before Little Rock s Central High School was integrated, and thirteen years before John Howard Griffin s similar experiment became the bestselling Black Like Me, an unlikely pair of heroes brought black lives to the forefront of American consciousness.

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Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, "Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia" (Fordham UP, 2022)

Mon, 08 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How is religious conversion transforming American democracy? In one corner of Appalachia, a group of American citizens has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church and through it Putin’s New Russia. Historically a minority immigrant faith in the United States, Russian Orthodoxy is attracting Americans who look to Russian religion and politics for answers to Western secularism and the loss of traditional family values in the face of accelerating progressivism.

Sarah Riccardi-Swartz's Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (Fordham UP, 2022) highlights an intentional community of converts who are exemplary of much broader networks of Russian Orthodox converts in the United States. These converts sought and found a conservatism more authentic than Christian American Republicanism and a nationalism unburdened by the broken promises of American exceptionalism. Ultimately, both converts and the Church that welcomes them deploy the subversive act of adopting the ideals and faith of a foreign power for larger, transnational political ends.

Offering insights into this rarely considered religious world, including its far-right political roots that nourish the embrace of Putin’s Russia, this ethnography shows how religious conversion is tied to larger issues of social politics, allegiance, (anti)democracy, and citizenship. These conversions offer us a window onto both global politics and foreign affairs, while also allowing us to see how particular U.S. communities are grappling with social transformations in the twenty-first century. With broad implications for our understanding of both conservative Christianity and right-wing politics, as well as contemporary Russian–American relations, this book provides insight in the growing constellations of far-right conservatism. While Russian Orthodox converts are more likely to form the moral minority rather than the moral majority, they are an important gauge for understanding the powerful philosophical shifts occurring in the current political climate in the United States and what they might mean for the future of American values, ideals, and democracy.

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Kyla Sommers, "When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellion and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation's Capital" (New Press, 2023)

Mon, 08 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible—or resulted in more property damage, arrests, or federal troop involvement—than in Washington, DC, where thousands took to the streets in protest against racial inequality, looting and burning businesses in the process. The nation’s capital was shaken to its foundations.

When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellion and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation's Capital (The New Press, 2023) tells the story of the Washingtonians who seized the moment to rebuild a more just society, one that would protect and foster Black political and economic power. A riveting account of activism, urban reimagination, and political transformation, Kyla Sommers’s revealing and deeply researched narrative is ultimately a tale of blowback, as the Nixon administration and its allies in Congress thwarted the ambitions of DC’s reformers, opposing civil rights reforms and self-governance. And nationwide, conservative politicians used the specter of crime in the capital to roll back the civil rights movement and create the modern carceral state.

A vital chapter in the struggle for racial equality, When the Smoke Cleared is an account of open wounds, paths not taken, and their unforeseen consequences—revealed here in all of their contemporary significance.

Dr Kyla Sommers earned her PhD in history at George Washington University. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Washington History journal, and Demand the Impossible: Essays in History as Activism (Westphalia Books, 2018). She is former editor-in-chief of the History News Network, and works as Digital Engagement Editor at American Oversight.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email, Mastodon or Twitter.

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Chad E. Pearson, "Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century" (UNC Press, 2022)

Tue, 02 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers, government officials, journalists, and powerful individuals deployed a variety of violent tactics to control ordinary people and workers who sought to secure power in and out of workplaces. In the face of worker resistance, employers and their allies collaborated to use a variety of extralegal repressive techniques, including whippings, kidnappings, drive-out campaigns, incarcerations, arsons, hangings, and shootings, as well as less overtly illegal tactics such as shutting down meetings, barring speakers from lecturing through blacklists, and book burning.

Drawing together the various groups who engaged in this violence, Chad E. Pearson's book Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2022) shows how the original Ku Klux Klan, various Law and Order Leagues, Stockgrowers' organizations, and Citizens' Alliances engaged in violence and were driven by unambiguous economic and managerial interests. While often discussed separately, all of these groups employed similar language to smear ordinary people, including former slaves, populists, political radicals, and striking workers, as menacing an violent villains who threatened polite society - justifying their actions by insisting that they were upholding "law and order." This book thus suggests that law and order politics emerged in the campaigns of organized terror against an assortment of ordinary people across racial lines conducted by Klansmen, lawmen, vigilantes, and union busters during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell.

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Charles Reagan Wilson, "The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South" (UNC Press, 2023)

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life--a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the American South in national and global contexts, celebrated historian Charles Reagan Wilson assesses how diverse communities of southerners have sought to define the region's identity. Surveying three centuries of southern regional consciousness across many genres, disciplines, and cultural strains, Wilson considers and challenges prior presentations of the region, advancing a vision of southern culture that has always been plural, dynamic, and complicated by race and class.

Structured in three parts, The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South (UNC Press, 2023) takes readers on a journey from the colonial era to the present, from when complex ideas of "southern civilization" rooted in slaveholding and agrarianism dominated to the twenty-first-century rise of a modern, multicultural "southern living." As Wilson shows, there is no singular or essential South but rather a rich tapestry woven with contestations, contingencies, and change.

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Tatiana D. McInnis, "To Tell a Black Story of Miami" (UP of Florida, 2022)

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In To Tell a Black Story of Miami (UP of Florida, 2022), Tatiana McInnis examines literary and cultural representations of Miami alongside the city's material realities to challenge the image of South Florida as a diverse cosmopolitan paradise. McInnis discusses how this favorable "melting pot" narrative depends on the obfuscation of racialized violence against people of African descent.

Analyzing novels, short stories, and memoirs by Edwidge Danticat, M.J. Fievre, Carlos Moore, Carlos Eire, Patricia Stephens Due, and Tananarive Due, as well as films such as Dawg Fight and Moonlight, McInnis demonstrates how these creations push back against erasure by representing the experiences of Black Americans and immigrants from Caribbean nations. McInnis considers portrayals of state-sanctioned oppression, residential segregation, violent detention of emigres, and increasing wealth gaps and concludes that celebrations of Miami's diversity disguise the pervasive, adaptive nature of white supremacy and anti-Blackness.

To Tell a Black Story of Miami offers a model of how to use literature as a primary archive in urban studies. It draws attention to the similarities and divergences between Miami's Black diasporic communities, a historically underrepresented demographic in popular and scholarly awareness of the city. Increasing understanding of Miami's political, social, and economic inequities, this book brings greater nuance to traditional narratives of exceptionalism in cities and regions.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Thomas Aiello, "Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate" (U Georgia Press, 2023)

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Thomas Aiello joins E. James West to discuss Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate (University of Georgia Press, 2023).

Building on his earlier book The Grapevine of the Black South, which focused on the rise and fall of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate through its flagship publication the Atlanta Daily World, this book further reshapes the place of southern newspapers in the historiography of Black journalism. Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration traces the development and trajectory of the individual newspapers of the Syndicate, evaluating those with surviving issues, and presenting them as they existed in proximity to their Atlanta hub. In so doing, he emphasizes the thread of practical radicalism that ran through Syndicate editorial policy, providing a fuller picture of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate and the Black press in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

James West is a historian of race, media and business in the modern United States and Black diaspora. Author of "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (Illinois, 2020), "A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago" (Illinois, 2022), "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (Massachusetts, 2022).

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Keith Brian Wood, "Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City,1968-1997" (U Tennessee Press, 2021)

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City, 1968-1997 (U Tennessee Press, 2021) tells the story of basketball in Tennessee’s southwestern-most metropolis following the 1968 assassination of Marin Luther King Jr. Keith Brian Wood examines the city through the lens of the Memphis State University basketball team and its star player turned-coach Larry Finch. Finch, a Memphis native and the first highly recruited black player signed by Memphis State, helped the team make the 1973 NCAA championship game in his senior year. In an era when colleges in the south began to integrate their basketball programs, the city of Memphis embraced its flagship university’s shift toward including black players. Wood interjects the forgotten narrative of LeMoyne-Owen’s (the city’s HBCU) 1975 NCAA Division III National Championship team as a critical piece to understanding this era. Finch was drafted by the Lakers following the 1973 NCAA championship but instead signed with the American Basketball Association’s Memphis Tams. After two years of playing professionally, Finch returned to the sidelines as a coach and would eventually become the head coach of the Memphis State Tigers.

Wood deftly weaves together basketball and Memphis’s fraught race relations during the post–civil rights era. While many Memphians viewed the 1973 Tigers’ championship run as representative of racial progress, Memphis as a whole continued to be deeply divided on other issues of race and civil rights. And while Finch was championed as a symbol of the healing power of basketball that helped counteract the city’s turbulence, many black players and coaches would discover that even its sports mirrored Memphis’s racial divide. Today, as another native son of Memphis, Penny Hardaway, has taken the reigns of the University of Memphis’s basketball program, Wood reflects on the question of progress in the city that saw King’s assassination little more than forty years ago.

In this important examination of sports and civil rights history, Wood summons social memory from an all-too-recent past to present the untold—and unfinished—story of basketball in the Bluff City.

Keith B. Wood teaches history at Christian Brothers High School in Memphis.

Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense.

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Alexander Rose, "The Lion and the Fox: Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a Confederate Navy" (Mariner Books, 2022)

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

From the New York Times bestselling author of Washington’s Spies, the thrilling story of the Confederate spy who came to Britain to turn the tide of the Civil War—and the Union agent resolved to stop him.

In 1861, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, two secret agents—one a Confederate, the other his Union rival—were dispatched to neutral Britain, each entrusted with a vital mission.

The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was to acquire a cutting-edge clandestine fleet intended to break President Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate ports, sink Northern merchant vessels, and drown the U.S. Navy’s mightiest ships at sea. The profits from gunrunning and smuggling cotton—Dixie’s notorious “white gold”—would finance the scheme. Opposing him was Thomas Dudley, a resolute Quaker lawyer and abolitionist. He was determined to stop Bulloch by any means necessary in a spy-versus-spy game of move and countermove, gambit and sacrifice, intrigue and betrayal. If Dudley failed, Britain would ally with the South and imperil a Northern victory. The battleground was the Dickensian port of Liverpool, whose dockyards built more ships each year than the rest of the world combined, whose warehouses stored more cotton than anywhere else on earth, and whose merchant princes, said one observer, were “addicted to Southern proclivities, foreign slave trade, and domestic bribery.”

From master of historical espionage Alexander Rose, The Lion and the Fox: Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a Confederate Navy (Mariner Books, 2022) is the astonishing, untold tale of two implacable foes and their twilight struggle for the highest stakes.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Mari N. Crabtree, "My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching" (Yale UP, 2023)

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching (Yale UP, 2023), Mari N. Crabtree traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. She unearths how African American victims and survivors found ways to live through and beyond the horrors of lynching, offering a theory of African American collective trauma and memory rooted in the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility--a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain.

Black southerners often shielded their loved ones from the most painful memories of local lynchings with strategic silences but also told lynching stories about vengeful ghosts or a wrathful God or the deathbed confessions of a lyncher tormented by his past. They protested lynching and its legacies through art and activism, and they mourned those lost to a mob's fury. They infused a blues element into their lynching narratives to confront traumatic memories and keep the blues at bay, even if just for a spell. Telling their stories troubles the simplistic binary of resistance or submission that has tended to dominate narratives of Black life and reminds us that amid the utter devastation of lynching were glimmers of hope and an affirmation of life.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Leah Mickens, "In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II" (NYU Press, 2022)

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The history and practices of African American Catholics has been vastly understudied, and Black Catholics are often written off as a fringe sector of the religious population. Yet, Catholics of African descent have been a part of Catholicism since the early days of European exploration into the New World.

In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II (NYU Press, 2022) examines how the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Vatican Council affected African American Catholics in Atlanta, Georgia, focusing on the historic Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in the Old Fourth Ward. Our Lady of Lourdes is a neighbor of major historic Black Protestant churches in the city, including Ebenezer Baptist Church, a block away, which during the Civil Rights era was the pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. Featuring archival and oral history sources, the book examines the religious and cultural life of the parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, showing how this Black Catholic congregation fit into the overall religious ecology of the neighborhood. Examining Our Lady of Lourdes in relation to these larger Black Protestant congregations helps to illuminate whether and how they were shaped by their place at a center of the civil rights struggle, and how religious change and social change intersect.

Allison Isidore is a Religious Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa and is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Katherine Johnston, "The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World (Oxford UP, 2022) interrogates how people with an interest in African slavery manufactured and publicly disseminated a baseless rhetoric about climate, race, and labor that they knew, privately, to contradict their lived experiences.

In the late eighteenth century, plantation owners and slaveholders in the Caribbean and the American South publicly argued that physiological and biological differences made African people more capable of withstanding the heat and labor required to work on plantations. This climatic defense of slavery allowed planters to deny their own culpability in enslaving human beings while also framing the issue of racial slavery. The Nature of Slavery challenges this framing of labor, environment, and the development of racial ideologies. Using extensive personal and professional correspondence and colonial records, Dr. Katherine Johnston demonstrates that privately planters did not observe any health differences between Black and white bodies. White slaveholders publicly defended racial slavery constructed on a climatic rhetoric and biological theory of race they knew to be false. The ideology linking race and climate supported the economic motives of these enslavers and this defense of racial slavery in the late 18th century became a retroactive explanation for its establishment in the colonies. This climatic dichotomy to justify slavery and their economic livelihood contributed to historical myths about enslaved bodies and a groundless theory of race which was used to perpetuate the institution of slavery. Nature of Slavery powerfully argues that a “rhetoric of bodily difference gained strength and power as slaveholders and others imbued it with a language of nature.”

Dr. Katherine Johnston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History & Philosophy at Montana State University. Her work focuses on slavery, race, the body, and the environment in Atlantic plantation societies.

Daniela Lavergne served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd, "Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South" (U Georgia Press, 2022)

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd's book Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South (U Georgia Press, 2022) explains a curiosity: why a feminine ideal rooted in the nineteenth century continues to enjoy currency well into the twenty-first. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd examines how the continuation of certain gender rituals in the American South has served to perpetuate racism, sexism, and classism.

In a trio of popular gender rituals—sorority rush, beauty pageants, and the Confederate Pageant of the Natchez (Mississippi) Pilgrimage—young white southern women have readily ditched contemporary modes of dress and comportment for performances of purity, gentility, and deference. Clearly, the ability to “do” white southern womanhood, convincingly and on cue, has remained a valued performance. But why?

Based on ethnographic research and more than sixty taped interviews, Southern Beauty goes behind the scenes of the three rituals to explore the motivations and rewards associated with participation. The picture that Boyd paints is not pretty: it is one of southern beauties securing status and sustaining segregation by making nostalgic gestures to the southern past. Boyd also maintains that the audiences for these rituals and pageants have been complicit, unwilling to acknowledge the beauties’ racial work or their investment in it.

With its focus on performance, Southern Beauty moves beyond representations to show how femininity in motion—stylized and predictable but ephemeral—has succeeded as an enduring emblem, where other symbols faltered, by failing to draw scrutiny. Continuing to make the moves of region and race even as many Confederate symbols have been retired, the southern beauty has persisted, maintaining power and privilege through consistent performance.

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David Wright Faladé, "Black Cloud Rising" (Grove Press, 2022)

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

By fall of 1863, Union forces had taken control of Tidewater Virginia, and established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer Banks. Thousands of freed slaves and runaways flooded the Union lines, but Confederate irregulars still roamed the region. In December, the newly formed African Brigade, a unit of these former slaves led by General Edward Augustus Wild—a one-armed, impassioned Abolitionist—set out from Portsmouth to hunt down the rebel guerillas and extinguish the threat.

From this little-known historical episode comes Black Cloud Rising (Grove Press, 2022), a dramatic, moving account of these soldiers—men who only weeks earlier had been enslaved, but were now Union infantrymen setting out to fight their former owners. At the heart of the narrative is Sergeant Richard Etheridge, the son of a slave and her master, raised with some privileges but constantly reminded of his place. Deeply conflicted about his past, Richard is eager to show himself to be a credit to his race. As the African Brigade conducts raids through the areas occupied by the Confederate Partisan Rangers, he and his comrades recognize that they are fighting for more than territory. Wild’s mission is to prove that his troops can be trusted as soldiers in combat. And because many of the men have fled from the very plantations in their path, each raid is also an opportunity to free loved ones left behind. For Richard, this means the possibility of reuniting with Fanny, the woman he hopes to marry one day.

With powerful depictions of the bonds formed between fighting men and heartrending scenes of sacrifice and courage, Black Cloud Rising offers a compelling and nuanced portrait of enslaved men and women crossing the threshold to freedom.

AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

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Robin M. Morris, "Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right" (U Georgia Press, 2022)

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right (U Georgia Press, 2022) is a statewide study of women’s part in the history of conservatism, the New Right, and the Republican Party in the state of Georgia. Robin M. Morris examines how the growth of the Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s was due in large part to the political activism of white women. The book begins with the African American women who established the Georgia Federation of Republican Women and follows how they lost the organization and the party to white women moving to the Sunbelt South. Conservative white women developed a language and strategy of family values that they deployed to battle school busing, defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, and elect Republican leaders even in Jimmy Carter’s home state.

Morris uses original interviews and archival research in personal papers of women activists in the Georgia New Right movement, including Lee Ague Miller, Beth Callaway, Kathryn Dunaway, Lee Wysong, and Hattie Greene, to reveal the motivations and actions that transformed the state from blue to red. In this era, perceived threats to family life and traditional values spurred women-led grassroots organization that enabled broad political shifts on the state level. Conservative women carved out their political niche as they consolidated and expanded their power and influence. Rather than a male-dominated, top-down approach, Morris centers her historical account on the middle-class white women whose actions changed the political landscape of the state and ultimately the country.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1.

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Damian Alan Pargas, "Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Damian Alan Pargas introduces a new conceptualization of 'spaces of freedom' for fugitive slaves in North America between 1800 and 1860, and answers the questions: How and why did enslaved people flee to – and navigate – different destinations throughout the continent, and to what extent did they succeed in evading recapture and re-enslavement? Taking a continental approach, this study highlights the diversity of slave fight by conceptually dividing the continent into three distinct – and continuously evolving – spaces of freedom. Namely, spaces of informal freedom in the US South, where enslaved people attempted to flee by passing as free blacks; spaces of semi-formal freedom in the US North, where slavery was abolished but the precise status of fugitive slaves was contested; and spaces of formal freedom in Canada and Mexico, where slavery was abolished and runaways were considered legally free and safe from re-enslavement.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Jefferson Cowie, "Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power" (Basic Book, 2022)

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 10:00:00 -0000

Jefferson Cowie discusses his book Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (Basic Books, 2022), beginning with the book’s origin story, and then tracing the use of "freedom" to dominate others in Barbour County, Alabama, from Indian Removal in the 1830s through the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

This episode was produced for "Working History," the podcast of the Southern Labor Studies Association.

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T. R. Johnson, "New Orleans: A Writer's City" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

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Jovan Scott Lewis, "Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa" (Duke UP, 2022)

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke UP, 2022), Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity. He focuses on how the massacre in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood—colloquially known as Black Wall Street—curtailed the freedom built there. Rather than framing the massacre as a one-off event, Lewis places it in a larger historical and social context of widespread patterns of anti-Black racism, segregation, and dispossession in Tulsa and beyond. He shows how the processes that led to the massacre, subsequent urban renewal, and intergenerational poverty shored up by nonprofits constitute a form of continuous slow violence. Now, in their attempts to redevelop resources for self-determination, Black Tulsans must reconcile a double inheritance: the massacre’s violence and the historical freedom and prosperity that Greenwood represented. Their future is tied to their geography, which is the foundation from which they will repair and fulfill Greenwood’s promise.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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Thomas Aiello, "Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947-1979" (U Tennessee Press, 2019)

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947-1979 (U Tennessee Press, 2019), Thomas Aiello considers the cultural function of professional basketball in the Deep South between 1947 and 1979. Making a strong case for the role of race in this process, Aiello ties the South’s initial animus toward basketball to the same complex that motivated the region to sacrifice its own economic interests to the cause of white supremacy. Fans of basketball, as compared to other team sports, were closer to the players, who showed more of their bodies; blackness, then, had more visibility in basketball than it had in other sports. By the time Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, African Americans made up 47.5 percent of professional basketball players, and despite integrating later than baseball and football, it was fast becoming known as a “black” sport. Over time, survival for southern teams grew more tenuous, fan support more fickle, and racial incidents between players and fans more hostile. Racism clashed with civic development in a fast-evolving region.

To identify the sources of this clash, Dixieball (The University of Tennessee Press, 2019) locates the main points of intersection between professional basketball and the Deep South in the two decades prior to the region’s first major franchise. Aiello then takes readers to New Orleans, where the first major Deep South professional basketball team—the New Orleans Buccaneers—was born, and on to Atlanta, Birmingham, St. Louis, and others, leading up to 1979.

Bennett Koerber is an instructor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He can be reached at bkoerber@andrew.cmu.edu

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Saida Grundy, "Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man" (U California Press, 2022)

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

How does it feel to be groomed as the "solution" to a national Black male "problem"? This is the guiding paradox of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man (U California Press, 2022), an in-depth examination of graduates of Morehouse College, the nation's only historically Black college for men. While Black male collegians are often culturally fetishized for "beating the odds," the image of Black male success that Morehouse assiduously promotes and celebrates is belied by many of the realities that challenge the students on this campus. Saida Grundy offers a unique insider perspective: a graduate of Spelman college and a former "Miss Morehouse," Grundy crafts an incisive feminist and sociological account informed by her personal insights and scholarly expertise.

Respectable gathers the experiences of former students and others connected to Morehouse to illustrate the narrow, conservative vision of masculinity molded at a competitive Black institution. The thirty-two men interviewed unveil a culture that forges confining ideas of respectable Black manhood within a context of relentless peer competition and sexual violence, measured against unattainable archetypes of idealized racial leadership. Grundy underlines the high costs of making these men—the experiences of low-income students who navigate class issues at Morehouse, the widespread homophobia laced throughout the college's notions of Black male respectability, and the crushingly conformist expectations of a college that sees itself as making "good" Black men. As Morehouse's problems continue to pour out into national newsfeeds, this book contextualizes these issues not as a defect of Black masculinity, but as a critique of what happens when an institution services an imagination of what Black men should be, at the expense of more fully understanding the many ways these young people see themselves.

Mickell Carter is a doctoral student in the department of history at Auburn University. She can be reached at mzc0152@auburn.edu and on twitter @MickellCarter.

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Jonathan W. White and Lydia J. Davis, ed., "My Work Among the Freedmen: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of Harriet M. Buss" (U Virginia Press, 2021)

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Between 1863 and 1871, Harriet M. Buss of Sterling, Massachusetts, taught former slaves in three different regions of the South, in coastal South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, and Raleigh, North Carolina. A white, educated Baptist woman, she initially saw herself as on a mission to the freedpeople of the Confederacy but over time developed a shared mission with her students and devoted herself to training the next generation of Black teachers.

The geographical and chronological reach of her letters is uncommon for a woman in the Civil War era. In each place she worked, she taught in a different type of school and engaged with different types of students, so the subjects she explored in her letters illuminate a remarkably broad history of race and religion in America. Her experiences also offer an inside perspective of the founding of Shaw University, an important historically Black university. Now available to specialists and general readers alike for the first time in My Work Among the Freedmen: The Civil War and Reconstruction Letters of Harriet M. Buss (U Virginia Press, 2021), her correspondence offers an extensive view of the Civil War and Reconstruction era rarely captured in a single collection.

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Laura Janet Feller, "Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia: Powhatan People and the Color Line" (U Oklahoma Press, 2022)

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Spanning a century of fraught history, Being Indigenous in Jim Crow Virginia: Powhatan People and the Color Line (University of Oklahoma Press, 2022) by Dr. Laura J. Feller describes the critical strategic work that tidewater Virginia Indians, descendants of the seventeenth-century Algonquian Powhatan chiefdom, undertook to sustain their Native identity in the face of deep racial hostility from segregationist officials, politicians, and institutions.

Like other Southeastern Native groups living under Jim Crow regimes, tidewater Native groups and individuals fortified their communities by founding tribal organizations, churches, and schools; they displayed their Indianness in public performances; and they enlisted whites, including well-known ethnographers, to help them argue for their Native distinctness. Describing an arduous campaign marked by ingenuity, conviction, and perseverance, Dr. Feller shows how these tidewater Native people drew on their shared histories as descendants of Powhatan peoples, and how they strengthened their bonds through living and marrying within clusters of Native Virginians, both on and off reservation lands. She also finds that, by at times excluding African Americans from Indian organizations and Native families, Virginian Indians themselves reinforced racial segregation while they built their own communities.

Even as it paved the way to tribal recognition in Virginia, the tidewater Natives’ sustained efforts chronicled in this book demonstrate the fluidity, instability, and persistent destructive power of the construction of race in America.

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Labor Journalism, Farmworkers, and Reynolds Tobacco with Victoria Bouloubasis

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Journalist Victoria Bouloubasis discusses her career reporting on agricultural and food labor in North Carolina, her approach to labor journalism, and how she uses histories in her work.

"A North Carolina Farmworker Was Accused of Abusing His Workers. Then Big Tobacco Backed His Election," by Ben Stockton and Victoria Bouloubasis, Mother Jones, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and Enlace Latino NC.
"How a Tobacco Company Funds a Mega-Farmer’s Political Ambitions That Hurt Workers" podcast in English.
"Cómo una tabacalera financia las ambiciones políticas de granjero que perjudica a los trabajadores" podcast en español.
Victoria's reporting for Enlace Latino NC.
Victoria's reporting for Southerly.

This episode was produced for "Working History," the podcast of the Southern Labor Studies Association.

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M. V. Hood and Seth C. McKee, "Rural Republican Realignment in the Modern South: The Untold Story" (U South Carolina Press, 2022)

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Beginning with the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948 and extending through the 2020 election cycle, political scientists M.V. Hood III and Seth C. McKee trace the process by which rural white southerners transformed from fiercely loyal Democrats to stalwart Republicans. While these rural white southerners were the slowest to affiliate with the Grand Old Party, they are now its staunchest supporters. This transition and the reasons for it are vital to understanding the current electoral landscape of the American South, including states like Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, all of which have the potential to exert enormous influence over national electoral outcomes.

In Rural Republican Realignment in the Modern South: The Untold Story (U South Carolina Press, 2022), Hood and McKee examine their changing political behavior, arguing that their Democratic-to-Republican transition is both more recent and more durable than most political observers realize. By analyzing data collected from their own region-wide polling along with a variety of other carefully mined sources, the authors explain why the initial appeal of 1950s Republicanism to upscale white southerners in metropolitan settings took well over a half-century to yield to, and morph into, its culturally conservative variant now championed by rural residents. Hood and McKee contend that it is impossible to understand current American electoral politics without understanding the longer trajectory of voting behavior in rural America and they offer not only a framework but also the data necessary for doing so.

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Emily Strasser, "Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History" (UP of Kentucky, 2023)

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In 1942, the US government began construction on a sixty-thousand-acre planned community named Oak Ridge in a rural area west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Unmarked on regional maps, Oak Ridge attracted more than seventy thousand people eager for high-paying wartime jobs. Among them was author Emily Strasser's grandfather George, a chemist. All employees—from scientists to secretaries, from military personnel to construction workers—were restricted by the tightest security. They were provided only the minimum information necessary to perform their jobs.

It wasn't until three years later that the citizens of Oak Ridge, and the rest of the world, learned the true purpose of the local industry. Oak Ridge was one of three secret cities constructed by the Manhattan Project for the express purpose of developing the first atomic bomb, which devastated Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

In Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History (UP of Kentucky, 2023), Emily Strasser exposes the toxic legacy—political, environmental, and personal—that forever polluted her family, a community, the nation, and the world. Sifting through archives and family memories, and traveling to the deserts of Nevada and the living rooms of Hiroshima, she grapples with the far-reaching ramifications of her grandfather's work. She learns that during the three decades he spent building nuclear weapons, George suffered from increasingly debilitating mental illness. Returning to Oak Ridge, Strasser confronts the widespread contamination resulting from nuclear weapons production and the government's disregard for its impact on the environment and public health. With brilliant insight, she reveals the intersections between the culture of secrecy in her family and the institutionalized secrecy within the nuclear industry, which persists, with grave consequences, to this day.

Emily Strasser: Emily Strasser is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bitter Southerner, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Gulf Coast, and Tricycle, among others, and she was the presenter of the BBC podcast “The Bomb.” Her essays have been named notable in Best American Essays 2016 and 2017 and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was a winner of the 2015 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, a 2016 AWP Intro Award, a 2016 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist’s Initiative Grant, and the 2016 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College. She served as a 2018-19 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow.

Cody Skahan (cas12@hi.is) is a student in the MA program in Anthropology at the University of Iceland as a Leifur Eriksson Fellow. His work focuses on environmentalism in Iceland, especially the social and political implications of the youth environmentalist movement in an arctic country that has created for itself a façade of being environmentally and socially progressive. More generally, his other interests span anywhere from critical theory, psychoanalysis, anarchism, cultural studies, anime, and applying theory through praxis. Cody has a blog where he is trying to write more rather than just only read and talk about books.

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Michael Lawrence Dickinson, "Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807" (U Georgia Press, 2022)

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Beginning in the late seventeenth century and concluding with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807 (U Georgia Press, 2022) reveals how the thousands of captives who lived, bled, and resisted in the Black Urban Atlantic survived to form dynamic communities. Michael Lawrence Dickinson uses cities with close commercial ties to shed light on similarities, variations, and linkages between urban Atlantic slave communities in mainland America and the Caribbean.

The study adopts the perspectives of those enslaved to reveal that, in the eyes of the enslaved, the distinctions were often in degree rather than in kind as cities throughout the Black Urban Atlantic remained spaces for Black oppression and resilience. The tenets of subjugation remained all too similar, as did captives' need to stave off social death and hold on to their humanity. Almost Dead argues that urban environments provided unique barriers to and avenues for social rebirth: the process by which African-descended peoples reconstructed their lives individually and collectively after forced exportation from West Africa. This was an active process of cultural remembrance, continued resistance, and communal survival. Indeed it was in these urban slave communities-within the connections between neighbors and kinfolk-that the enslaved found the physical and psychological resources necessary to endure the seemingly unendurable. Whether sites of first arrival, commodification, sale, short-term captivity, or lifetime enslavement, the urban Atlantic shaped and was shaped by Black lives.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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J. Brent Morris, "Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp" (UNC Press, 2022)

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons--people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers--established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites.

Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp (UNC Press, 2022) is the first book to fully examine the lives of these maroons and their struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined, award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story of resilient, proud, and determined people of color who made the Great Dismal Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role in undermining slavery through the Civil War.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Viola Franziska Müller, "Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South" (UNC Press, 2022)

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (UNC Press, 2022), Viola Franziska Müller examines runaways who camouflaged themselves among the free Black populations in Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and Richmond. In the urban South, they found shelter, work, and other survival networks that enabled them to live in slaveholding territory, shielded and supported by their host communities in an act of collective resistance to slavery. While all fugitives risked their lives to escape slavery, those who fled to southern cities were perhaps the most vulnerable of all. Not dissimilar to modern-day refugees and illegal migrants, runaway slaves that sought refuge in the urban South were antebellum America's undocumented people, forging lives free from bondage but without the legal status of freedpeople. Spanning from the 1810s to the start of the Civil War, Müller reveals how urbanization, work opportunities, and the interconnectedness of free and enslaved Black people in each city determined how successfully runaways could remain invisible to authorities.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Emily A. Owens, "Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans" (UNC Press, 2023)

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In histories of enslavement and in Black women's history, coercion looms large in any discussion of sex and sexuality. At a time when sexual violence against Black women was virtually unregulated—even normalized—a vast economy developed specifically to sell the sexual labor of Black women. In Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (UNC Press, 2023), Emily A. Owens wrestles with the question of why white men paid notoriously high prices to gain sexual access to the bodies of enslaved women to whom they already had legal and social access.

Owens centers the survival strategies and intellectual labor of Black women enslaved in New Orleans to unravel the culture of violence they endured, in which slaveholders obscured "the presence of force" with arrangements that included gifts and money. Owens's storytelling highlights that the classic formulation of rape law that requires "the presence of force" and "the absence of consent" to denote a crime was in fact a key legal fixture that packaged predation as pleasure and produced, rather than prevented, violence against Black women. Owens dramatically reorients our understanding of enslaved women's lives as well as of the nature of violence in the entire venture of racial slavery in the U.S. South. Unsettling the idea that consent is necessarily incompatible with structural and interpersonal violence, this history shows that when sex is understood as a transaction, women are imagined as responsible for their own violation.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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The History of the Black Urban Working-Class in the United States

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Joe William Trotter, Jr., Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Founder and Director of the Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) at Carnegie Mellon University, talks about his book, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (University of California Press, 2019), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Workers on Arrival examines the long history of the black urban working-class going back to the 18th century and coming right up to the present. While Trotter fully acknowledges the hardships African-Americans have faced, he also emphasizes the agency of black people as they organized, resisted, and found ways to cope in the contexts they found themselves. Trotter and Vinsel also discuss current trends in African-American historical scholarship and Trotter’s own present and future research projects.

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Poverty, Race, and Rural Sanitation

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Catherine Coleman Flowers, activist, author, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, and MacArthur “genius prize” winner, talks about her book Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Waste examines the brutal realities of rural sanitation issues, particularly the lack of septic tanks, and how they affect poor, often black, people. Flowers also reflects on growing up in Lowndes County, Alabama and how her family, the Civil Rights Movement, and her faith life led her to be the leader she is today.

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Jonathan W. White, "To Address You as My Friend: African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln" (UNC Press, 2021)

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Many African Americans of the Civil War era felt a personal connection to Abraham Lincoln. For the first time in their lives, an occupant of the White House seemed concerned about the welfare of their race. Indeed, despite the tremendous injustice and discrimination that they faced, African Americans now had confidence to write to the president and to seek redress of their grievances. Their letters express the dilemmas, doubts, and dreams of both recently enslaved and free people in the throes of dramatic change. For many, writing Lincoln was a last resort. Yet their letters were often full of determination, making explicit claims to the rights of U.S. citizenship in a wide range of circumstances.

Jonathan W. White's To Address You as My Friend: African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln (UNC Press, 2021) presents more than 120 letters from African Americans to Lincoln, most of which have never before been published. They offer unflinching, intimate, and often heart-wrenching portraits of Black soldiers' and civilians' experiences in wartime. As readers continue to think critically about Lincoln's image as the "Great Emancipator," this book centers African Americans' own voices to explore how they felt about the president and how they understood the possibilities and limits of the power vested in the federal government.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com

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Felicity M. Turner, "Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America" (UNC Press, 2022)

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Felicity M. Turner's Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press, 2022) documents how women—Black and white, enslaved and free—gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first half of the nineteenth century, community-based female knowledge played a crucial role in prosecutions for infanticide: midwives, neighbors, healers, and relatives were better acquainted with an accused woman's intimate life, the circumstances of her pregnancy, and possible motives for infanticide than any man. As the century progressed, women accused of the crime were increasingly subject to the scrutiny of white male legal and medical experts educated in institutions that reinforced prevailing ideas about the inferior mental and physical capacities of women and Black people. As Reconstruction ended, the reach of the carceral state expanded, while law and medicine simultaneously privileged federal and state regulatory power over that of local institutions. These transformations placed all women's bodies at the mercy of male doctors, judges, and juries in ways they had not been before.

Reframing knowledge of the body as property, Felicity M. Turner shows how, at the very moment when the federal government expanded formal civil and political rights to formerly enslaved people, the medical profession instituted new legal regulations across the nation that restricted access to knowledge of the female body to white men.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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"Gone with the Wind" Revisited

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In this week’s episode from the Institute’s Vault, Molly Haskell talks about her 2009 book, Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited, published by Yale University Press.

Haskell grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and studied at the Sorbonne. She came to New York in the sixties to work for the French Film office, where she wrote a newsletter about French films. She wrote about movies for the Village Voice, Vogue, and New York magazine.

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Jefferson Cowie, "Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power" (Basic Books, 2022)

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

"History recalls Wallace’s inaugural address as a set piece in the larger drama of defending Southern segregation, which it was. But the speech was about something even more profound, more enduring, even more virulent than segregation. Aside from his infamous “Segregation Forever” slogan, Wallace mentioned “segregation” only one other time that afternoon. In contrast, he invoked “freedom” twenty-five times in his speech—more than Martin Luther King Jr. would use the term later that year in his “I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington. “Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us,” Wallace told his audience, “and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.” Those rattling shackles of oppression were forged by the enemy of the people of his beloved Barbour County: the federal government."

– Jefferson Cowie, Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (Basic Books, 2022).

Professor Cowie titles his latest book’s introduction ‘George Wallace and American Freedom’, which frames part of the historical narrative within which he reexamines one of our most celebrated values within the purview of local history. But as The New York Times review of the book in December by author Jeff Shesol articulately summarized:

‘Freedom’s Dominion is local history, but in the way that Gettysburg was a local battle or the Montgomery bus boycott was a local protest. The book recounts four peak periods in the conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government: the wild rush, in the early 19th century, to seize and settle lands that belonged to the Creek Nation; Reconstruction; the reassertion of white supremacy under Jim Crow; and the attempts of Wallace and others to nullify the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, as Cowie reveals, white Southerners portrayed the oppression of Black people and Native Americans not as a repudiation of freedom, but its precondition, its very foundation.’

This book is an engrossing read and check this from Shesol’s review about Wallace and his attraction:

‘Racism was central to his appeal, yet its common note was grievance; the common enemies were elites, the press and the federal government. “Being a Southerner is no longer geographic,” he declared in 1964, during the first of his four runs for the White House. “It’s a philosophy and an attitude.” That attitude, we know, is pervasive now — a primal, animating principle of conservative politics. We hear it in conspiracy theories about the “deep state”; we see it in the actions of Republican officials like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who built a case for his re-election in 2022 by banning — in the name of “individual freedom” — classroom discussions of gender, sexuality and systemic racism.’

Some of Professor Cowie’s other books mentioned in this interview:

Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor (1999) received the 2000 Phillip Taft Prize for the Best Book in Labor History in 2000
Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010) awarded the Francis Parkman Prize for the Best Book in American History in 2011
The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (2016)

Professor Cowie’s work in social and political history focuses on how class, inequality, and labor shape American politics and culture. Formerly at Cornell, he is currently the James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.

Sydney Business School at Shanghai University - can be reached at keith.krueger1@uts.edu.au or keithNBn@gmail.com

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Kevin R. C. Gutzman, "The Jeffersonians: Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, 1801-1825" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Kevin R. C. Gutzman's The Jeffersonians: Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, 1801-1825 (St. Martin's Press, 2022) marks the first chronicle of the only consecutive trio of two-term presidencies of the same political party in American history: Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.

Before the consecutive two-term administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, there had only been one other trio of its type: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe.

Kevin R. C. Gutzman's The Jeffersonians is a complete chronicle of the men, known as The Virginia Dynasty, who served as president from 1801 to 1825 and implemented the foreign policy, domestic, and constitutional agenda of the radical wing of the American Revolution, setting guideposts for later American liberals to follow.

The three close political allies were tightly related: Jefferson and Madison were the closest of friends, and Monroe was Jefferson's former law student. Their achievements were many, including the founding of the opposition Republican Party in the 1790s; the Louisiana Purchase; and the call upon Congress in 1806 to use its constitutional power to ban slave imports beginning on January 1, 1808.

Of course, not everything the Virginia Dynasty undertook was a success: Its chief failure might have been the ineptly planned and led War of 1812. In general, however, when Monroe rode off into the sunset in 1825, his passing and the end of The Virginia Dynasty were much lamented. Kevin R. C. Gutzman's new book details a time in America when three Presidents worked toward common goals to strengthen our Republic in a way we rarely see in American politics today.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Michael Ayers Trotti, "The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South" (UNC Press, 2022)

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Michael Ayers Trotti's The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion and Punishment in the American South (The University of North Carolina Press, 2022) documents the complex religious and cultural textures of post-Civil War executions in the U.S. South. Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. In just the same era when a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.

Lane Davis is an Instructor of Religion at Huntingdon College. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis

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Lauren N. Haumesser, "The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856-1861" (UNC Press, 2022)

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Lauren N. Haumesser's The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856-1861 (UNC Press, 2022) offers a fresh examination of antebellum politics comprehensively examines the ways that gender issues and gendered discourse exacerbated fissures within the Democratic Party in the critical years between 1856 and 1861. Whereas the cultural politics of gender had bolstered Democratic unity through the 1850s, the Lecompton crisis and John Brown's raid revealed that white manhood and its association with familial and national protection meant disparate--and ultimately incompatible--things in free and slave society. In fierce debates over the extension of slavery, gendered rhetoric hardened conflicts that ultimately led to the outbreak of the Civil War.

Lauren Haumesser here traces how northern and southern Democrats and their partisan media organs used gender to make powerful arguments about slavery as the sectional crisis grew, from the emergence of the Republican Party to secession. Gendered charges and countercharges turned slavery into an intractable cultural debate, raising the stakes of every dispute and making compromise ever more elusive.

Lauren N. Haumesser holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia.

Jackson Reinhardt is a graduate of University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. He is currently an independent scholar, freelance writer, and research assistant. You can reach Jackson at jtreinhardt1997@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @JTRhardt

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Sonya Y. Ramsey, "Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership" (UP of Florida, 2022)

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Bertha Maxwell-Roddey: A Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership (UP of Florida, 2022) examines a life of remarkable achievements and leadership in the desegregated South. Sonya Ramsey modernizes the nineteenth-century term "race woman" to describe how Maxwell-Roddey and her peers turned hard-won civil rights and feminist milestones into tangible accomplishments in North Carolina and nationwide from the late 1960s to the 1990s.

Born in 1930, Maxwell-Roddey became one of Charlotte's first Black women principals of a white elementary school; she was the founding director of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte's Africana Studies Department; and she cofounded the Afro-American Cultural and Service Center, now the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art + Culture. Maxwell-Roddey founded the National Council for Black Studies, helping institutionalize the field with what is still its premier professional organization, and served as the 20th National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., one of the most influential Black women's organizations in the United States.

Using oral histories and primary sources that include private records from numerous Black women's home archives, Ramsey illuminates the intersectional leadership strategies used by Maxwell-Roddey and other modern race women to dismantle discriminatory barriers in the classroom and the boardroom. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey offers new insights into desegregation, urban renewal, and the rise of the Black middle class through the lens of a powerful leader's life story.

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Gregory Smithsimon, "Liberty Road: Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism" (NYU Press, 2022)

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Half of Black Americans who live in the one hundred largest metropolitan areas are now living in suburbs, not cities. In Liberty Road: Black Middle-Class Suburbs and the Battle Between Civil Rights and Neoliberalism (NYU Press, 2022), Gregory Smithsimon shows us how this happened, and why it matters, unearthing the hidden role that suburbs played in establishing the Black middle-class.

Focusing on Liberty Road, a Black middle-class suburb of Randallstown, Maryland, Smithsimon tells the remarkable story of how residents broke the color barrier, against all odds, in the face of racial discrimination, tensions with suburban Whites and urban Blacks, and economic crises like the mortgage meltdown of 2008. Drawing on interviews, census data, and archival research he shows us the unique strategies that suburban Black residents in Liberty Road employed, creating a blueprint for other Black middle-class suburbs.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Elizabeth N. Ellis. "The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—who helped shape the modern Gulf South.

In The Great Power of Small Nations, Elizabeth N. Ellis (Peoria) tells the stories of the many smaller Native American nations that shaped the development of the Gulf South. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, Ellis’s narrative chronicles how diverse Indigenous peoples—including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas—influenced and often challenged the growth of colonial Louisiana. The book centers on questions of Native nation-building and international diplomacy, and it argues that Native American migration and practices of offering refuge to migrants in crisis enabled Native nations to survive the violence of colonization.

Indeed, these practices also made them powerful. When European settlers began to arrive in Indigenous homelands at the turn of the eighteenth century, these small nations, or petites nations as the French called them, pulled colonists into their political and social systems, thereby steering the development of early Louisiana. In some cases, the same practices that helped Native peoples withstand colonization in the eighteenth century, including frequent migration, living alongside foreign nations, and welcoming outsiders into their lands, have made it difficult for their contemporary descendants to achieve federal acknowledgment and full rights as Native American peoples.

The Great Power of Small Nations tackles questions of Native power past and present and provides a fresh examination of the formidable and resilient Native nations who helped shape the modern Gulf South.

John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020.

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Catherine Bateson, "Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood" (Louisiana UP, 2022)

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Dr Catherine Bateson is Associate Lecturer of American History at the University of Kent. She researches and writes about the role of song in the American Civil War, the sentiments ballads reveal about conflict experiences (especially for Irish Americans) and the culture of transnational music in mid-nineteenth century America. She has also written about aspects of retreat, enemy encounters, and home-front identity as articulated in American Civil War songs, and the role of music and song in military history more broadly. Dr Bateson is the co-founder of the War Through Other Stuff Society, former Vice-Chair of the Scottish Association for the Study of America and is currently Associate Editor of the Irish in the American Civil War website project.

In this interview she discusses her new book, Irish American Civil War Songs: Identity, Loyalty, and Nationhood (Louisiana State University Press, 2022)

Irish-born and Irish-descended soldiers and sailors were involved in every major engagement of the American Civil War. Throughout the conflict, they shared their wartime experiences through songs and song lyrics, leaving behind a vast trove of ballads in songbooks, letters, newspaper publications, wartime diaries, and other accounts. Taken together, these songs and lyrics offer an underappreciated source of contemporary feelings and opinions about the war. Irish American Civil War Songs provides the first in-depth exploration of Irish Americans’ use of balladry to portray and comment on virtually every aspect of the war as witnessed by the Irish on the front line and home front. Bateson considers the lyrics, themes, and sentiments of wartime songs produced in America but often originating with those born across the Atlantic in Ireland and Britain. Her analysis gives new insight into views held by the Irish migrant diaspora about the conflict and the ways those of Irish descent identified with and fought to defend their adopted homeland. Bateson’s investigation of Irish American song lyrics within the context of broader wartime experiences enhances our understanding of the Irish contribution to the American Civil War. At the same time, it demonstrates how Irish songs shaped many American balladry traditions as they laid the foundation of the Civil War’s musical soundscape.

Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh

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Yasmine Ali, "Walk Through Fire: The Train Disaster That Changed America" (Citadel Press, 2023)

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The first book to examine the rarely-acknowledged Waverly Train Disaster of 1978 - the catastrophic accident that changed America forever and led to the formation of FEMA.

Coinciding with the 45th anniversary of the event, Walk Through Fire: The Train Disaster That Changed America (Citadel Press, 2023) is a tribute to the first responders, as well as an examination of the strengths and vulnerabilities in rural America. On the night of February 22, 1978, a devastating freight train derailment drastically altered Waverly, Tennessee, and its place in history. This was one of the worst train explosions of the twentieth century, killing 16 people, injuring hundreds more, and causing millions of dollars in damage. What could have been dismissed as a single community's terrible misfortune instead became the catalyst for radical change, including the formation of FEMA, much-needed reforms in emergency response training, and the creation and enforcement of national and state safety regulations. Response to the disaster reshaped American infrastructure and laid the groundwork for the future of emergency management and disaster relief . . . and yet most Americans have never heard of Waverly.

Dr. Yasmine S. Ali, an award-winning medical writer and Waverly native, sets out to change this in Walk Through Fire, drawing from over a decade of meticulous research and interviews with survivors, first responders, and other firsthand accounts, including those of her own parents, first-generation Americans who were on call at the local hospital that treated the victims. Ali weaves a compelling narrative of small-town tragedy set against the broader backdrop of U.S. railroad history, rural healthcare, and other elements of American infrastructure that played a part in the creation--and the aftermath--of the Disaster. A tribute to resiliency and a call to action, Walk Through Fire tells the harrowing story of the Waverly Train Disaster from the perspectives of those who survived it, and those who still feel its impact today, illuminating how much a nation still has to learn from one small town in Tennessee.

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Norm Cohen et al., "An American Singing Heritage: Songs from the British-Irish-American Oral Tradition as Recorded in the Early Twentieth Century" (A-R Editions, 2021)

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The Music of the United States of America Series of musical editions is a monumental undertaking funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities with financial and organizational support from the University of Michigan, the American Musicological Society, the Society of American Music, and A-R Editions. The aim of the MUSA series, as it is called, is to provide expertly researched and edited scores of music from a wide variety of musical traditions performed in the United States. The thirty-second volume of the MUSA series is An American Singing Heritage: Songs from the British-Irish-American Oral Tradition as Recorded in the Early Twentieth Century published by A-R Editions in 2021 and edited by the Anne Dhu McLucas, Norm Cohen, and Carson Cohen. Dr. McLucas passed away before the edition was completed and Carson stepped in to complete the project with his father Norm. This collection of one hundred songs is a record of a fundamental repertoire in American music. Brought to this country by colonists, the folk songs became one of the foundations of the genre that early record executives called hillbilly music which was eventually rebranded as country music.

Each entry has extensive notes explaining the piece’s background and text, information about the recording used for the musical transcription, and a list of secondary sources that discuss the song. An American Singing Heritage required the editors to sift through thousands of recordings and songs to pick a representative sample of this large and fascinating repertoire. The editors selected sources for transcriptions in a broad range of singing styles and representing many regions of the United States. The selections attempt to avoid the biases of previous collections and provide a fresh group of examples, many heretofore unseen in print. The sources for the transcriptions are recordings of traditional musicians from the 1920s through the early 1940s drawn from commercial recordings of "hillbilly" musicians, and field recordings in the collection of the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song, now part of the Archive of Folk Culture. The American Musicological Society awarded the collection the 2022 Claude V. Palisca Award for an Outstanding Edition.

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Barbara E. Mattick, "Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South" (Catholic U of America Press

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South (Catholic University of America Press, 2022) discusses the work of the Sisters of St. Joseph of (the city of) St. Augustine, who came to Florida from France in 1866 to teach newly freed blacks after the Civil War, and remain to this day. It also tells the story of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Georgia, who sprang from the motherhouse in St. Augustine.

A significant part of the book is a comparison of the Sisters of St. Josephs’ work against that of their major rivals, missionaries from the Protestant American Missionary Association. Using letters the Sisters wrote back to their motherhouse in France, the book provides rare glimpses into the personal and professional (pun intended) lives of these women religious in St. Augustine and other parts of Florida and Georgia, from the mid-nineteenth century through the era of anti-Catholicism in the early twentieth century South. It carries the story through 1922, the end of the pioneer years of the Sisters of St. Josephs’ work in Florida, and the end of Sisters of St. Joseph of Georgia’s existence as a distinct order. Through the lenses of Catholicism, Florida and Southern history, gender, and race, the book addresses the Protestant concept of domesticity and how it was reinforced in Catholic terms by women who seemingly defied the ideal. It also relates the Sisters’ contributions in shaping life in the South during Reconstruction as they established elite academies and free schools, created orphanages, ministered to all during severe yellow fever epidemics, and fought the specter of anti-Catholicism as it crept across the rural regions of the country. To date, little has been written about Catholics in the South, much less the women religious who served there. This book helps to fill that gap.

Teaching in Black and White provides rare glimpses into the personal and professional lives of women religious in Florida and Georgia, from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth-century.

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Virginia L. Summey, "The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism within the Courts" (U Georgia Press, 2022)

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Virginia L. Summey's book The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism within the Courts (U Georgia Press, 2022) explores the life and contributions of groundbreaking attorney, Elreta Melton Alexander Ralston (1919–98). In 1945 Alexander became the first African American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School. In 1947 she was the first African American woman to practice law in the state of North Carolina, and in 1968 she became the first African American woman to become an elected district court judge. Despite her accomplishments, Alexander is little known to scholars outside of her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. Her life and career deserve recognition, however, not just because of her impressive lists of “firsts,” but also owing to her accomplishments during the civil rights movement in the U.S. South.

While Alexander did not actively participate in civil rights marches and demonstrations, she used her professional achievements and middle-class status to advocate for individuals who lacked a voice in the southern legal system. Virginia L. Summey argues that Alexander was integral to the civil rights movement in North Carolina as she, and women like her, worked to change discriminatory laws while opening professional doors for other minority women. Using her professional status, Alexander combatted segregation by demonstrating that Black women were worthy and capable of achieving careers alongside white men, thereby creating environments in which other African Americans could succeed. Her legal expertise and ability to reach across racial boundaries made her an important figure in Greensboro history.

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Char Miller, "West Side Rising: How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement" (Maverick Books, 2022)

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

On September 9, 1921, a tropical storm raged above San Antonio, Texas. The rain that night flooded the city's many waterways, distributing unequal destruction throughout its many neighborhoods. For the whiter, wealthier, parts of the city, the flood was an inconvenient detriment to business. For the Latinx West Side, it was a devastating tragedy.

In West Side Rising: How San Antonio's 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Miller (Maverick Books, 2021), Pomona College professor Char Miller explains why this flood happened, what made it so devastating, and how it galvanized a community activist movement that remade San Antonio politics. Miller uses never-before analyzed sources to explain how flood control and urban redevelopment left the city's most vulnerable population behind in the disaster's aftermath, and how this blatant environmental racism formed the nuclear of several generations of environmental activist organizations. By taking the story of 1921 into the twenty-first century, Miller argues that a story that could be told as simple tragedy in fact represents the best in the human spirit, as people band together to aid one another and seize power for themselves.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Christopher Willoughby, "Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools" (UNC Press, 2022)

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Medical science in antebellum America was organized around a paradox: it presumed African Americans to be less than human yet still human enough to be viable as experimental subjects, as cadavers, and for use in the training of medical students. By taking a hard look at the racial ideas of both northern and southern medical schools, Christopher D. E. Willoughby reveals that racist ideas were not external to the medical profession but fundamental to medical knowledge.

In this history of racial thinking and slavery in American medical schools, the founders and early faculty of these schools emerge as singularly influential proponents of white supremacist racial science. They pushed an understanding of race influenced by the theory of polygenesis—that each race was created separately and as different species—which they supported by training students to collect and measure human skulls from around the world. Medical students came to see themselves as masters of Black people's bodies through stealing Black people’s corpses, experimenting on enslaved people, and practicing distinctive therapeutics on Black patients. In documenting these practices Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in US Medical Schools (UNC Press, 2022) charts the rise of racist theories in U.S. medical schools, throwing new light on the extensive legacies of slavery in modern medicine.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Anna Arabindan-Kesson, "Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World" (Duke UP, 2021)

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke UP, 2021), Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In doing so, Arabindan-Kesson models an art historical approach that makes the histories of the Black diaspora central to nineteenth-century cultural production. She traces the emergence of a speculative vision that informs perceptions of Blackness in which artistic renderings of cotton--as both commodity and material--became inexorably tied to the monetary value of Black bodies. From the production and representation of "negro cloth"--the textile worn by enslaved plantation workers--to depictions of Black sharecroppers in photographs and paintings, Arabindan-Kesson demonstrates that visuality was the mechanism through which Blackness and cotton became equated as resources for extraction. In addition to interrogating the work of nineteenth-century artists, she engages with contemporary artists such as Hank Willis Thomas, Lubaina Himid, and Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, who contend with the commercial and imperial processes shaping constructions of Blackness and meanings of labor.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Caroline Grego, "Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South" (UNC Press, 2022)

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

On an August night in 1893, the deadliest hurricane in South Carolina history struck the Lowcountry, killing thousands—almost all African American. But the devastating storm is only the beginning of this story. The hurricane's long effects intermingled with ongoing processes of economic downturn, racial oppression, resistance, and environmental change. In the Lowcountry, the political, economic, and social conditions of Jim Crow were inextricable from its environmental dimensions.

This narrative history of a monumental disaster and its aftermath uncovers how Black workers and politicians, white landowners and former enslavers, northern interlocutors and humanitarians all met on the flooded ground of the coast and fought to realize very different visions for the region's future. Through a telescoping series of narratives in which no one's actions were ever fully triumphant or utterly futile, Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South (UNC Press, 2022) explores with nuance this painful and contradictory history and shows how environmental change, political repression, and communal traditions of resistance, survival, and care converged.

Caroline Grego is assistant professor of history at Queens University of Charlotte. Twitter. Website.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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R. Isabela Morales, "Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

When Samuel Townsend died at his home in Madison County, Alabama, in November 1856, the fifty-two-year-old white planter left behind hundreds of slaves, thousands of acres of rich cotton land, and a net worth of approximately $200,000. In life, Samuel had done little to distinguish himself from other members of the South's elite slaveholding class. But he made a name for himself in death by leaving almost the entirety of his fortune to his five sons, four daughters, and two nieces: all of them his slaves.

In Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (Oxford UP, 2022), R. Isabela Morales reconstructs the migration of this mixed-race family across the American West and South over the second half of the nineteenth century. Searching for communities where they could exercise their newfound freedom and wealth to the fullest, members of the family homesteaded and attended college in Ohio and Kansas; fought for the Union Army in Mississippi; mined for silver in the Colorado Rockies; and, in the case of one son, returned to Alabama to purchase part of the old plantation where he had once been held as a slave. In Morales's telling, the Townsends' story maps a new landscape of opportunity and oppression, where the meanings of race and freedom--as well as opportunities for social and economic mobility--were dictated by highly local circumstances.

During the turbulent period between the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow at the turn of the twentieth century, the Townsends carved out spaces where they were able to benefit from their money and mixed-race ancestry, pass down generational wealth, and realize some of their happy dreams of liberty.

Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware.

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Clayton J. Butler, "True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction" (LSU Press, 2022)

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

During the American Civil War, thousands of citizens in the Deep South remained loyal to the United States. Though often overlooked, this small number of individuals possessed broad symbolic importance and occupied an outsized place in the strategic thinking and public discourse of both the Union and the Confederacy.

In True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction (LSU Press, 2022), Clayton Butler investigates the lives of white Unionists in three Confederate states, revealing who they were, why and how they took their Unionist stand, and what happened to them as a result. He focuses on three Union regiments recruited from the Deep South and explores how Northerners and southerners alike thought about Deep South Unionism throughout the war, often projecting their hopes and apprehensions onto these embattled dissenters.

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Andrew McIlwaine Bell, "The Origins of Southern College Football: How an Ivy League Game Became a Dixie Tradition" (LSU Press, 2020)

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 08:00:00 -0000

College football is a massive enterprise in the United States, and southern teams dominate poll rankings and sports headlines while generating billions in revenue for public schools and private companies. Southern football fans worship their teams, often rearranging their personal lives in order to accommodate season schedules. Andrew McIlwaine Bell's book The Origins of Southern College Football: How an Ivy League Game Became a Dixie Tradition (LSU Press, 2020) sheds new light on the South’s obsession with football and explores the sport’s beginnings below the Mason-Dixon Line in the decades after the Civil War.

Military defeat followed by a long period of cultural unrest compelled many southerners to look to northern ideas and customs for guidance in rebuilding their beleaguered society. Ivy League universities, considered bastions of enlightenment and symbols of the modernizing spirit of the age, provided a particular source of inspiration for southerners in the form of organized or “scientific” football that featured standardized rules and scoring. Transported to the South by men educated at northern universities, scientific football reinforced cultural values that had existed in the region for centuries, among them a tolerance for violence, respect for martial displays, and support for traditional gender roles. The game also held the promise of a “New South” that its supporters hoped would transform the region into an industrial powerhouse. Students and townspeople alike embraced the new sport, which served as a source of pride for a region that lagged woefully behind its northern counterpart in terms of social equity and economic prowess.

The Origins of Southern College Football (LSU Press, 2020) is an entertaining history of the South’s most popular sport cast against a broader narrative of the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, two momentous periods of change that gave rise to the game we recognize today.

Bennett Koerber is an instructor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He can be reached at bkoerber@andrew.cmu.edu

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Sam W. Haynes, "Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas" (Basic Books, 2022)

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Texas Revolution has long been cast as an epic episode in the origins of the American West. As the story goes, larger-than-life figures like Sam Houston, David Crockett, and William Barret Travis fought to free Texas from repressive Mexican rule. In Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas (Basic Books, 2022), historian Sam Haynes reveals the reality beneath this powerful creation myth. He shows how the lives of ordinary people—white Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and those of African descent—were upended by extraordinary events over twenty-five years. After the battle of San Jacinto, racial lines snapped taut as a new nation, the Lone Star republic, sought to expel Indians, marginalize Mexicans, and tighten its grip on the enslaved.

This is a revelatory and essential new narrative of a major turning point in the history of North America.

Andrew R. Graybill is professor of history and director of the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (Liveright, 2013).

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Regina L. Wagner, "Electoral Patterns in Alabama: Local Change and Continuity Amid National Trends" (Palgrave MacmIllan, 2022)

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

While significant attention in political science is devoted to national level elections, a comprehensive look at state level political dynamics in the United States is so far sorely missing, and state level electoral developments and shifts are treated as mere reflections of national-level dynamics and patterns.

Regina L. Wagner's book Electoral Patterns in Alabama: Local Change and Continuity Amid National Trends (Palgrave MacmIllan, 2022) argues that this significantly impacts our ability to understand macro-level electoral shifts in the United States in general. The book analyzes gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential election results in the state of Alabama from 1945 through 2020. Comprehensive maps of county-level partisan shifts over time and comparisons between trends for different offices make it possible to isolate pivotal elections and compare state-level and national trends over time. When and where did Alabama’s electorate break with the Democratic Party, and were these breaks uniform across the state? Which counties shifted the most over time, and was this shift gradual or characterized by change elections? Comprehensive electoral data, on the county- and precinct-level, make it possible to answer these questions and place state-level electoral behavior in its regional and national context. Detailed county level demographic and economic data is used to provide local context for electoral patterns, shifts, and continuities.

Regina L. Wagner is assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama.

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Guy Lancaster, "American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching" (U Arkansas Press, 2021)

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Lynching is often viewed as a narrow form of violence: either the spontaneous act of an angry mob against accused individuals, or a demonstration of white supremacy against an entire population considered subhuman. However, in this new treatise, historian Guy Lancaster exposes the multiple forms of violence hidden beneath the singular label of lynching.

Lancaster, who has written extensively on racial violence, details several lynchings of Blacks by white posses in post-Reconstruction Arkansas. Drawing from the fields of history, philosophy, cognitive science, sociology, and literary theory, and quoting chilling contemporary accounts, he argues that the act of lynching encompasses five distinct but overlapping types of violence. This new framework reveals lynching to be even more of an atrocity than previously understood: that mobs did not disregard the humanity of their victims but rather reveled in it; that they were not simply enacting personal vengeance but manifesting an elite project of subjugation. Lancaster thus clarifies and connects the motives and goals of seemingly isolated lynch mobs, embedding the practice in the ongoing enforcement of white supremacy. By interrogating the substance of lynching, American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching (U Arkansas Press, 2021) shines new light on both past anti-Black violence and the historical underpinnings of our present moment.

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Dan Immergluck, "Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta" (U California Press, 2022)

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Atlanta, the capital of the American South, is at the red-hot core of expansion, inequality, and political relevance. In recent decades, central Atlanta has experienced heavily racialized gentrification while the suburbs have become more diverse, with many affluent suburbs trying to push back against this diversity. Exploring the city’s past and future, Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First-Century Atlanta (U California Press, 2022) tracks these racial and economic shifts and the politics and policies that produced them.

Dan Immergluck documents the trends that are inverting Atlanta’s late-twentieth-century “poor-in-the-core” urban model. New emphasis on capital-driven growth has excluded low-income people and families of color from the city’s center, pushing them to distant suburbs far from mass transit, large public hospitals, and other essential services. Revealing critical lessons for leaders, activists, and residents in cities around the world, Immergluck considers how planners and policymakers can reverse recent trends to create more socially equitable cities.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Charles Sawyer, "B. B. King: From Indianola to Icon: A Personal Odyssey with the 'King of the Blues'" (Schiffer Publishing, 2022)

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Want to take a trip with the king of the Blues? As B.B. King’s photographer and original biographer, Charlie Sawyer was along for the ride. In B.B. King from Indianola to Icon: A Personal Odyssey with the King of the Blues (Schiffer, 2022), journalist and photographer Charles Sawyer discusses his many years working with and near the greatest of Blues icons, from the early years as King was transitioning to the “Chitlin Circuit” to mainstream audiences to the founding of the B. B. King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center, Sawyer was there for it all, and shares it with us—along with more than 100 photographs.

David Hamilton Golland is professor of history and immediate past president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland.

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Alena Pirok, "The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg: Ghosts and Interpreting the Recreated Past" (U Massachusetts Press, 2022)

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

On any given night, hundreds of guests walk the darkened streets of Colonial Williamsburg looking for ghosts. Since the early 2000s, both the museum and private companies have facilitated these hunts, offering year-round ghost tours. Critics have called these excursions a cash grab, but in truth, ghosts and hauntings have long been at the center of the Colonial Williamsburg project.

The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg: Ghosts and Interpreting the Recreated Past (U Massachusetts Press, 2022) examines how the past comes alive at this living-history museum. In the early twentieth century, local stories about the ghosts of former residents--among them Revolutionary War soldiers and nurses, tavern owners and prominent attorneys, and enslaved African Americans--helped to turn Williamsburg into a desirable site for historical restoration. But, for much of the twentieth century, the museum tried diligently to avoid any discussion of ghosts, considering them frivolous and lowbrow. Alena Pirok explores why historic sites have begun to embrace their spectral residents in recent decades, arguing that through them, patrons experience an emotional connection to place and a palpable understanding of the past through its people.

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Robert P. Watson, "George Washington's Final Battle: The Epic Struggle to Build a Capital City and a Nation" (Georgetown UP, 2021)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

George Washington is remembered for leading the Continental Army to victory, presiding over the Constitution, and forging a new nation, but few know the story of his involvement in the establishment of a capital city and how it nearly tore the United States apart. In George Washington's Final Battle: The Epic Struggle to Build a Capital City and a Nation (Georgetown UP, 2021), Dr. Robert P. Watson brings this tale to life, telling how the country's first president tirelessly advocated for a capital on the shores of the Potomac. Washington envisioned and had a direct role in planning many aspects of the city that would house the young republic. In doing so, he created a landmark that gave the fledgling democracy credibility, united a fractious country, and created a sense of American identity. Although Washington died just months before the federal government's official relocation, his vision and influence live on in the city that bears his name. This little-known story of founding intrigue throws George Washington’s political acumen into sharp relief and provides a historical lesson in leadership and consensus-building that remains relevant today. This book will fascinate anyone interested in the founding period, the American presidency, and the history of Washington, DC.

Daniel P. Stone holds a PhD in American history from Manchester Metropolitan University (United Kingdom) and is the author of William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet (Signature Books, 2018).

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Wendy Gonaver, "The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880" (UNC Press, 2019)

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 20:39:00 -0000

Dr. Wendy Gonaver discusses her book, The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Virginia, and the roles that race, the institution of slavery, and slave labor played in the development of psychiatric diagnosis and care through the nineteenth century and beyond.

Though the origins of asylums can be traced to Europe, the systematic segregation of the mentally ill into specialized institutions occurred in the United States only after 1800, just as the struggle to end slavery took hold. In this book, Wendy Gonaver examines the relationship between these two historical developments, showing how slavery and ideas about race shaped early mental health treatment in the United States, especially in the South. She reveals these connections through the histories of two asylums in Virginia: the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, the first in the nation; and the Central Lunatic Asylum in Petersburg, the first created specifically for African Americans. Eastern Lunatic Asylum was the only institution to accept both slaves and free blacks as patients and to employ slaves as attendants.

Drawing from these institutions' untapped archives, Gonaver reveals how slavery influenced ideas about patient liberty, about the proper relationship between caregiver and patient, about what constituted healthy religious belief and unhealthy fanaticism, and about gender. This early form of psychiatric care acted as a precursor to public health policy for generations, and Gonaver's book fills an important gap in the historiography of mental health and race in the nineteenth century.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Kenneth H. Kolb, "Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate" (U California Press, 2021)

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate (U California Press, 2021) examines the failure of recent efforts to improve Americans' diets by increasing access to healthy food. Based on exhaustive research, this book by Kenneth H. Kolb documents the struggles of two Black neighborhoods in Greenville, South Carolina. For decades, outsiders ignored residents' complaints about the unsavory retail options on their side of town—until the well-intentioned but flawed "food desert" concept took hold in popular discourse. Soon after, new allies arrived to help, believing that grocery stores and healthier options were the key to better health. These efforts, however, did not change neighborhood residents' food consumption practices. Retail Inequality explains why and also outlines the history of deindustrialization, urban public policy, and racism that are the cause of unequal access to food today. Kolb identifies retail inequality as the crucial concept to understanding today’s debates over gentrification and community development. As this book makes clear, the battle over food deserts was never about food—it was about equality.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Timothy Paul Bowman, "You Will Never Be One of Us: A Teacher, a Texas Town, and the Rural Roots of Radical Conservatism" (U of Oklahoma Press, 2022)

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

As the 1974 school year began, Wayne Woodward was a beloved high school teacher in a rural Texas town. By the following spring, he was embroiled in a local political firestorm that would ultimately cost him his job. Woodward's sin was, in his own words, naively trying to found a chapter of the ACLU in his Hereford, Texas community. In You Will Never Be One of Us: A Teacher, A Texas Town, and the Rural Roots of Radical Conservatism (University of Oklahoma Press, 2022) West Texas A&M Professor Timothy Bowman tells the remarkable story of Woodward's teaching career, his fight over the ACLU chapter, and the nationally-covered wrongful termination trial that followed. Woodward's story casts shifts the story of American conservatism away from the suburbs and toward rural places like Hereford, where local frontier identities helped create distrust of outsiders and a strong streak of libertarianism. The central question of the book is one of human behavior: why otherwise average Americans would work so hard to run an idealistic young person and beloved teacher out of town? The answer has everything to do with Mexican immigration, labor unrest, and the roiling culture wars, and speaks directly to our present political moment.

Timothy Paul Bowman is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at West Texas A&M University in Canyon and the author of Blood Oranges: Colonialism and Agriculture in the South Texas Borderlands.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Emily Bingham, "My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song" (Knopf, 2022)

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Any song as old and as familiar as “My Old Kentucky Home” is bound to have accrued many different meanings and an interesting history. Emily Bingham’s book, My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song (Knopf, 2022) delivers on the promise of its title. In this book Bingham uses the reception of “My Old Kentucky Home,” composed in 1853 by Stephen Foster, to consider how white Americans have constructed a story about the United States that washes away racism and silences the pain of enslavement and racialized violence. Bingham traces the journey of “My Old Kentucky Home” from a popular minstrel song written by an alcoholic Northerner to Lost Cause anthem to American patriotic hymn to a symbol of a reckoning over United States history that is still unfinished. She explains how Black Americans’ responses to “My Old Kentucky Home” illuminates the challenges and contradictions of living within a racist system while also protesting it. Bingham also reveals the lengths to which some people will go in order to maintain an inauthentic history that conforms to a comforting national and even personal self-image.

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Amy Potter et al., "Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum" (U Georgia Press, 2022)

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum (U Georgia Press, 2022) explores plantation museums as sites for contesting and reforming public interpretations of slavery in the American South. Emerging out of a three-year National Science Foundation grant (2014-17), the book turns a critical eye toward the growing inclusion of the formerly enslaved within these museums, specifically examining advances but also continuing inequalities in how they narrate and memorialize the formerly enslaved.

Using assemblage theory as a framework, Remembering Enslavement offers an innovative approach for studying heritage sites, retelling and remapping the ways that slavery and the enslaved are included in southern plantation museums.

It examines multiple plantation sites across geographic areas, considering the experiences of a diversity of actors: tourists, museum managers/owners, and tour guides/interpreters. This approach allows for an understanding of regional variations

among plantation museums, narratives, and performances, as well as more in-depth study of the plantation tour experience and public interpretations. The authors conclude the book with a set of questions designed to help professionals reassemble plantation museum narratives and landscapes to more justly position the formerly enslaved at their center.

This interview is with three of the authors: Amy Potter, Stephen Hanna, and Derek Alderman.

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Carl A. Brasseaux and Donald W. Davis, "Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Shrimp is easily America’s favorite seafood, but its very popularity is the wellspring of problems that threaten the shrimp industry’s existence. Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou (University of Mississippi Press, 2022) by Carl A. Brasseaux and Donald W. Davis provides insightful analysis of this paradox and a detailed, thorough history of the industry in Louisiana.

Dried shrimp technology was part of the cultural heritage Pearl River Chinese immigrants introduced into the Americas in the mid-nineteenth century. As early as 1870, Chinese natives built shrimp-drying operations in Louisiana’s wetlands and exported the product to Asia through the port of San Francisco. This trade internationalized the shrimp industry. About three years before Louisiana’s Chinese community began their export endeavors, manufactured ice became available in New Orleans, and the Dunbar family introduced patented canning technology. The convergence of these ancient and modern technologies shaped the evolution of the northern Gulf Coast’s shrimp industry to the present.

Coastal Louisiana’s historic connection to the Pacific Rim endures. Not only does the region continue to export dried shrimp to Asian markets domestically and internationally, but since 2000 the region’s large Vietnamese immigrant population has increasingly dominated Louisiana’s fresh shrimp harvest. Louisiana shrimp constitute the American gold standard of raw seafood excellence. Yet, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, cheap imports are forcing the nation’s domestic shrimp industry to rediscover its economic roots. “Fresh off the boat” signs and real-time internet connections with active trawlers are reestablishing the industry’s ties to local consumers. Direct marketing has opened the industry to middle-class customers who meet the boats at the docks. This “right off the boat” paradigm appears to be leading the way to reestablishment of sustainable aquatic resources. All-one-can-eat shrimp buffets are not going to disappear, but the Louisiana shrimp industry’s fate will ultimately be determined by discerning consumers’ palates.

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Jodi Skipper, "Behind the Big House: Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the U.S. South" (U Iowa Press, 2022)

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Behind the Big House: Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the U.S. South (U Iowa Press, 2022) gives readers a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to interpret the difficult history of slavery in the U.S. South. The book explores Jodi Skipper’s eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture.

In laying out her experiences through an autoethnographic approach, Skipper seeks to help other activist scholars of color negotiate the nuances of place, the academic public sphere, and its ambiguous systems of reward, recognition, and evaluation.

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Davida Breier, "Sinkhole" (U New Orleans Press, 2022)

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Davida Breier talks about her debut novel Sinkhole (University of New Orleans Press, 2022). Humidity, lovebugs, and murder. Lies from the past and a dangerous present collide when, after fifteen years in exile, Michelle Miller returns to her tiny hometown of Lorida, Florida. With her mother in the hospital, she's forced to reckon with the broken relationships she left behind: with her family, with friends, and with herself. As a teenager, Michelle felt isolated and invisible until she met Sissy, a dynamic and wealthy classmate. Their sudden, intense friendship was all-consuming. Punk rocker Morrison later joins their clique, and they become an inseparable trio. They were the perfect high school friends, bound by dysfunction, bad TV, and boredom—until one of them ends up dead. Forced to confront the life she turned her back on fifteen years ago, she begins questioning what was truth and what were lies. Now at a distance, Michelle begins to see how dangerous Sissy truly was. An ingenious debut from editor and publisher Davida Breier, Sinkhole is a mesmerizing, darkly comic coming-of-age novel immersed in 1980s central Florida. A disturbing and skillful exploration of home, friendship, selfhood, and grief set amidst golf courses, mobile homes, and alligators.

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Marissa R. Moss, "Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be" (Henry Holt, 2022)

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

It was only two decades ago, but, for the women of country music, 1999 seems like an entirely different universe. With Shania Twain, country's biggest award winner and star, and The Chicks topping every chart, country music was a woman's world: specifically, country radio and Nashville's Music Row.

Cut to 2021, when women are only played on country radio 16% of the time, on a good day, and when only men have won Entertainer of the Year at the CMA Awards for a decade. To a world where artists like Kacey Musgraves sell out arenas but barely score a single second of airplay. But also to a world where these women are infinitely bigger live draws than most male counterparts, having massive pop crossover hits like Maren Morris's "The Middle," pushing the industry to confront its deeply embedded racial biases with Mickey Guyton's "Black Like Me," winning heaps of Grammy nominations, banding up in supergroups like The Highwomen and taking complete control of their own careers, on their own terms. When the rules stopped working for the women of country music, they threw them out and made their own: and changed the genre forever, and for better.

Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be (Henry Holt, 2022) is veteran Nashville journalist Marissa R. Moss's story of how in the past two decades, country's women fought back against systems designed to keep them down, armed with their art and never willing to just shut up and sing: how women like Kacey, Mickey, Maren, The Chicks, Miranda Lambert, Rissi Palmer, Brandy Clark, LeAnn Rimes, Brandi Carlile, Margo Price and many more have reinvented the rules to find their place in an industry stacked against them, how they've ruled the century when it comes to artistic output--and about how women can and do belong in the mainstream of country music, even if their voices aren't being heard as loudly.

Marissa R. Moss is an award-winning journalist who has written about the topic of gender inequality on the country airwaves for outlets like Rolling Stone, NPR, Billboard, Entertainment Weekly, and many more. Moss was the 2018 recipient of the Rolling Stone Chet Flippo Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism, and the 2019 Nashville Scene Best of Nashville Best Music Reporter. She has been a guest on The TODAY Show, Entertainment Tonight, CBS Morning Show, NPR's Weekend Edition, WPLN, the Pop Literacy Podcast, and more.

Marissa R. Moss on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Marcus Nevius on Becoming a Historian, Marronage, Slave Resistance, and More!

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 04:00:00 -0000

Today's episode of "New Books in African American Studies" is special. Why, you might ask? Because today's episode marks my 100th episode on the NBN! To celebrate, I am chopping it up with my good brother, Dr. Marcus Nevius, Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island. In today's convo, Brotha Dr. Nevius and I discuss why he chose to become a historian, his route to become a scholar of marronage and slave resistance, the great Dr. Leslie Alexander, and much much more. Enjoy NBN interview #100, family!

Marcus Nevius is the author of City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856 (University of Georgia Press, 2021).

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Christopher M. Reali, "Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Christopher Reali is an assistant professor of music at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama's carnival.

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John M. Shaw, "Following the Drums: African American Fife and Drum Music in Tennessee" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Following the Drums: African American Fife and Drum Music in Tennessee (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) is an epic history of a little-known African American instrumental music form. Carefully documenting the music's early uses for commercial advertising and sports promotion, John M. Shaw follows the strands of the music through the nadir of African American history during post-Reconstruction up to the form's rediscovery by musicologists and music researchers during the blues and folk revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Following the Drums is a journey through African American history and Tennessee history, with a fascinating form of music powering the story.

John M. Shaw is a musicologist, musician, writer, and blogger, currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of Memphis.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama's carnival.

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Peter H. Wood, "Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion" (Norton, 1996)

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Adam Xavier McNeil. Today’s podcast is special, not because this is the 99th episode of my New Books career, but because I get the chance to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Peter H. Wood completing the dissertation version of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion. In this wide-ranging interview, I discuss the origin story of Peter’s work, what happened at Duke University in the 80s and 90s that opened opportunities for the likes of Jennifer L. Morgan, Vincent Brown, and the late great Julius Scott to come through the Durham doors, and where he sees the field of slavery studies going? Enjoy the conversation, family.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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The Battle of Buxton: Saving a Lighthouse in the Era of Climate Change

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

If you tuned in to our “ideas in strange places” themed programming last week, you would have heard an episode of Darts and Letters’ predecessor: Cited. (If you didn’t, check it out - there’s everything from science fiction to prison activism back there!)

Today, as we continue exploring the politics of education, we’re bringing you another episode of Cited. This one was produced in collaboration with 99% Invisible. It tells a vivid story of science, politics, nature, and a heated battle over a small town’s beloved lighthouse.

The forces of nature versus the forces of human willpower has been an eternal struggle. This is an evocative short documentary, melding history with salient reminders: in the face of climate change, the struggle is becoming more and more intense.

We’ve got one more episode for this week, and then we’ll be moving on to a different theme! Stay tuned for more of our classic content, and get ready for new episodes of Darts and Letters right here on the New Books Network starting on September 16th.

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If you want to do a little more we would love if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too.

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Today’s episode was produced by Gordon Katic, and edited by 99% Invisible’s Delaney Hall and Cited's Sam Fenn.

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Michael K. Beauchamp, "Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815" (LSU Press, 2021)

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

M. K. Beauchamp's Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 (LSU Press, 2021) examines the challenges that resulted from U.S. territorial expansion through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. With the acquisition of this vast region, the United States gained a colonial European population whose birthplace, language, and religion often differed from those of their U.S. counterparts. This population exhibited multiple ethnic tensions and possessed little experience with republican government. Consequently, administration of the territory proved a trial-and-error endeavor involving incremental cooperation between federal officials and local elites. As Beauchamp demonstrates, this process of gradual accommodation served as an essential nationalizing experience for the people of Louisiana.

After the acquisition, federal officials who doubted the loyalty of the local French population and their capacity for self-governance denied the territory of Orleans--easily the region's most populated and economically robust area--a quick path to statehood. Instead, U.S. officials looked to groups including free people of color, Native Americans, and recent immigrants, all of whom found themselves ideally placed to negotiate for greater privileges from the new territorial government. Beauchamp argues that U.S. administrators, despite claims of impartiality and equality before the law, regularly acted as fickle agents of imperial power and frequently co-opted local elites with prominent positions within the parishes. Overall, the methods utilized by the United States in governing Louisiana shared much in common with European colonial practices implemented elsewhere in North America during the early nineteenth century.

While historians have previously focused on Washington policy makers in investigating the relationship between the United States and the newly acquired territory, Beauchamp emphasizes the integral role played by territorial elites who wielded enormous power and enabled government to function. His work offers profound insights into the interplay of class, ethnicity, and race, as well as an understanding of colonialism, the nature of republics, democracy, and empire. By placing the territorial period of early national Louisiana in an imperial context, this study reshapes perceptions of American expansion and manifest destiny in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Instruments of Empire serves as a rich resource for specialists studying Louisiana and the U.S. South, as well as scholars of slavery and free people of color, nineteenth-century American history, Atlantic World and border studies, U.S. foreign relations, and the history of colonialism and empire.

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John Joe Schlichtman, "Showroom City: Real Estate and Resistance in the Furniture Capital of the World" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

A unique and engaging account of local urban decision-making within the globalizing world

High Point, North Carolina, is known as the “Furniture Capital of the World.” Once a manufacturing stronghold, most of its furniture factories have closed over the past forty years, with production shipped off to low-wage countries. Yet as manufacturing left, the city tightened its hold on a biannual global exposition that serves as the world’s furniture fashion runway. At the High Point Market, visitors from more than one hundred nations traverse twelve million square feet of meticulous design. Downtown buildings—once courthouses, movie theaters, post offices, and gas stations—are now chic showroom spaces, even as many sit empty between each exposition.

In Showroom City: Real Estate and Resistance in the Furniture Capital of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Dr. John Joe Schlichtman applies an ethnographic lens to the global exposition’s relationship with High Point after it defeated rival Chicago in the 1960s and established itself as the world’s dominant furniture center. In recent decades, following trends in global finance, private equity firms were increasingly behind downtown High Point’s real estate transactions, coordinated by buyers far removed from the region. Then, in one massive transaction in 2011, a firm funded by Bain Capital purchased every major showroom building, and the majority of downtown real estate was under one owner.

Showroom City is a story of exclusionary growth and unchecked development, of a city flailing to fill the void left by its dwindling factories. But beyond that Schlichtman engages the general lessons behind both High Point’s deindustrialization and its stunning reinvention as a furniture fashion, merchandising, and design node. With great nuance, he delves deeply to reveal how power operates locally and how citizens may affirm, exploit, influence, and resist the takeover of their community.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations people and place at festivals and celebrations. His next book project is on research that he conducted about a canoeing and kayaking event that occurs annually on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Thulani Davis, "The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom" (Duke UP, 2022)

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke UP, 2022) Thulani Davis provides a sweeping rethinking of Reconstruction by tracing how the four million people newly freed from bondage created political organizations and connections that mobilized communities across the South. Drawing on the practices of community they developed while enslaved, freedpeople built new settlements and created a network of circuits through which they imagined, enacted, and defended freedom. This interdisciplinary history shows that these circuits linked rural and urban organizations, labor struggles, and political culture with news, strategies, education, and mutual aid. Mapping the emancipation circuits, Davis shows the geography of ideas of freedom---circulating on shipping routes, via army maneuvers, and with itinerant activists---that became the basis for the first mass Black political movement for equal citizenship in the United States. In this work, she reconfigures understandings of the evolution of southern Black political agendas while outlining the origins of the enduring Black freedom struggle from the Jim Crow era to the present.

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Katharine A. Burnett and Monica Carol Miller, "The Tacky South" (LSU Press, 2022)

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

As a way to comment on a person’s style or taste, the word “tacky” has distinctly southern origins, with its roots tracing back to the so-called “tackies” who tacked horses on South Carolina farms prior to the Civil War. The Tacky South (LSU Press, 2022) presents eighteen fun, insightful essays that examine connections between tackiness and the American South, ranging from nineteenth-century local color fiction and the television series Murder, She Wrote to red velvet cake and the ubiquitous influence of Dolly Parton. Charting the gender, race, and class constructions at work in regional aesthetics, The Tacky South explores what shifting notions of "tackiness" reveal about US culture as a whole and the role that region plays in addressing national and global issues of culture and identity.

Editors Katharine Burnett and Monica Carol Miller have created a Spotify playlist celebrating tackiness. Follow them on Twitter @thetackysouth or visit their website.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Associate Professor of English and Assistant Dean of the School of Arts, Science, and Business at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.

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Tanya M. Peres and Aaron Deter-Wolf, "Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink" (U Alabama Press, 2018)

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Understanding and explaining societal rules surrounding food and foodways have been the foci of anthropological studies since the early days of the discipline. Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink: Foodways Archaeology in the American Southeast (U Alabama Press, 2018), however, is the first collection devoted exclusively to southeastern foodways analyzed through archaeological perspectives. These essays examine which foods were eaten and move the discussion of foodstuffs into the sociocultural realm of why, how, and when they were eaten.

Editors Tanya M. Peres and Aaron Deter-Wolf present a volume that moves beyond basic understandings, applying new methods or focusing on subjects not widely discussed in the Southeast to date. Chapters are arranged using the dominant research themes of feasting, social and political status, food security and persistent places, and foodways histories. Contributors provide in-depth examination of specific food topics such as bone marrow, turkey, Black Drink, bourbon, earth ovens, and hominy.

Contributors bring a broad range of expertise to the collection, resulting in an expansive look at all of the steps taken from field to table, including procurement, production, cooking, and consumption, all of which have embedded cultural meanings and traditions. The scope of the volume includes the diversity of research specialties brought to bear on the topic of foodways as well as the temporal and regional breadth and depth, the integration of multiple lines of evidence, and, in some cases, the reinvestigation of well-known sites with new questions and new data.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.

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David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

David Silkenat is a Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of several books, including Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War, a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Rain Prud'homme-Cranford and Darryl Barthé, "Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community" (U Washington Press, 2022)

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood: Afro-Indigeneity and Community (U Washington Press, 2022) explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity.

With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people who have been negated and written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination.

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Joseph Boone, "Furnace Creek" (Eyewear Publishing, 2021)

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, Furnace Creek (Eyewear Publishing, 2021) teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues--racial injustice, a war abroad, women's and gay rights, class struggle--that galvanized the world in those decades. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer's niece and nephew--these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris--all before returning home to confront his life's many expectations and disappointments. Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, Furnace Creek leaps the frame of Dickens' masterpiece to provide a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family.

Joseph Allen Boone is a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California and the author of Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism and Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington, the Stanford Humanity Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies and has been in residency at the Liguria Center at Bogliasco, the Rockefeller-Bellagio Center, and the Valparaiso Foundation.

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. Twitter.

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Amy L. Stone, "Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South" (NYU Press, 2022)

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South (NYU Press, 2022) reveals the importance of citywide celebrations like Mardi Gras and Fiesta for LGBTQIA+ communities in the US South. Drawing on five years of research, and over a hundred days at LGBTQ events in cities such as San Antonio, Santa Fe, Baton Rouge, and Mobile, Stone gives readers a front-row seat to festivals, carnivals, and Mardi Gras celebrations, vividly bringing these queer cultural spaces and the people that create and participate in them to life. Stone shows how these events serve a larger fundamental purpose, helping LGBTQ people to cultivate a sense of belonging in cities that may be otherwise hostile

Amy L. Stone is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. They are the author of several other books, including Gay Rights at the Ballot Box, Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, and Cornyation: San Antonio’s Outrageous Fiesta Tradition.

Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries.

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Stephen Deusner, "Where the Devil Don't Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers" (U Texas Press, 2021)

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Stephen Deusner's Where the Devil Don't Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers (U Texas Press, 2021) is the book-length study Drive-By Truckers fans have been waiting for. A group biography in the form of a road trip saga, Deusner's book takes you to the Athens scene that has supported the band, the sweltering hot Birmingham studio where they recorded their breakthrough album Southern Rock Opera, and the Muscle Shoals in which a majority of the band was raised. Deusner's trip takes wide detours into Southern history and culture, as any proper treatment of the Truckers must. It is as much about what the band's music is about (family, tradition, violence, despair, transcendence) as it is about the music itself. This book is as complex, moving, thrilling, and funny as one of DBT's marathon sets. Pass the bourbon.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross, "Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Tue, 31 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge UP, 2020) tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies - Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana - Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom - not slavery - established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.

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Anjanette Delgado, "Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness" (UP of Florida Press, 2021)

Fri, 27 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today I spoke to Anjanette Delgado, a Puerto Rican writer and journalist based in Miami who has compiled emblematic stories and essays by writers from many countries who congregate in the city of Miami and the state of Florida. The stories are about those who have been touched by the Florida and Miami experience, and who have made the state their home. Her anthology titled Home in Florida. Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness published by the University of Florida Press Gainesville in 2021 has won the silver medal for the Independent Publishing Book awards. She is also the author of The Heartbreak Pill: A novel and the The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho. She has written for the The New York Times “Modern Love” column, Vogue, NPR, HBO, the Kenyon Review and the Hong Kong Review.

Through this corpus on the immigrant experience, the reader will get the distillation of Florida’s multiculturalism and also gain insights on the in betweenness of the minority and majority in America.

On the one hand there are those who feel Miami is a city lost to the American heartland but continue to flock there to enjoy the café cortadito and the myriad joys of having the foreign in the midst of Sameness. And then there the displaced and uprooted in a “halfway house” of exile. A variety of genres: poetry, love letters, prose songs, jokes all hang together in this poignant compilation of the involuntary wanderer.

Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Delhi

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Brandon T. Jett, "Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South" (Louisiana State UP, 2021)

Fri, 27 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In this groundbreaking work, Professor Brandon T. Jett unearths how police departments evolved with the urbanization of the Jim Crow South, to target African Americans through a variety of mechanisms of control and violence, such as violent interactions, unjust arrests, and the enforcement of segregation laws and customs. Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South, published by Louisiana State University in July 2021, provides explanation and context to show the way that modern institution of policing in the United States has evolved from, but clings to historical patterns and attitudes that situate African Americans in positions of relative vulnerability in their interactions with police.

Still, what surprises in Jett's work is the way that Black residents co-operated and even manipulated the police in aid of crime reduction and to extract services in the urban spaces that they lived. Vivid examples and rich detail provides the reader with a thorough understanding of criminal justice and the way that policing reinforced segregation during the Jim Crow era.

Brandon T. Jett is a professor of history at Florida South Western State College. In 2017, he was awarded a William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Early Career Scholar Fellowship. You can listen to him host on New Books in The American South. Race, Crime Policing in the Jim Crow South was the Silver Medal Winner of the Florida Book Award in 2021.

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

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Glenda E. Gilmore, "Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South" (UNC Press, 2022)

Tue, 10 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist's Reckoning with the South (UNC Press, 2022), Glenda Gilmore meticulously documents and interprets the artistic life of Romare Bearden. Gilmore details four generations of the Bearden family and grounds the reader in places formative to Bearden like North Carolina, New York, and Pennsylvania. By centering Bearden’s art, Gilmore mines the historical record and this artist’s recollections which were at times conflicting, but nevertheless, shaped his creative imagination. This text weaves archival depth with visual art analysis, illuminating a richer understanding of this important twentieth-century artist and his work.

Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She tweets from @amandajoycehall.

N’Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. Candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter @NKosiOates.

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The Future of Statues: A Conversation with Alex Von Tunzelmann

Tue, 03 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

What are the rights and wrongs of toppling statues? Sometimes everyone agrees it’s a good idea. After the second world war, for example, the defeat of fascism meant that all over Europe Hitler statues were toppled and destroyed. After the collapse of communism some statues of Stalin actually survived. Just a couple of years ago Black Lives Matter protests led to the hauling down statues of slaveholders and imperialists – for example in the UK a statue of slaver – and philanthropist, Edward Colston was hurled into a harbour. Some argued Colston should be left alone because he was just a man of his time. So, when is it right to tear down a statue and do you need a democratically elected committee to make the decision? A discussion with screenwriter and historian Alex Von Tunzelmann, author of Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Joan DeJean, "Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast" (Basic, 2022)

Mon, 02 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. It was loaded with urgently needed goods for the fledgling French colony, but its principal commodity was a new kind of export: women.

Falsely accused of sex crimes, these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship's hold. Of the 132 women who were sent this way, only 62 survived. But these women carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi.

Drawing on an impressive range of sources to restore the voices of these women to the historical record, Mutinous Women: How French Convicts Became Founding Mothers of the Gulf Coast (Basic, 2022) introduces us to the Gulf South's Founding Mothers.

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João B. Chaves, "The Global Mission of the Jim Crow South: Southern Baptist Missionaries and the Shaping of Latin American Evangelicalism" (Mercer UP, 2022)

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

João B. Chaves analyzes the first hundred years of Southern Baptist missionary activity in Brazil to reveal how the racialized practices of Southern Baptist Convention missionaries in the largest Latin America country shaped aspects of Latin American evangelicalism in general and the Brazilian Baptist Convention in particular. Partially because the Brazilian Baptist Convention sent missionaries to many Latin American countries, established educational institutions that trained ministers from a number of denominations, and impacted the life of Brazilian evangelicalism in general, the influences of Southern evangelicalism manifested in the Brazilian Baptist Convention were established into Latin American evangelicalism broadly. Although Latin American evangelicalism is a diverse movement both in its Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal manifestations, historians have tended to overlook the power of US evangelicalism in the establishment and maintenance of the evangelicalism in the region, preferring to offer sharp distinctions between the US-based "evangelical" movement and Latin American "evangélicos." The Global Mission of the Jim Crow South: Southern Baptist Missionaries and the Shaping of Latin American Evangelicalism (Mercer UP, 2022) recognizes that such distinctions may explain cases in which differences between US and Latin American evangelicalisms exist, but it argues that a hemispheric evangelicalism overdetermined by the commitments of US Southern evangelicals has broader explanatory power.

Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. Student from South Korea in the Department of History & Ecumenics, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions at Princeton Theological Seminary.

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Rana A. Hogarth, "Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840" (UNC Press, 2017)

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Medicine and slavery went hand-in-hand. But what was the nature of this vile partnership? In Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 (UNC Press, 2017), Rana Hogarth shows that familiar histories, though excellent, fail to explain how and why medicine and slavery became fused in the first place.

No doubt, defenders of slavery used medicine to justify the corrupt practice once it was under threat. But Hogarth shows how science and medicine grafted during times and in places where slavery was secure—where white elites had no need to justify the violent practice with medical ideas because slavery was taken for granted. How and why did medicine and slavery fuse, Hogarth asks, in the Atlantic World of the newly invented United States and ascendant imperial Britain? Understanding the answer helps us grasp the valences and impacts of racialized national and social identities, then as well as today.

White physicians inflated their value—financial as well as reputational—by locating medical reasons for already existing racist tropes. Circa 1800, white physicians were a disreputable and loosely aligned lot. They had many rivals (Black healers), rich skeptics (plantation owners), and no professional organization until the mid-nineteenth century under which they could rally. Before then, a wide-spread, active white belief in an innate difference between Black and white bodies was the foregone conclusion that white physicians worked to explain in order to appear of use. White physicians in the English-speaking Caribbean developed medical theories of innate difference in the etiology, progress and experience of illness in Black and white bodies—evidence to the contrary be damned. As a consequence, they ignored immense Black suffering, exposed Black workers to deadly diseases, and policed Black people through the hospital system, all the while seeing Black people as appropriate for service in the military and as objects for teaching dissection, that is to say, in projects of imperial and professional expansion.

Medicalizing Blackness broadens the story of medicine in the Atlantic World with a lens that perceives more than the institution of slavery. It also demonstrates the emergence of the Caribbean as a locus—not an outpost—of trustworthy medical knowledge circulated through an array of genres, including journals articles, plantation guides, hospital advertisements, and other media of “textual subjugation” that Hogarth reads with great insight. In short, medicine needed the racist logics of slavery in order to gain power before slavery needed racist medicine to defend its own might.

July 2022 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the exposure of the abusive and unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments in the US media. Engaging the roots of white supremacist ideas and practices is essential for better understanding and for stronger political action against racism, as important fifty years ago as it is in our ongoing racialized pandemic.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about the collaborative interview process: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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Nina M. Yancy, "How the Color Line Bends: The Geography of White Prejudice in Modern America" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

How the Color Line Bends: The Geography of White Prejudice in Modern America (Oxford UP, 2022) explores the connection between prejudice and place in modern America. Existing scholarship suggests that living near Black Americans presents a "threat" to White Americans, which in turn influences White opinions on policies related to race. This book rejects the tendency to position White people as tacit victims and Black people as threatening, instead recasting White Americans as active viewers of their surroundings. This reframing brings a critical focus on power and positionality to scholarship on racial threat, and challenges the neutrality typically assigned to the White perspective. The book first presents ethnographic analysis of Louisiana residents caught in a racialized debate over incorporating a new city in the Baton Rouge area, using interpretive methods to show how race colors White residents' perspective on local geography and politics. Then, the book applies its conceptualization of a White perspective to the quantitative study of prejudice and place, revisiting the classic racialized policy issues of welfare and affirmative action. These analyses emphasize White Americans' diverse beliefs and surroundings but also their common structural position, and how an interest in defending that position shapes the White perspective. This emphasis supports new empirical insights on the behavior of racially tolerant White people, perceptions of the Black middle class, and the consequences of segregation for racial politics. The book also includes discussion of the author's own positionality as a Black woman researcher in conversation with White interview subjects, and the risks of Whiteness studies that leave Black people invisible.

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John S. Huntington, "Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Donald Trump shocked the nation in 2016 by winning the presidency through an ultraconservative, anti-immigrant platform, but, despite the electoral surprise, Trump's far-right views were not an aberration, nor even a recent phenomenon. In Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021), John Huntington shows how, for almost a century, the far right has forced so-called "respectable" conservatives to grapple with their concerns, thereby intensifying right-wing thought and forecasting the trajectory of American politics. Ultraconservatives of the twentieth century were the vanguard of modern conservatism as it exists in the Republican Party of today.

Far-Right Vanguard chronicles the history of the ultraconservative movement, its national network, its influence on Republican Party politics, and its centrality to America's rightward turn during the second half of the twentieth century. Often marginalized as outliers, the far right grew out of the same ideological seedbed that nourished mainstream conservatism. Ultraconservatives were true reactionaries, dissenters seeking to peel back the advance of the liberal state, hoping to turn one of the major parties, if not a third party, into a bastion of true conservatism.

In the process, ultraconservatives left a deep imprint upon the cultural and philosophical bedrock of American politics. Far-right leaders built their movement through grassroots institutions, like the John Birch Society and Christian Crusade, each one a critical node in the ultraconservative network, a point of convergence for activists, politicians, and businessmen. This vibrant, interconnected web formed the movement's connective tissue and pushed far-right ideas into the political mainstream. Conspiracy theories, nativism, white supremacy, and radical libertarianism permeated far-right organizations, producing an uncompromising mindset and a hyper-partisanship that consumed conservatism and, eventually, the Republican Party.

Ultimately, the far right's politics of dissent—against racial progress, federal power, and political moderation—laid the groundwork for the aggrieved, vitriolic conservatism of the twenty-first century.

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Lindsey Krinks, "Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets" (Brazos, 2021)

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets (Brazos Press, 2021), written by Lindsey Krinks was published by Baker Publishing Group in 2021. In this personal, and pastoral, account of working alongside Nashville’s homeless population, Lindsey teaches us about God’s heart for the poor and how to work toward collective liberation.

At age twenty, Lindsey Krinks thought she had her life figured out. But a devastating injury and an unexpected encounter with a homeless organizing group disrupted her plans and opened her eyes to the immense suffering and injustice around her. Awakened to a fierce pursuit of justice and a faith that called her to "pray with her feet," Krinks plunged into the underside of American society, where she found both staggering loss and astounding love.

As a street chaplain, activist, and co-founder of Open Table Nashville, Krinks takes us on an unforgettable spiritual journey to tent cities, alleys, slums, and the front lines of movements for justice. Praying with Our Feet challenges preconceptions about people who live on the streets, calling us to move from charity to justice and to get our hands dirty in the struggle for a better world.

Readers who are dismayed by the world's suffering but don't know where to start will find much inspiration in this intimate and moving book. Includes end-of-book discussion questions for each chapter.

Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Director of Outreach for an addiction recovery center. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her work at meggambino.com.

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Kate Clifford Larson, "Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

She was born the 20th child in a family that had lived in the Mississippi Delta for generations, first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers. She left school at 12 to pick cotton, as those before her had done, in a world in which white supremacy was an unassailable citadel. She was subjected without her consent to an operation that deprived her of children. And she was denied the most basic of all rights in America--the right to cast a ballot--in a state in which Blacks constituted nearly half the population.

And so Fannie Lou Hamer lifted up her voice. Starting in the early 1960s and until her death in 1977, she was an irresistible force, not merely joining the swelling wave of change brought by civil rights but keeping it in motion. Working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which recruited her to help with voter-registration drives, Hamer became a community organizer, women's rights activist, and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She summoned and used what she had against the citadel--her anger, her courage, her faith in the Bible, and her conviction that hearts could be won over and injustice overcome. She used her brutal beating at the hands of Mississippi police, an ordeal from which she never fully recovered, as the basis of a televised speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention, a speech that the mainstream party--including its standard-bearer, President Lyndon Johnson--tried to contain. But Fannie Lou Hamer would not be held back. For those whose lives she touched and transformed, for those who heard and followed her voice, she was the embodiment of protest, perseverance, and, most of all, the potential for revolutionary

change.

Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer (Oxford UP, 2021) is the most complete biography of Hamer ever written, drawing on recently declassified sources on both Hamer and the civil rights movement, including unredacted FBI and Department of Justice files. It also makes full use of interviews with Civil Rights activists conducted by the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and Democratic National Committee archives, in addition to extensive conversations with Hamer's family and with those with whom she worked most closely. Stirring, immersive, and authoritative, Walk with Me does justice to Fannie Lou Hamer's life, capturing in full the spirit, and the voice, that led the fight for freedom and equality in America at its critical moment.

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Jenifer L. Barclay, "The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America" (U of Illinois Press, 2021)

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Time and again, antebellum Americans justified slavery and white supremacy by linking blackness to disability, defectiveness, and dependency. In The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2021), historian Jenifer L. Barclay examines the ubiquitous narratives that depicted black people with disabilities as pitiable, monstrous, or comical, narratives used not only to defend slavery but argue against it. As she shows, this relationship between ableism and racism impacted racial identities during the antebellum period and played an overlooked role in shaping American history afterward. Barclay also illuminates the everyday lives of the ten percent of enslaved people who lived with disabilities. Devalued by slaveholders as unsound and therefore worthless, these individuals nonetheless carved out an unusual autonomy. Their roles as caregivers, healers, and keepers of memory made them esteemed within their own communities and celebrated figures in song and folklore.

Prescient in its analysis and rich in detail, The Mark of Slavery is a powerful addition to the intertwined histories of disability, slavery, and race.

Jenifer L. Barclay is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Buffalo. Her research places African American history in conversation with the “new” disability history, a field that emphasizes disability as a lived human experience embedded in a set of socially constructed ideas that change over time, across cultures, and in relation to other categories of identity such as race, gender, class and sexuality. She earned her Ph.D. in African American History at Michigan State University.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. A social historian of gender, slavery, and emancipation in early America and the Atlantic World, Jerrad is currently completing his dissertation, entitled “The Work of Freedom: African American Women and the Ordeal of Emancipation in New England, 1740-1840” which examines the everyday lives, labors, and emancipation experiences of African-descended women in late-colonial and early republic New England. Jerrad is also increasingly interested in the history of slavery and disability in the context of early America; his research examining the lives and physically-disabling nature of enslavement in early New England will be published in two peer-reviewed anthologies - one of which is co-edited by Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt Kennedy - early next year.

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Mark Newman, "Desegregating Dixie: The Catholic Church in the South and Desegregation, 1945-1992" (UP of Mississippi, 2018)

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Desegregating Dixie: The Catholic Church in the South and Desegregation, 1945-1992 (UP of Mississippi, 2018), Mark Newman draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining African Americans to the back of white churches and to black-only schools and churches. However, in the twentieth century, papal adoption and dissemination of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, pressure from some black and white Catholics, and secular change brought by the civil rights movement increasingly led the Church to address racial discrimination both inside and outside its walls.

Far from monolithic, white Catholics in the South split between a moderate segregationist majority and minorities of hard-line segregationists and progressive racial egalitarians. While some bishops felt no discomfort with segregation, prelates appointed from the late 1940s onward tended to be more supportive of religious and secular change. Some bishops in the peripheral South began desegregation before or in anticipation of secular change while elsewhere, especially in the Deep South, they often tied changes in the Catholic churches to secular desegregation.

African American Catholics were diverse and more active in the civil rights movement than has often been assumed. While some black Catholics challenged racism in the Church, many were conflicted about the manner of Catholic desegregation generally imposed by closing valued black institutions. Tracing its impact through the early 1990s, Newman reveals how desegregation shook congregations but seldom brought about genuine integration.

Winner of the 2020 American Studies Network Book Prize from the European Association for American Studies

Allison Isidore is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association and is an Instructor of Record for the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Erin L. Thompson, "Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments" (Norton, 2022)

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the United States, the national debate over public monuments often frames the removal of statutes as a revision of history. But Dr. Thompson suggests that we need to interrogate both the creation and removal of monuments to understand the essential role they play in creating national narratives and determining who is seen as an American. Using a set of remarkable case studies, Dr. Thompson demonstrates the complex ways in which these statutes were suggested, contested, funded, physically created, and used symbolically by future groups. Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments (Norton, 2022) aims to create a toolkit to interrogate how Americans represent what they have built and what they need to rebuild in the American public landscape – and the nation as a whole.

Erin L. Thompson is an associate professor of art crime at John Jay College, City University of New York. She is an expert in the deliberate destruction of art, analyzing the ways in which this destruction has sometimes harmed and sometimes benefited communities. Her first book, Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors (Yale University Press, 2016) was named an NPR Best Book of 2016 and her impressive public facing scholarship includes the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, CNN, NPR, BBC, Freakonomics and Smithsonian Magazine.

In the podcast, Dr. Thompson mentions her article, “Ghosting the Confederacy” and references the Confederate Sailors and Soldiers Monument in Birmingham, AL. Dr. Liebell highlights Howard University’s grant to digitize and archive Black newspapers required for research across disciplines.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Steven J. Brady, "Chained to History: Slavery and US Foreign Relations to 1865" (Cornell UP, 2022)

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Chained to History: Slavery and US Foreign Relations to 1865 (Cornell University Press, 2022), Dr. Steven J. Brady places slavery at the centre of the story of America's place in the world in the years prior to the calamitous Civil War. Beginning with the immediate aftermath of the War of the American Revolution, Brady follows the military, economic, and moral lines of the diplomatic challenges of attempting to manage, on the global stage, the actuality of human servitude in a country dedicated to human freedom.

Dr. Brady argues that “slavery was defined by policymakers and laypeople alike as central to US interactions with four continents—whether for good or bad. America’s security, prosperity, and geographical and political reach were all connected, in one way or another, with bonded labour. It is no surprise, then, that Americans looked on, and conducted, their relations with the world with a conviction that slavery was central to the nation’s international role.” He argues that this mindset around the centrality of American slavery therefore “forced the United States to act in the international sphere in ways that it otherwise would not have, and to interact with the Atlantic world in a more dynamic way than its leaders might have preferred.”

Dr. Brady highlights the limitations placed on American policymakers who, working in an international context increasingly supportive of abolition, were severely constrained regarding the formulation and execution of preferred policy. Policymakers were bound to the slave interest based in the Democratic Party and the tortured state of domestic politics bore heavily on the conduct of foreign affairs. As international powers not only abolished the slave trade but banned human servitude as such, the American position became untenable.

The book argues that the “proclivity of slavery to enmesh the nation with the wider world in unwanted ways was manifested again and again throughout the time period up to 1865. From vainly seeking the return of escaped slaves under President George Washington to the failed attempts of President Abraham Lincoln to settle their freed brethren somewhere—anywhere—else, one sees the real limits placed on the nation’s ability to shape and implement a consistent foreign policy…. Slavery was not the only factor that contributed to this frustration of American aims to conduct a largely unilateralist foreign policy in its early years. Nor was it the only reason why America frequently found itself unable to achieve its foreign relations goals. But it was among the most significant reasons.”

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K. Stephen Prince, "The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot Of 1900" (UNC Press, 2021)

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

For a brief moment in the summer of 1900, Robert Charles was arguably the most infamous black man in the United States. After an altercation with police on a New Orleans street, Charles killed two police officers and fled. During a manhunt that extended for days, violent white mobs roamed the city, assaulting African Americans and killing at least half a dozen. When authorities located Charles, he held off a crowd of thousands for hours before being shot to death. The notorious episode was reported nationwide; years later, fabled jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton recalled memorializing Charles in song. Yet today, Charles is almost entirely invisible in the traditional historical record. So who was Robert Charles, really? An outlaw? A black freedom fighter? And how can we reconstruct his story?

In The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot Of 1900 (UNC Press, 2021), K. Stephen Prince sheds fresh light on both the history of the Robert Charles riots and the practice of history-writing itself. He reveals evidence of intentional erasures, both in the ways the riot and its aftermath were chronicled and in the ways stories were silenced or purposefully obscured. But Prince also excavates long-hidden facts from the narratives passed down by white and black New Orleanians over more than a century. In so doing, he probes the possibilities and limitations of the historical imagination.

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Carole Emberton, "To Walk about in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner" (Norton, 2022)

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged--feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage.

Her life story--candidly recounted in an oral history for the Federal Writers' Project--captures the intimate nature of freedom. Using Joyner's interview and the interviews of other formerly enslaved people, historian Carole Emberton uncovers the deeply personal, emotional journeys of freedom's charter generation--the people born into slavery who walked into a new world of freedom during the Civil War. From the seemingly mundane to the most vital, emancipation opened up a myriad of new possibilities: what to wear and where to live, what jobs to take and who to love.

Although Joyner was educated at a Freedmen's Bureau school and married a man she loved, slavery cast a long shadow. Uncertainty about her parentage haunted her life, and as Jim Crow took hold throughout the South, segregation, disfranchisement, and racial violence threatened the loving home she made for her family. But through it all, she found beauty in the world and added to it where she could.

Weaving together illuminating voices from the charter generation, To Walk about in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner (Norton, 2022) gives us a kaleidoscopic look at the lived experiences of emancipation and challenges us to think anew about the consequences of failing to reckon with the afterlife of slavery.

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Michael Gorra, "The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War" (Liveright Publishing, 2020)

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

William Faulkner, one of America's most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance--his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South--demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate's life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon.

Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (Liveright Publishing, 2020) argues that even despite these contradictions--and perhaps because of them--William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner's biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was "the South's curse and its separate destiny," a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South's revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a "Lost Cause" romanticism not only defined Faulkner's twentieth century but now even our own age.

Through Gorra's critical lens, Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America's history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, "was" and "again." Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that "the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning."

Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra's travels through the South--including Faulkner's Oxford, Mississippi--and commentaries on Faulkner's fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.

William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association.

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Sherry Scott, "Playhouses: Sexuality and Fundamentalism" (Black Rose Writing, 2022)

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of Queer Voices of the South I talk to Dr. Sherry Scott about her new book Playhouses: Sexuality and Fundamentalism, released in February 2022 by Black Rose Writing.

Three cousins fiercely defended their roles within the sanctity of their playhouses. But a six-year stint in a fundamentalist religious organization thwarted Scott's developing understanding of sexual orientation. Homosexuality was an insidious, infective spirit that conferred fear upon her adolescent naiveté, eventually eroding the relationship with her cousins. Playhouses is a journey from corrosive indoctrination to celebrating the differences in others. "Reconciling who we were took years, but survival led to relational ties without fear and a heart for activism in the face of rising institutionalized discrimination."

Sherry Scott, M.D., is a pediatrician who has practiced palliative/hospice care for children and general medicine. She self-published her first literary work, The Year My Mother Died, 2011. She founded Paris Poet's Society and published a juried anthology of poetry and photography: What Brings You Here, 2016. She serves on the board of the Gendercide Awareness Project, founded in Dallas. She lives with her family in Paris, Texas.

Morris Ardoin is the author of Stone Motel – Memoirs of a Cajun Boy (2020, University Press of Mississippi), which has been optioned for TV/film development. A communications leader in health care, immigration and asylum, and higher education, his work has appeared in national and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, “Parenthetically Speaking,” which focuses on life as a writer, home cook, and Cajun New Yorker, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin Instagram: morrisardoin.

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Gregg Cantrell, "The People's Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism" (Yale UP, 2020)

Thu, 17 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Pundits, politicians, and scholars often use words like "liberalism" and "populism" uncritically. Dr. Gregg Cantrell, professor of history at Texas Christian University, argues that not only do these terms have specifically, historically contingent meanings, but also that one can draw a direct link from one to the other. In The People's Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism (Yale UP, 2020), Cantrell explains how the populists weren't simply racist rural men, but instead had complicated ideologies and policy views, and an expansive worldview that serves as a forbearer to 20th and early 21st century liberalism. The Texas Revolt is driven by people - Lyndon Johnson's grandfather Sam Johnson, Black activist and avowed populist JB Rayner, the Texas judge and gubernatorial candidate Tom Nugent - and Cantrell uses their stories to paint a complicated, and remarkably modern, picture of the populists and the Texas People's Party at the end of the nineteenth century. Although their political party fell apart after the 1896 election, their ideas lingered in American politics, eventually becoming the core of the mid-twentieth century Democratic Party platform. The People's Revolt convincingly shows that the populist are not what you think, and that while it's easy to kill a political party, quashing ideas is much more difficult.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, "Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching" (Verso, 2021)

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, ten Black men and one Black woman—Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time—were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens.

Through hauntingly detailed full-color artwork and collage, Elegy for Mary Turner names those who were killed, identifies the killers, and evokes a landscape in which the NAACP investigated the crimes when the state would not and a time when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see Black corpses while Black people fought to make their lives—and their mourning—matter.

Included are contributions from C. Tyrone Forehand, great-grandnephew of Mary and Hayes Turner, whose family has long campaigned for the deaths to be remembered; abolitionist activist and educator Mariame Kaba, reflecting on the violence visited on Black women’s bodies; and historian Julie Buckner Armstrong, who opens a window onto the broader scale of lynching’s terror in American history.

All royalties from Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching (Verso, 2021) go to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, GA.

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Max Krochmal and Todd Moye, "Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas" (U Texas Press, 2021)

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Max Krochmal and Todd Moye’s Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas (University of Texas Press, 2021) is a critical contribution that uncovers histories of activism in the lone state. From El Paso, Dallas, and to the Rio Grande Valley, social justice initiatives were critical for fighting Jim Crow and Juan Crow. The contributors make the case that various towns and cities across the state developed coalitions across Black and Brown racial lines.

In this episode, Tiffany speaks with Drs. Max Krochmal, Katherine Bynum, and Todd Moye about the process for collecting histories of the long liberation struggles in Texas. Moye, Krochmal, and other Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex joined forces to create a coalition of professionals to spearhead the creation of Civil Rights in Black and Brown, a digital oral history project that holds over a hundred oral interviews. As a graduate student at Texas Christian University, Bynum worked alongside Krochmal to document and preserve the oral records of activists and traveled with other peers to learn more about the hidden history of Jim Crow discrimination in the state.

Tiffany González is an Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University. She is a historian of Chicana/Latinx history, American politics and social movements.

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Eric Herschthal, "The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress" (Yale UP, 2021)

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders' scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders.

Looking beyond the science of race, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (Yale UP, 2021) shows how Black and white scientists and abolitionists drew upon a host of scientific disciplines--from chemistry, botany, and geology, to medicine and technology--to portray slaveholders as the enemies of progress. From the 1770s through the 1860s, scientists and abolitionists in Britain and the United States argued that slavery stood in the way of scientific progress, blinded slaveholders to scientific evidence, and prevented enslavers from adopting labor-saving technologies that might eradicate enslaved labor.

While historians increasingly highlight slavery's centrality to the modern world, fueling the rise of capitalism, science, and technology, few have asked where the myth of slavery's backwardness comes from in the first place. This book contends that by routinely portraying slaveholders as the enemies of science, abolitionists and scientists helped generate that myth.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Frank Andre Guridy, "The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics" (U Texas Press, 2021)

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

When I was a teenager, I spent entirely too much time at the Pontiac Silverdome watching the Detroit Pistons play basketball. In all the games I watched, it never occurred to me to wonder why a professional basketball team was playing in a cavernous, multi-purpose stadium entirely unsuited to basketball.

Frank Andre Guridy begins his wonderful book The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (U Texas Press, 2021) by examining the Houston Astrodome as both a result of and a contributor to dramatic changes in sports and society in the United States. Guridy is recognizes that the games we watch and the athletes who play them are valuable in and of themselves and the book is full of lyrical descriptions of games and athletes. But he is mostly interested in the ways sports reflected and formed American society. He argues that the economic and social forces reshaping America in the 1960s and 70s provided the context for a change in the ways sports were played, produced and consumed and that Texas served as an incubator for these changes. His book is always insightful and interesting. But his examination of the intersection of race and economics in the emergence of the NBA's San Antonio Spurs is particularly strong, as is a chapter examining the emergence of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders as a national phenomenon. In a world where sports is again undergoing a transformation, The Sports Revolution offers a valuable lens through which to view both the dramatic changes of the 1970s and those so prominent in today's society.

Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University.

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Gregory Samantha Rosenthal, "Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City" (UNC Press, 2021)

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Queer history is a living practice. Talk to any group of LGBTQ people today, and they will not agree on what story should be told. Many people desire to celebrate the past by erecting plaques and painting rainbow crosswalks, but queer and trans people in the twenty-first century need more than just symbols—they need access to power, justice for marginalized people, spaces of belonging. Approaching the past through a lens of queer and trans survival and world-building transforms history itself into a tool for imagining and realizing a better future.

Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City (UNC Press, 2021) tells the story of an LGBTQ community in Roanoke, Virginia, a small city on the edge of Appalachia. Interweaving historical analysis, theory, and memoir, Gregory Samantha Rosenthal tells the story of their own journey—coming out and transitioning as a transgender woman—in the midst of working on a community-based history project that documented a multigenerational southern LGBTQ community. Based on over forty interviews with LGBTQ elders, Living Queer History explores how queer people today think about the past and how history lives on in the present.

Gregory Samantha Rosenthal, PhD, is Associate Professor of History and Coordinator of the Public History Concentration at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. She teaches courses in public history, women’s and gender studies, and general education. She is interested in environmental studies, working-class studies, LGBTQ, queer, and trans studies, community organizing, and scholar-activism. Her pronouns are she/her or they/them.

The Queer Voices of the South podcast encourages listeners to suggest authors they would like to hear us interview. Follow us on Twitter @voices_south or in the public group Queer Voices of the South on Facebook or email us at queervoicesofthesouth@gmail.com

Morris Ardoin is the author of Stone Motel – Memoirs of a Cajun Boy (2020, University Press of Mississippi), which was optioned for TV/film development in 2021. A communications leader in health care, immigration and asylum, and higher education, his work has appeared in national and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, “Parenthetically Speaking,” which focuses on life as a writer, home cook, and Cajun New Yorker, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin Instagram: morrisardoin.

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Ada Ferrer, "Cuba: An American History" (Scribner, 2021)

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

“No country is ever just one thing.” In her new book Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021), NYU historian Ada Ferrer shows this again and again. In clear and engaging prose, Ferrer narrates five centuries of history from a decidedly different angle than previous one-volume studies; the main drivers of history in this book are not just familiar political figures and abstract historical forces, but a whole range of typically marginalized historical actors. Ferrer integrates the voices of the enslaved, ordinary Cubans, and her own family to reimagine what it means to tell the history of the island. Part of this reimagining also involves showing the many points of convergence between the history of the United States and Cuba. Ferrer uses many anecdotes—such as the story of the inauguration of a Vice President of the United States on a sugar plantation in Cuba—to suggest how the lines between Cuban and American history were often blurred together. The result is a finely crafted and deeply personal book that encourages readers to recognize Cuba’s contested past and its multiple identities.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD Candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod.

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Baker A. Rogers, "King of Hearts: Drag Kings in the American South" (Rutgers UP, 2021)

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of the Queer Voices of the South podcast, John Marszalek interviews author Baker A. Rogers about their research on drag kings in the South and about their own experience performing as a drag king.

While drag subcultures have gained mainstream media attention in recent years, the main focus has been on female impersonators. Equally lively, however, is the community of drag kings: cis women, trans men, and non-binary people who perform exaggerated masculine personas onstage under such names as Adonis Black, Papi Chulo, and Oliver Clothesoff.

King of Hearts: Drag Kings in the American South (Rutgers UP, 2021) shows how drag king performers are thriving in an unlikely location: Southern Bible Belt states like Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina. Based on observations and interviews with sixty Southern drag kings, this study reveals how they are challenging the region’s gender norms while creating a unique community with its own distinctive Southern flair. Reflecting the region’s racial diversity, it profiles not only white drag kings, but also those who are African American, multiracial, and Hispanic.

The Queer Voices of the South podcast encouragers listeners to suggest authors they would like to hear us interview. Follow us on Twitter @voices_south or in the public group Queer Voices of the South on Facebook or email us at queervoicesofthesouth@gmail.com

Baker A. Rogers is an associate professor of sociology at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro. Baker is the author of Conditionally Accepted: Christians’ Perspectives on Sexuality and Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights (Rutgers University Press) and Trans Men in the South: Becoming Men.

John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Website: Johnmarszalek3.com Twitter: @marsjf3

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Tyler D. Parry, "Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual" (UNC Press, 2020)

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual (UNC Press, 2020), Tyler D. Parry untangles the convoluted history of the "broomstick wedding." Popularly associated with African American culture, Parry traces the ritual's origins to marginalized groups in the British Isles and explores how it influenced the marriage traditions of different communities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. His surprising findings shed new light on the complexities of cultural exchange between peoples of African and European descent from the 1700s up to the twenty-first century. Drawing from the historical records of enslaved people in the United States, British Romani, Louisiana Cajuns, and many others, Parry discloses how marginalized people found dignity in the face of oppression by innovating and reimagining marriage rituals. Such innovations have an enduring impact on the descendants of the original practitioners. Parry reveals how and why the simple act of "jumping the broom" captivates so many people who, on the surface, appear to have little in common with each other.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Fay A. Yarbrough, "Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country" (UNC Press, 2021)

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living in its territory to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and deemed any criticism of it or its army treasonous and punishable by death. Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces.

In Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country (UNC Press, 2021), Fay A. Yarbrough reveals that, while sovereignty and states’ rights mattered to Choctaw leaders, the survival of slavery also determined the Nation’s support of the Confederacy. Mining service records for approximately 3,000 members of the First Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles, Yarbrough examines the experiences of Choctaw soldiers and notes that although their enthusiasm waned as the war persisted, military service allowed them to embrace traditional masculine roles that were disappearing in a changing political and economic landscape. By drawing parallels between the Choctaw Nation and the Confederate states, Yarbrough looks beyond the traditional binary of the Union and Confederacy and reconsiders the historical relationship between Native populations and slavery.

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Howard Philips Smith, "A Sojourn in Paradise: Jack Robinson in 1950s New Orleans" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Jack Robinson made his name as a much-sought-after fashion and celebrity photographer during the 1960s and early 1970s, and his work is well documented in hundreds of pages of Vogue, the New York Times, and Life, as well as other publications. However, his personal life remains virtually unknown. In this study of Robinson and his photography, Howard Philips Smith takes an in-depth look at Robinson’s early life in New Orleans, where he discovered his passion for painting, photography, and the Dixie Bohemian life of the French Quarter.

A Sojourn in Paradise: Jack Robinson in 1950s New Orleans (UP of Mississippi, 2020) features more than one hundred photographs taken by the artist, accompanied by detailed commentary about Robinson’s life in New Orleans and excerpts from interviews with the people who knew him when he lived there. Robinson’s photographs of New Orleans reveal the genesis of two unique and fascinating facets of the city’s history and culture: the creation of the first gay Carnival krewes who would make their own unique contribution to the rich cultural history of the city and the formation of the Orleans Gallery, one of the earliest centers of the contemporary art movement blossoming in 1950s America. This detailed study of Jack Robinson’s early life and photography illustrates the contributions of a gifted, gay artist whose quiet spirit and constant interior struggle found refuge in New Orleans, the city where he was able to find himself, for a time, free from society’s grip and open to exploring life on his own terms.

Other interviews by Isabel Machado with Howard Philips Smith:

Southern Decadence in New Orleans

Unveiling the Muse The Lost History of Gay Carnival in New Orleans

Isabel Machado is Research Associate with the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture hosted by the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at the University of Johannesburg.

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Suzanne Cope, "Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement" (Lawrence Hill Books, 2021)

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Suzanne Cope about her new book Power Hungry: Women of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer and Their Fight to Feed a Movement (Lawrence Hill Books, 2021)

In early 1969 Cleo Silvers and a few Black Panther Party members met at a community center laden with boxes of donated food to cook for the neighborhood children. By the end of the year, the Black Panthers would be feeding more children daily in all of their breakfast programs than the state of California was at that time.

More than a thousand miles away, Aylene Quin had spent the decade using her restaurant in McComb, Mississippi, to host secret planning meetings of civil rights leaders and organizations, feed the hungry, and cement herself as a community leader who could bring people together--physically and philosophically--over a meal.

These two women's tales, separated by a handful of years, tell the same story: how food was used by women as a potent and necessary ideological tool in both the rural south and urban north to create lasting social and political change. The leadership of these women cooking and serving food in a safe space for their communities was so powerful, the FBI resorted to coordinated extensive and often illegal means to stop the efforts of these two women, and those using similar tactics, under COINTELPRO--turning a blind eye to the firebombing of the children of a restaurant owner, destroying food intended for poor kids, and declaring a community breakfast program a major threat to public safety.

But of course, it was never just about the food.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature.

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Andrew J. Kunka, "The Life and Comics of Howard Cruse: Taking Risks in the Service of Truth" (Rutgers UP, 2021)

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode of QUEER VOICES OF THE SOUTH, I talk with ANDREW J. KUNKA, who is a professor of English and division chair at the University of South Carolina Sumter. He is the author of the book Autobiographical Comics and has also published articles and book chapters on Will Eisner, Kyle Baker, Doug Moench, Jack Katz, and Dell Comics.

The Life and Comics of Howard Cruse: Taking Risks in the Service of Truth (Rutgers UP, 2021) tells the remarkable story of how a self-described “preacher’s kid” from Birmingham, Alabama, became the so-called “Godfather of Gay Comics.” This study showcases a remarkable fifty-year career that included working in the 1970s underground comics scene, becoming founding editor of the groundbreaking anthology series Gay Comix, and publishing the graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby, partially based on his own experience of coming of age in the Civil Rights era.

Through his exploration of Cruse’s life and work, Andrew J. Kunka also chronicles the dramatic ways that gay culture changed over the course of Cruse’s lifetime, from Cold War-era homophobia to the gay liberation movement to the AIDS crisis to the legalization of gay marriage. Highlighting Cruse’s skills as a trenchant satirist and social commentator, Kunka explores how he cast a queer look at American politics, mainstream comics culture, and the gay community’s own norms.

Lavishly illustrated with a broad selection of comics from Cruse’s career, this study serves as a perfect introduction to this pioneering cartoonist, as well as an insightful read for fans who already love how his work sketched a new vision of gay life.

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Warren E. Milteer Jr., "North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715-1885" (LSU Press, 2020)

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr. about his book North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020). He is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His publications include two academic books, Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South (UNC Press, 2021) and North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020), the independently published Hertford County, North Carolina’s Free People of Color and Their Descendants (2016), as well as articles in the Journal of Social History and the North Carolina Historical Review. Milteer was the recipient of the Historical Society of North Carolina’s R. D. W. Connor Award in 2014 and 2016 for the best journal article in the North Carolina Historical Review.

In North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. examines the lives of free persons categorized by their communities as “negroes,” “mulattoes,” “mustees,” “Indians,” “mixed-bloods,” or simply “free people of color.” From the colonial period through Reconstruction, lawmakers passed legislation that curbed the rights and privileges of these non-enslaved residents, from prohibiting their testimony against whites to barring them from the ballot box. While such laws suggest that most white North Carolinians desired to limit the freedoms and civil liberties enjoyed by free people of color, Milteer reveals that the two groups often interacted—praying together, working the same land, and occasionally sharing households and starting families. Some free people of color also rose to prominence in their communities, becoming successful business people and winning the respect of their white neighbors.

Milteer’s innovative study moves beyond depictions of the American South as a region controlled by a strict racial hierarchy. He contends that although North Carolinians frequently sorted themselves into races imbued with legal and social entitlements—with whites placing themselves above persons of color—those efforts regularly clashed with their concurrent recognition of class, gender, kinship, and occupational distinctions. Whites often determined the position of free nonwhites by designating them as either valuable or expendable members of society. In early North Carolina, free people of color of certain statuses enjoyed access to institutions unavailable even to some whites. Prior to 1835, for instance, some free men of color possessed the right to vote while the law disenfranchised all women, white and nonwhite included.

North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885 demonstrates that conceptions of race were complex and fluid, defying easy characterization. Despite the reductive labels often assigned to them by whites, free people of color in the state emerged from an array of backgrounds, lived widely varied lives, and created distinct cultures—all of which, Milteer suggests, allowed them to adjust to and counter ever-evolving forms of racial discrimination.

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Rosa Hawkins and Steve Bergsman, "Chapel of Love: The Story of New Orleans Girl Group the Dixie Cups" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In 1963, sisters Barbara Ann and Rosa Hawkins and their cousin Joan Marie Johnson traveled from the segregated South to New York City under the auspices of their manager, former pop singer Joe Jones. With their wonderful harmonies, they were an immediate success. To this day, the Dixie Cups’ greatest hit, “Chapel of Love,” is considered one of the best songs of the past sixty years. In Chapel of Love: The Story of New Orleans Girl Group the Dixie Cups (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Rosa Hawkins and Steve Bergsman discuss the ups and downs of one of the most successful girl groups of the early 1960s. Telling their story for the first time, in their own words, Chapel of Love reintroduces the Louisiana Music Hall of Famers to a new audience.

Podcast guest Steve Bergsman is a longtime journalist who has written over a dozen books. His most recent book was a biography of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a PhD in Musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

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Catherine Gentile, "Sunday's Orphan" (Booklocker.com, 2021)

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Even for someone trained from birth to manage a farm, stepping into an inheritance at the age of twenty is not easy. Yet this is the situation facing Promise Mears Crawford when Sunday’s Orphan opens in 1930. Trouble comes at her from many directions. Her adoptive uncle, Taylor Crawford, constructed his farm according to the principles of racial equality, in defiance of the Jim Crow laws in effect all around him. Taylor had the standing to resist opposition from his neighbors, but Promise lacks both his stature and the resources she needs to fulfill the obligations he took on. Her financial constraints land her in conflict with the farm’s foreman, Fletch Hart, a long-time friend whose dreams of becoming a physician she cannot support due to lack of funds.

But the potential loss of Fletch’s friendship pales in comparison to the threat posed by the arrival of Daffron Mears, a self-appointed Jim Crow enforcer whose propensity for vigilante violence is well known throughout the county. Daffron wants a job—in fact, he wants Promise’s farm, which he regards as stolen from him by Taylor—and he is not above manipulating Jim Crow laws to get his way. He implies that he will report Promise to the authorities if she turns him down while giving work to Fletch, a Black man.

To protect her friend, Promise agrees to Daffron’s demand, if only for a week. But Daffron’s return to the farm that he left twenty years before sets off a series of crises that cast doubt on everything Promise thought she knew about herself and her origins.

Catherine Gentile admits in our interview that this was a difficult novel to write. For the same reasons, it is a difficult novel to read. But its exploration of a topic too often buried beneath platitudes about the need for change and its particular relevance to the questions of racial injustice that have been front and center the last two years make it an important book.

Catherine Gentile is the author of The Quiet Roar of the Hummingbird, a fictionalized memoir, and Small Lies: A Collection of Short Stories, as well as Sunday’s Orphan.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her next book, Song of the Sinner, will appear in 2022.

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Sonia Hernández and John Morán González, "Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border" (U Texas Press, 2021)

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In the wake of protests and marches for racial and gender justice in the twenty-first century, scholars have located and argued that racial violence has been embedded in the very fabric of the United States since its inception. In Drs. Sonia Hernández and John Morán González recent anthology, Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border (U Texas Press, 2021), the editors and contributors cement the issue that state-sanctioned violence affected the Mexican community in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. The volume brings together eminent researchers of Mexican American and borderlands studies to showcase the varying ways the Tejana/o community navigated and challenged state-encouraged violence in the early twentieth century.

The book consists of fourteen essays to illustrate the formation of the Refusing to Forget collective, the influence that the Texas Rangers held in Texas, lynching and extralegal violence in Mexico and the United States, educational justice, the Idar family, J.T. Canales and his 1919 investigation into the Texas Ranger Force, intergenerational trauma, public memory and public history exhibits, family history in South Texas, and the legacies of violence.

The volume is a critical addition to Latina/o/x and borderlands studies, given its thoughtful and exceptionally argued premise that the reverberations of racial violence extend well into the Southwest region of the United States.

Tiffany González is an Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University. She is a historian of Chicana/Latinx history, American politics, and social movements.

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Warren E. Milteer, Jr., "Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South" (UNC Press, 2021)

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

We often focus on enslaved people of color but Dr. Warren E. Milteer Jr.’s Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South (UNC Press, 2021) directs our attention to the people of color who were free -- and the complex web of intersecting values that led to significant inconsistencies in how they were treated and the institutions they built for themselves. Although many white southerners prized the racial hierarchy, Milteer insists that they also recognized other forms of hierarchy such as “gender, wealth, reputation, occupation, and family connections.” Engaging how these other forms of hierarchy intersected with racial categorization creates a rich history of how free people of color in the South negotiated legal regimes, political ideas, and institutions to carve out as much freedom as possible. Rejecting laws and political rhetoric as the only evidence for discerning the viewpoints of everyday people, Beyond Slavery’s Shadows places everyday people in their wider political and social contexts by drawing from an impressive catalogue of sources. The book accounts for how diverse political and social attitudes could coexist while it provides a remarkable history of law, colonization, taxes, labor, immigration, and gender.

Dr. Warren E. Milteer, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is also the author of North Carolina's Free People of Color, 1715-1885 (LSU Press, 2020).

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, "Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Elizabeth Korver-Glenn's book Race Brokers: Housing Markets and Segregation in 21st Century Urban America (Oxford UP, 2021) examines how housing market professionals-including housing developers, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and appraisers-construct 21st century urban housing markets in ways that contribute to or undermine racial segregation.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic and interview data collected in Houston, Texas, Race Brokers shows that housing market professionals play a key role in connecting people-or refusing to connect people-to housing resources and opportunities. They make these brokering decisions through reference to racist or anti-racist ideas. Typically, housing market professionals draw from racist ideas that rank-order people and neighborhoods according to their perceived economic and cultural housing market value, entwining racism with their housing market activities and interactions. Racialized housing market routines encourage this entwinement by naturalizing racism as a professional tool. Race Brokers tracks how professionals broker racism across the housing exchange process-from the home's construction, to real estate brokerage, mortgage lending, home appraisals, and the home sale closing. In doing so, it shows that professionals make housing exchange a racialized process that contributes to neighborhood inequality and racial segregation. However, in contrast to the racialized status-quo, a small number of housing market professionals draw on anti-racist ideas and strategies to extend equal opportunities to individuals and neighborhoods, de-naturalizing housing market racism. Race Brokers highlights the imperative to interrupt the racism that pervades housing market professionals' work, dismantle the racialized routines that underwrite such racism, and cultivate a truly fair housing market.

Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

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Lee B. Wilson, "Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Lee B. Wilson is the author of Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660-1783, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. Bonds of Empire explores how English law gave the institution of slavery its ability to thieve and grow. By looking at how law was practiced, instead of solely focusing on how it was written, Wilson follows the development of the institution of slavery in South Carolina and the English law of slavery in the colony. The day to day legal life of slavery in the colon shows just how much English law was crucial, and not opposed, to the enslavement of people.

Dr. Wilson is an Associate Professor at Clemson University.

Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic.

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Cassandra Lane, "We Are Bridges: A Memoir" (Feminist Press, 2021)

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt's lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town.

We Are Bridges: A Memoir (Feminist Press, 2021) turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family--and considers how to take back one's American story.

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Bryant Terry, "Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora" (4 Color Books, 2021)

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

James Beard and NAACP Image Award-winning chef and educator, Bryant Terry calls Black Food a “communal shrine to the shared culinary histories of the African diaspora.” Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora (4 Color Books, 2021) weaves together a diverse collection of more than 100 different contributors, including food writers, chefs, scholars, activists, and leaders exploring the food, experience, and community across the diaspora. As the editor, Terry extends the cookbook genre by curating a stunning gathering of over 50 recipes, song titles, essays, and poems, spanning over 300 pages while discussing issues like land ownership, race and gender, and self-care. Black Food is an impactful and enduring tribute to Black foodways.

N’Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Marianne Worthington, "The Girl Singer" (Fireside Industries, 2021)

Fri, 10 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In The Girl Singer (Fireside Industries, 2021), her latest collection of poems, Marianne Worthington weaves together nature writing, feminism, and country music to form a powerful strand of interlocking poems. In the book's first section, Worthington inhabits famous woman singers like Hazel Dickens and Sara Carter, but also unsung artists who struggled to find a voice or an audience in the patriarchal world of country music. Later sections pivot to more personal themes, but the resonances of the first section remain in lines that recall the lyrics of folksongs, evocations of the singing of birds, and poems that make use of traditional song structure. The collection as a whole is an immensely satisfying volume that should appeal to poetry fans in general, as well as fans of country, folk, and old-time music.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Mia Bay, "Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance" (Harvard UP, 2021)

Thu, 09 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Mobility has been central to the American identity—think of the automobile, the perceived freedom that comes with it, the open road—but Black Americans have never possessed the same freedom to move around as whites. From the slave patrols policing the movement of Black Americans in the nineteenth century to the indignities and violence that Blacks suffered on road-trips in the twentieth, Black travelers in the United States have faced violence, indignities, and a confusing and contradictory set of racist rules. This history—the history of the Black experience of travel in the United States—is expertly and beautifully told by Mia Bay in her new book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard UP, 2021)

In addition to examining the white-supremacist restrictions on Black travel, Bay—the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at the University of Pennsylvania—foregrounds how Black Americans coped (The Negro Motorist Green Book is one such example) and even resisted travel segregation. In fact, by putting travel at the center of her analysis, Bay sheds new light on the the civil rights movement. Finally, Bay concludes the book with an epilogue on the continuities into the present, writing that “there's no need to travel back in time to travel Black.”

Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations.

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Edward L. Ayers, "Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020" (LSU Press, 2020)

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Taking a wide focus, Southern Journey: The Migrations of the American South, 1790-2020 (LSU Press, 2020) narrates the evolution of southern history from the founding of the nation to the present day by focusing on the settling, unsettling, and resettling of the South. Using migration as the dominant theme of southern history and including indigenous, white, black, and immigrant people in the story, Edward L. Ayers cuts across the usual geographic, thematic, and chronological boundaries that subdivide southern history.

Ayers explains the major contours and events of the southern past from a fresh perspective, weaving geography with history in innovative ways. He uses unique color maps created with sophisticated geographic information system (GIS) tools to interpret massive data sets from a humanistic perspective, providing a view of movement within the South with a clarity, detail, and continuity we have not seen before. The South has never stood still; it is—and always has been—changing in deep, radical, sometimes contradictory ways, often in divergent directions.

Ayers’s history of migration in the South is a broad yet deep reinterpretation of the region’s past that informs our understanding of the population, economy, politics, and culture of the South today. Southern Journey is not only a pioneering work of history; it is a grand recasting of the South’s past by one of its most renowned and appreciated scholars.

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Joseph C. Ewoodzie, "Getting Something to Eat in Jackson: Race, Class, and Food in the American South" (Princeton UP, 2021)

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Getting Something to Eat in Jackson (Princeton Press, 2021) uses food—what people eat and how—to explore the interaction of race and class in the lives of African Americans in the contemporary urban South. Dr. Joseph Ewoodzie Jr. examines how “foodways”—food availability, choice, and consumption—vary greatly between classes of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi, and how this reflects and shapes their very different experiences of a shared racial identity.

Ewoodzie spent more than a year following a group of socioeconomically diverse African Americans—from upper-middle-class patrons of the city’s fine-dining restaurants to men experiencing homelessness who must organize their days around the schedules of soup kitchens. Ewoodzie goes food shopping, cooks, and eats with a young mother living in poverty and a grandmother working two jobs. He works in a Black-owned BBQ restaurant, and he meets a man who decides to become a vegan for health reasons but who must drive across town to get tofu and quinoa. Ewoodzie also learns about how soul food is changing and why it is no longer a staple survival food. Throughout, he shows how food choices influence, and are influenced by, the racial and class identities of Black Jacksonians.

By tracing these contemporary African American foodways, Getting Something to Eat in Jackson offers new insights into the lives of Black Southerners and helps challenge the persistent homogenization of blackness in American life.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University.

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Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Shelby Criswell, "Queer As All Get Out: 10 People Who've Inspired Me" (Street Noise Books, 2021)

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

On this episode of Queer Voices of the South, I talk with Shelby Criswell, whose book Queer As All Get Out: 10 People Who've Inspired Me (Street Noise Books, 2021) follows the daily life of one queer artist from Texas as they introduce us to the lives of ten extraordinary people.

The author shares their life as a genderqueer person, living in the American South, revealing their own personal struggle for acceptance and how they were inspired by these historical LGBTQIA+ people to live their own truth. Featuring biographies of Mary Jones, We'wha, Magnus Hirschfeld, Dr. Pauli Murray, Wilmer "Little Axe" M. Broadnax, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Carlett Brown, Nancy Cardenas, Ifti Nasim, and Simon Nkoli.

Shelby Criswell is a queer comic creator and graphic designer thriving in San Antonio, TX. They studied studio arts at the Santa Fe Institute of Art and Design as well as illustration at Academy of Arts University. They have been creating comics and drawing since childhood and haven't found anything more fulfilling to take its place. When Shelby is not creating comics or working on graphic design projects for clients, they are playing banjo, going on overnight bike trips, or drinking far too much coffee.

Shelby has had work in a few comic anthologies including Sweaty Palms, Everything is Going Wrong, and is in the Ignatz and Ringo Award-winning book Be Gay Do Comics. Shelby made their debut into mainstream comics as the artist on TERMINAL PUNKS published by Mad Cave Studios. They have also illustrated online comics for Oh Joy Sex Toy and The Nib.

Morris Ardoin is author of Stone Motel: Memoirs of a Cajan Boy (2020, University Press of Mississippi), which was optioned for TV/Film development in 2021. A communications practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin

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James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely, "Confederates and Comancheros: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlands" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021)

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

A vast and desolate region, the Texas-New Mexico borderlands have long been an ideal setting for intrigue and illegal dealings--never more so than in the lawless early days of cattle trafficking and trade among the Plains tribes and Comancheros. This book takes us to the borderlands in the 1860s and 1870s for an in-depth look at Union-Confederate skullduggery amid the infamous Comanche-Comanchero trade in stolen Texas livestock.

In 1862, the Confederates abandoned New Mexico Territory and Texas west of the Pecos River, fully expecting to return someday. Meanwhile, administered by Union troops under martial law, the region became a hotbed of Rebel exiles and spies, who gathered intelligence, disrupted federal supply lines, and plotted to retake the Southwest. Using a treasure trove of previously unexplored documents, authors James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely trace the complicated network of relationships that drew both Texas cattlemen and Comancheros into these borderlands, revealing the urban elite who were heavily involved in both the legal and illegal transactions that fueled the region's economy.

James Bailey Blackshear and Glen Sample Ely's Confederates and Comancheros: Skullduggery and Double-Dealing in the Texas-New Mexico Borderlands (U Oklahoma Press, 2021) deftly weaves a complex tale of Texan overreach and New Mexican resistance, explores cattle drives and cattle rustling, and details shady government contracts and bloody frontier justice. Peopled with Rebels and bluecoats, Comanches and Comancheros, Texas cattlemen and New Mexican merchants, opportunistic Indian agents and Anglo arms dealers, this book illustrates how central these contested borderlands were to the history of the American West.

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Steven P. Brown, "Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces That Changed a Nation" (U Alabama Press, 2020)

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Steven P. Brown, professor of political science at Auburn University, has written a history of notable U.S. Supreme Cases and justices that hailed from Alabama. In Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces That Changed a Nation (U Alabama Press, 2020), Brown reviews eight landmark cases which originated in Alabama and were eventually reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Although most of these cases were reflective of the civil rights issues endemic to Alabama and other states in the American South of the mid-twentieth century, not all are race related. For example, a notable gender equity case, Frontiero v. Richardson, which was concerned with benefits discrimination based on gender, was an important decision in the history of women’s rights. Brown also reviews the lives and times of three Supreme Court justices, John McKinley, John Archibald Campbell, and Hugo Black.

Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University.

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Stephen Cushman, "The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today" (UNC Press, 2021)

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of their service in the conflict. In The Generals’ Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today (University of North Carolina Press, 2021), Stephen Cushman analyzes a half-dozen of these works to discern the perspectives they provided on the era and the insights they offered about their authors. The publication of the service memoirs proliferated during the Gilded Age, thanks to the increases in literacy and the market for books that this created. Beginning in the 1870s several generals took advantage of the opportunity created by this emergence to recount for profit their time in uniform and justify the decisions they made.

As Cushman details, several of these books, such as those of the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston and Union commander William T. Sherman, contained contrasting views of similar events that, when read together, reflect the process of postwar reconciliation between the former foes. For others, such as Richard Taylor and George McClellan, their accounts served as an opportunity to present themselves as wagers of a more gentlemanly and “humane” war than that subsequently conducted by Sherman and Ulysses Grant. Grant’s own memoir proved the greatest successes of the genre, a testament both to his wartime stature and the skills as a writer he developed over the course of his life. The success of Grant’s posthumously published book was such that it overshadowed the subsequent release of both McClellan’s and Philip Sheridan’s memoirs, both of which proved a disappointment for their publisher, Charles L. Webster and Company. Cushman shows how the firm’s founder, Mark Twain, exerted an outsized influence on the genre, not only as a publisher but more famously as the editor of Grant’s memoirs and as a writer about the war in his own right.

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Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, "The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South" (UNC Press, 2021)

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Beginning on the shores of West Africa in the sixteenth century and ending in the U.S. Lower South on the eve of the Civil War, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh traces a bold history of the interior lives of bondwomen as they carved out an existence for themselves and their families amid the horrors of American slavery. With particular attention to maternity, sex, and other gendered aspects of women's lives, she documents how bondwomen crafted female-centered cultures that shaped the religious consciousness and practices of entire enslaved communities. Indeed, gender as well as race co-constituted the Black religious subject, she argues—requiring a shift away from understandings of "slave religion" as a gender-amorphous category.

Women responded on many levels—ethically, ritually, and communally—to southern slavery. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how they remembered, reconfigured, and innovated beliefs and practices circulating between Africa and the Americas. In The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (UNC Press, 2021), she redresses the exclusion of enslaved women from the American religious narrative. Challenging conventional institutional histories, this book opens a rare window onto the spiritual strivings of one of the most remarkable and elusive groups in the American experience.

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Chris McLaughlin, "Mississippi Barking: Hurricane Katrina and a Life That Went to the Dogs" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

On August 29, 2005, the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States devastated the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Like many others in America and around the world, Chris McLaughlin watched the tragedy of Katrina unfold on a television screen from the comfort of her living room on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In the devastation afterwards, almost 2,000 people and an estimated 250,000 animals had perished.

Miraculously, many pets did manage to survive. But in the months that followed the hurricane, thousands of them were fending for themselves in the ruins of devastated neighborhoods. They roamed the streets in feral packs or struck out alone. Their plight triggered a grassroots rescue effort unlike any this country had ever seen, and while relief organizations such as the Red Cross were tending to the human survivors, and movie stars and celebrities were airlifting food and endorsing seven-figure checks, a much smaller and meagerly funded effort was underway to save the four-legged victims. With no prior experience in disaster response and no real grasp of the hell that awaited them, scores of animal lovers, including McLaughlin, made their way to the Gulf Coast to help in any way they could.

Including photos from four-time Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist Carol Guzy, Mississippi Barking: Hurricane Katrina and a Life That Went to the Dogs (UP of Mississippi, 2021)spans the course of two years as McLaughlin and others ventured into the wreckage of the Gulf Coast to rescue the animals left behind. McLaughlin tells the moving stories of the people she met along the way, both those who lost everything to the hurricane and those working beside her rescuing and transporting animals away from the neglected, derelict conditions in which they barely survived. Within this story of tragedy and cruelty, suffering and ignorance, Mississippi Barking also bears witness to selfless acts of bravery and compassion, and the beauty and heroics of those who risked everything to save the animals that could not save themselves.

Chris McLaughlin is founder and executive director of the Animal Rescue Front. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts Boston with a BA in earth sciences, she lives in Massachusetts with two cats. This is her first book.

Morris Ardoin is author of STONE MOTEL – MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY (2020, University Press of Mississippi), which was optioned for TV/Film development in 2021. A communications practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin

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Alice L Baumgartner, "South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War" (Basic Books, 2020)

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

For some enslaved Americans, the path to freedom led not north, but south, argues Dr. Alice Baumgardner, an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California. In South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (Basic Books, 2020), Baumgartner reveals an untold story of enslaved African Americans finding redemption from slavery in Mexico, which had abolished slavery in many of its territories decades before the American Civil War. Indeed, it was concern by Texas slaveholders that their human property may have been threatened that led them to revolt against Mexico and eventually join the United States and, in time, the Confederate States of America. For those who escaped, Mexico could be far from an anti-slavery paradise, but Mexican officials were loathe to return runaway former slaves back to the United States, a fact which was one of the many reasons why the United States went to war with Mexico in the 1840s. South to Freedom is a fresh look at America's slavery crisis and Civil War, and one which places enslaved people themselves and their own quest for freedom at the heart of the story.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Elizabeth McCain, "A Lesbian Belle Tells: OUTrageous Southern Stories of Family, Loss, and Love" (Crystal Heart Imprints, 2020)

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Settle back for a wild ride through a Southern lesbian's life of soul-searching, rule-breaking, and truth-telling. This belle's kind of coming out was not what her traditional Mississippi family expected. How does she recover from family estrangement in the midst of her career as a psychotherapist? How does she find lasting love and a family-of-choice? From her last boyfriend suggesting she become a lesbian, to coming out to the church ladies at her mama's funeral, these true stories will touch your heart, give you hope, and make you laugh out loud. Based on Elizabeth McCain's award-winning one-woman play, A Lesbian Belle Tells..., A Lesbian Belle Tells: OUTrageous Southern Stories of Family, Loss, and Love (Crystal Heart Imprints, 2020) provides story medicine for your soul. It is filled with Southern charm and drama, as well as triumph over tragedy, as only a lesbian belle can tell.

Originally from Mississippi, Elizabeth McCain is a transformational storyteller, spiritual counselor, story coach, and shamanic interfaith minister. She supports women and LGBTQ+ people in expressing and reframing their stories of loss and transition. Elizabeth has written and performed an award-winning one-woman play, A Lesbian Belle Tells..., which has entertained and inspired people from all walks of life. Whether counseling, coaching, performing, or ministering, she believes that sharing stories in community touches hearts, provides story medicine for the soul, and changes the world. Elizabeth lives in the Washington DC area with her spouse and their two dogs.

John Marszalek III is a host of the podcast Queer Voices of the South on the LGBTQ+ Channel of the New Books Network. Follow our podcast on Twitter: @voices_south

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Aaron Cometbus and Scott Satterwhite, "A Punkhouse in the Deep South: The Oral History Of 309" (UP of Florida, 2021)

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Told in personal interviews, A Punkhouse in the Deep South: The Oral History of 309 (University Press of Florida, 2021) is the collective story of a punk community in an unlikely town and region, a hub of radical counterculture that drew artists and musicians from throughout the conservative South and earned national renown. The house at 309 6th Avenue has long been a crossroads for punk rock, activism, veganism, and queer culture in Pensacola, a quiet Gulf Coast city at the border of Florida and Alabama. In this book from Aaron Cometbus and Scott Satterwhite, residents of 309 narrate the colorful and often comical details of communal life in the crowded and dilapidated house over its 30-year existence. Each voice adds to the picture of a lively community that worked together to provide for their own needs while making a positive, lasting impact on their surrounding area. Together, these participants show that punk is more than music and teenage rebellion. It is about alternatives to standard narratives of living, acceptance for the marginalized in a rapidly changing world, and building a sense of family from the ground up.

Learn more about the 309 Punk Project here.

Scott Satterwhite is a historian, educator, and journalist who teaches writing and literature at the University of West Florida.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

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M. E. J. Huff and Carole Ann King, "Alabama Quilts: Wilderness Through World War II, 1682-1950" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Stephanie Khattak speaks with Carole Ann King, who, along with Mary Elizabeth “Sunshine” Johnson Huff, wrote Alabama Quilts: Wilderness Through World War II, 1682-1950 (UP of Mississippi, 2020).

Alabama Quilts is a look at quilts of the state from before Alabama was part of the Mississippi Territory through the Second World War—a period of 268 years. The quilts are examined for their cultural context. This lens includes the community and time, the lives of the makers and role of women, and the events for which the quilts were made.

Stephanie Khattak is a writer, artist, historian and folklore enthusiast. Visit stephaniekhattak.com to learn more, and connect on Twitter: @steph_khattak, Facebook: @khattakstudios or Instagram: @pinecurtainproject.

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Kalle Kananoja, "Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University.

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Alecia P. Long, "Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination As a Sex Crime" (Boundless South, 2021)

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's decision to arrest Clay Shaw on March 1, 1967, set off a chain of events that culminated in the only prosecution undertaken in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the decades since Garrison captured headlines with this high-profile legal spectacle, historians, conspiracy advocates, and Hollywood directors alike have fixated on how a New Orleans–based assassination conspiracy might have worked. Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination As a Sex Crime (Boundless South, 2021) settles the debate for good, conclusively showing that the Shaw prosecution was not based in fact but was a product of the criminal justice system's long-standing preoccupation with homosexuality.

Tapping into the public's willingness to take seriously conspiratorial explanations of the Kennedy assassination, Garrison drew on the copious files the New Orleans police had accumulated as they surveilled, harassed, and arrested increasingly large numbers of gay men in the early 1960s. He blended unfounded accusations with homophobia to produce a salacious story of a New Orleans-based scheme to assassinate JFK that would become a national phenomenon.

At once a dramatic courtroom narrative and a deeper meditation on the enduring power of homophobia, Cruising for Conspirators shows how the same dynamics that promoted Garrison's unjust prosecution continue to inform conspiratorial thinking to this day.

Alecia P. Long is the John L. Loos and Paul W. and Nancy Murrill Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Louisiana State University. Her other books include Louisiana: Our History, Our Home; Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation and the American Civil War, The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920.

She is the recipient of Ford Foundation Grant to sponsor the Listening to Louisiana Women oral history project; the LSU Rainmaker Award; The Julia Cherry Spruill Publication Prize; and the Wilbur Owen Sypherd Prize for the outstanding doctoral dissertation in the Humanities, University of Delaware.

Morris Ardoin is author of STONE MOTEL – MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY (2020, University Press of Mississippi), which was optioned for TV/Film development in 2021.

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Vanessa M. Holden, "Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community" (U Illinois Press, 2021)

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The local community around the Nat Turner rebellion The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner involved an entire community. Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and enslaved, who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the revolt. Mapping the region's multilayered human geography, Holden draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time.

In Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community (U Illinois Press, 2021), Holden recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event that reveals the continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local Black people. Holden follows how African Americans continued those practices through the rebellion's immediate aftermath and into the future, showing how Black women and communities raised children who remembered and heeded the lessons absorbed during the calamitous events of 1831. A bold challenge to traditional accounts, Surviving Southampton sheds new light on the places and people surrounding Americas most famous rebellion against slavery.

Purchase a copy of Surviving Southampton through the University of Illinois Press until September 30, 2021, using the Promo Code: ASALH21 in recognition of the 2021 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Annual Meeting and Conference!

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Thomas Michael Kersen, "Where Misfits Fit: Counterculture and Influence in the Ozarks" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

All regions and places are unique in their own way, but the Ozarks have an enduring place in American culture. Studying the Ozarks offers the ability to explore American life through the lens of one of the last remaining cultural frontiers in American society. Perhaps because the Ozarks were relatively isolated from mainstream American society, or were at least relegated to the margins of it, their identity and culture are liminal and oftentimes counter to mainstream culture. Whatever the case, looking at the Ozarks offers insights into changing ideas about what it means to be an American and, more specifically, a special type of southerner.

In Where Misfits Fit: Counterculture and Influence in the Ozarks (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Dr. Thomas Michael Kersen explores the people who made a home in the Ozarks and the ways they contributed to American popular culture. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Kersen argues the area attracts and even nurtures people and groups on the margins of the mainstream. These include UFO enthusiasts, cults, musical troupes, and back-to-the-land groups. Kersen examines how the Ozarks became a haven for creative, innovative, even nutty people to express themselves―a place where community could be reimagined in a variety of ways. It is in these communities that communitas, or a deep social connection, emerges. Each of the nine chapters focuses on a facet of the Ozarks, and Kersen often compares two or more cases to generate new insights and questions. Chapters examine real and imagined identity and highlight how the area has contributed to popular culture through analysis of the Eureka Springs energy vortex, fictional characters like Li’l Abner, cultic activity, environmentally minded communes, and the development of rockabilly music and near-communal rock bands such as Black Oak Arkansas.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Tug Cities: Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at a Tug of War Festival. This book is about the media representations of place and identity at an annual interstate tug of war festival where cities in two states across the Mississippi River from each other come together one week during the summer as rivals to duke it out on the rope. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb, "Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy" (Lexington, 2021)

Tue, 14 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb is the author of Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy, published by Lexington Books in 2021. Race Unequals takes a look at the complex relationship between enslavers and overseers in order to explore the ways in which the “white South” was not a monolithic identity, but one in which white male identity was constantly created, contested, and compromised over. By examining contracts, public law, and plantation management, McMurtry-Chubb shows how the plantation not only created one of the nation’s first class of managerial people, but how this system stymied upward mobility, created and controlled social boundaries, and furthered white supremacy.

Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb is a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at the University of Illinois Chicago Law School.

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Lettie Gay, "Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking" ( U South Carolina Press, 2021)

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Southern Food Historian Rebecca Sharpless discusses a new edition of Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking released in 2021 by University of South Carolina Press. Sharpless added a new critical introduction to the historic cookbook, first published in 1930 from a New York press as a collaboration between Blanche Rhett, Helen Woodward, and Lettie Gay. Woodward had married into a family with South Carolina ties and for a time rented a home that shared a courtyard with Rhett. As Woodward tells the story, she wanted to send some recipes back to her Northern connections, and Rhett suggested she write a book of recipes instead. Gay tested the recipes in a New York kitchen, standardizing measurements and translating them to a wider audience.

Sharpless immediately foregrounds the Northern sensibility that informs the rhetorical situation of the book. Published just a few years before Gone With the Wind, the cookbook represented a version of Charleston’s sumptuous antebellum past to an audience with an appetite for consuming moonlight and magnolias.

Sharpless’s 2021 introduction asks the question, “What do readers today need to know to put the book in context?” Sharpless uses most of the limited space of the foreword acknowledging the uncredited contributors to the cookbook and offering more information about those named in the book. Sharpless is especially – and rightly – critical of the ways that Two Hundred Years erases the contributions of enslaved people, and when it does offer credit, it is usually demeaning and patronizing in its depictions of African American domestic cooks as “magical” and unscientific. Sharpless reminds today’s readers that “It is a book of white nostalgia, not black.” And the final words of the foreword could not be any clearer: “Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking stands as a double monument: to the rich foodways of the Lowcountry and the efforts of White Charlestonians to put a pretty face on White Supremacy.” With this caveat, Sharpless does acknowledge some extraordinary women from Charleston’s elite classes who make significant contributions to the book and have remarkable stories of their own, still waiting to be told.

Sharpless encourages 21st century readers to use the cookbook in their own kitchens; the instructions and ingredients are as accessible today as they would have been in 1930. However, she cautions readers to read the nostalgic textual interludes between recipes with skepticism, and to maintain an attitude of respect for the enslaved and anonymous contributors who made Low Country cuisine into the hot cultural commodity it is today.

Rebecca Sharpless is professor of history at Texas Christian University. She is author of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms and Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. Her newest book, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South, is forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press in Spring 2022.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

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Michael Twitty, "Rice: A Savor the South Cookbook" (UNC Press, 2021)

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Rice is a central ingredient to Southern foodways, and it is one of the most versatile grains served around the world. It could be prepared as a side dish, an entrée, and dessert; pair it with sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla for a sweet dish or add tomatoes, onions, and peas for a savory meal. In Rice: A Savor the South Cookbook (UNC Press, 2021), Michael Twitty explores the culinary history of rice as he offers 51 recipes of how this grain is found in many culinary cultures including Creole, Acadian, soul food, Low Country, and Gulf Coast. As Twitty states, connects us to everyone and “no other ingredient tastes this much like home.”

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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Michael J. Bustamante, "Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile" (UNC Press, 2021)

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

I had the pleasure of interviewing my mentor, Dr. Michael J. Bustamante on his first monograph, Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile which was published in March 2021 as part of the Envisioning Cuba series by the University of North Carolina Press.

"For many Cubans, Fidel Castro's Revolution represented deliverance from a legacy of inequality and national disappointment. For others—especially those exiled in the United States—Cuba's turn to socialism made the prerevolutionary period look like paradise lost. In Cuban Memory Wars, Bustamante unsettles this familiar schism by excavating Cubans' contested memories of the Revolution's roots and results over its first twenty years. Cubans' battles over the past, he argues, not only defied simple political divisions; they also helped shape the course of Cuban history itself. As the Revolution unfolded, the struggle over historical memory was triangulated among revolutionary leaders in Havana, expatriate organizations in Miami, and average Cuban citizens. All Cubans leveraged the past in individual ways, but personal memories also collided with the Cuban state's efforts to institutionalize a singular version of the Revolution's story. Drawing on troves of archival materials, including visual media, Bustamante tracks the process of what he calls retrospective politics across the Florida Straits. In doing so, he drives Cuban history beyond the polarized vision seemingly set in stone today and raises the prospect of a more inclusive national narrative."

Dr. Bustamante is the Bacardi Chair in Cuban and Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami and Associate Professor in the Department of History. He is also my mentor, which makes this conversation a special treat for me. He and I talked about the journey from dissertation to monograph, navigating the politics of the Cuban archive, and challenging our own assumptions and biases. It was an AMAZING conversation and a must-listen!

Rozzmery Palenzuela Vicente is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Florida International University. Her dissertation examines the cultural and intellectual politics surrounding black motherhood in twentieth-century Cuba.

Twitter: @RozzmeryPV

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Mark A. Johnson, "Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)

Thu, 05 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

During the nadir of race relations in the United States South from 1877 to 1932, African Americans faced segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching. Among many forms of resistance, African Americans used their musical and theatrical talents to challenge white supremacy, attain economic opportunity, and transcend segregation. In Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932 (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Dr. Mark A. Johnson argues that African Americans, especially performers, retooled negative stereotypes and segregation laws to their advantage. From 1877 to 1932, African Americans spoke at public rallies, generated enthusiasm with music, linked party politics to the memory of the Civil War, honored favorable candidates, and openly humiliated their opposition.

Dr. Mark A. Johnson is Lecturer at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

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Sarah Hepola on Drinking in a "Dry" Texas County

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Welcome to Cover Story, a podcast by New Books Network devoted to long form journalism. Today, we are talking to Texas-based writer Sarah Hepola. Hepola is most known from her brave writing about drinking and the 2015 bestselling memoir Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget.

She's appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air and published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek, Salon and Texas Monthly, where she is a writer-at-large. Today we are talking about her recent story “In Mobile City Everybody Knows Your Name” from August 2021 Texas Monthly. A very fresh piece.

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

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Robert Wooster, "The United States Army and the Making of America: From Confederation to Empire, 1775-1903" (UP of Kansas, 2021)

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The story of how the American military—and more particularly the regular army—has played a vital role in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States that extended beyond the battlefield is the focus of Robert Wooster’s The United States Army and the Making of America: From Confederation to Empire, 1775–1903 (University Press of Kansas, 2021). As Wooster shows, Americans repeatedly used the army not only to secure their expanding empire and fight their enemies, but to shape their nation and their vision of who they were, often in ways not directly associated with shooting wars or combat. That the regular army served as nation-builders is ironic, given the officer corps’ obsession with a warrior ethic and the deep-seated disdain for a standing army that includes Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and debates regarding congressional appropriations. Whether the issue concerned Indian policy, the appropriate division of power between state and federal authorities, technology, transportation, communications, or business innovations, the public demanded that the military remain small even as it expected those forces to promote civilian development.

Douglas Bell is a historian who focuses on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies

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Kevin McGruder, "Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Kevin McGruder about his new book Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia UP, 2021)

In a moment of hope, even faith, African-Americans inspired by Booker T. Washington believed at the start of the 21st century that prospering financially would lead them to fair and even-standing with their fellow white citizens in America. In that vein, Philip Payton launched the Afro-American Realty Company in 1904 and in doing so took on the big-money crowd. Up against him, for instance, was the Hudson Realty Company that numbered among its backers the Bloomingdale family. To an amazing extent, Payton managed in his short life to engineer real estate deals that made Harlem the home base for many of the African-Americans coming north in the Great Migration of the World War One era. Was it an entirely smooth journey for Payton? No, it wasn’t—as McGruder points out in this episode that brings into account “racial capitalism” and the looming shadow of Woodrow Wilson’s divisive approach to race relations.

Kevin McGruder is an associate professor of history at Antioch College. He’s also the author of Race and Real Estate and in the 1990s was the director of real estate development for the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a nonprofit church-based organization in Harlem.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Jeffery A. Jenkins and Justin Peck, "Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 26 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Jeffrey Jenkins and Justin Peck’s new book Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918 (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores how Congressional Republicans enacted laws aimed at establishing an inclusive, multiracial democracy. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Congress crafted a civil rights agenda -- including laws, strict enforcement mechanisms, and Constitutional amendments that (for a brief time) enabled Black Americans to vote, sit on juries, and exercise other civil rights. Using a rich collection of data, the book documents how the Republican coalitions that passed and enforced civil rights weakened because of GOP political weakness in the South, shifts in the political preferences of Northern voters, and lack of GOP unity over core assumptions. Jenkins and Peck offer a Congress-centered American political development perspective to understand how Republicans built civil rights yet subsequently undermined the nascent multiracial democracy that their civil rights agenda helped make possible. The book focuses on the conflict within the Republican Party and electoral trends to argue that “policy enactments are a consequence of, and a window into, evolving attitudes about civil rights.” The book’s granular political history demonstrates how legal institutions -- created by majoritarian bodies like Congress -- liberated and protected an oppressed class of citizens but also reasserted the power of the white majority.

Dr. Jeffery A. Jenkins is Provost Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Law, Judith & John Bedrosian Chair of Governance and the Public Enterprise, Director of the Bedrosian Center, and Director of the Political Institutions and Political Economy (PIPE) Collaborative at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.

Dr. Justin Peck is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University. In addition to his work on Congress and Civil Rights, he is engaged in a project that seeks to understand how the United States’ role in international affairs leads to the production of new political ideas and to the reform of domestic political institutions.

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “BLM versus #BLM:The Dangers of the New Armed Rebellion Narrative” was recently published as part of the Brennan Center for Justice’s series on Protest, Insurrection, and the Second Amendment and “Sensitive Places: Originalism, Gender, and the Myth Self-Defense in District of Columbia v. Heller” appeared in July 2021’s Polity. Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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Kevin Waite, "West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire" (UNC Press, 2021)

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The geography of American slavery was continental, argues Dr. Kevin Waite, an assistant professor at Durham University, in West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (UNC Press, 2021). Rather than being confined to the South, the institution of slavery infected North America as the American empire expanded across the Mississippi River, including places often thought of as "free" states, such as California. Slaveholders saw territories in the far West as zones of political control, supportive of slavery in the South even when relatively small numbers of people were actually held in bondage in these places. Waite's history shifts how historians view the coming of the Civil War and the expansion of slavery - rather than quarantined, the "slave power" moved along railroads and roads, through networks of patronage and through alternate forms of unfreedom, such as peonage. The Civil War and Reconstruction are similarly continental events when viewed through this lens. Waite's book is a comprehensive examination of how southern elites saw their future, and in this way is an excellent example of historical contingency put into action.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Ken Ellingwood, "First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery" (Pegasus Books, 2021)

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery (Pegasus Books, 2021), Ken Ellingwood takes readers back to the first true test of the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech and a free press through the story of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. The story unfolds during the 1830s, a period known for legal efforts to silence the abolitionist movement by states across the South and violent mobs who picked up that charge when the government could not. Lovejoy pushed back against both of those forces and ultimately succumbed to them, becoming a martyr for the abolitionist movement and a wakeup call about how essential a free press was to a free country and a thriving democracy in America.

Lovejoy's story is worth revisiting now at time when attacks against journalists are again on the rise and the press is considered by some to be the "enemy of the people." Ellingwood does a wonderful job of capturing it in this book and bringing this important time in American history to light.

Ken Ellingwood is an award-winning journalist, Ken Ellingwood has been posted in the San Diego, Mexico City, Jerusalem, and Atlanta bureaus of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of the critically acclaimed (and prescient) work of investigative journalism Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border. He currently lives in Abu Dhabi.

Jenna Spinelle is an instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast.

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Nathan Kalmoe, "With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Political Scientist Nathan Kalmoe has written a fascinating historical and political exploration of the connections between violence and partisanship before, during, and after the American Civil War. This book brings together work by historians and political scientists and straddles both disciplines in the examination of the way that partisan politics at the time of the Civil War also contributed to the rise and use of violence, and how this violence then fed back into partisan politics during this period. Kalmoe engaged a multi-method approach to the research, examining election returns, especially county-level returns during this time; he also integrated the census data from the time to map where voters lived and where soldiers were coming from when they became part of the military. Kalmoe dug deeply into the records about the soldiers (which have been digitized), learning about what happened to them, where they fought, and where they called home. Finally, in order to get a clear sense of the partisan divisions and the action and rhetoric of the party elite, he integrated content from local newspapers—these newspapers were often the media arms of particular political parties in cities and localities, and thus they directly reflected the thinking of the party leaders in those same cities and localities. Kalmoe noted that literacy rates were quite high during this time, which also makes the case for the usefulness of what these partisan newspapers were writing about and reflecting to their readership.

With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2020) examines this violent period of American history, and Kalmoe is able to essentially measure how casualties effected voting and mass political behavior by using all of these historical sources to discern this data. By tracing these related behaviors, Kalmoe highlights some of the changes in attitude and approach that takes place in the two main political parties at the time. He finds that the northern Democrats shifted markedly from a pro-war stance earlier in the war to, in 1864, every northern Democratic newspaper taking an anti-war position. This is a rather dynamic change that takes place over a short time. During this same period, the northern Republican partisans were suffering significantly more losses, and they were even more committed to the war, as reflected in the newspapers and in the public events where speakers addressed the topic of the war. This pattern of war memory also continues in Reconstruction, as Republican states built monuments to remember the fallen, and as the regiments also wrote up their own histories, delineating the heroic deeds of those who were members of the respective regiments. This is a sophisticated and complex analysis of the connection between violence and partisan in an earlier era in the United States, when the Union and the Confederacy were moved to take up arms and to commit to violence in ways that were also directly related to the active political parties and partisan affiliation with those parties. In reading through With Ballots and Bullets: Partisanship and Violence in the American Civil War it hard not to see echoes and images of more recent political violence and the way that this more contemporary violence is also tied to partisanship.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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Candace Bailey, "Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South" (U Illinois Press, 2021)

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Dr. Candace Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in the women's culture of the time. Bailey pays particular attention to the space between music as an ideal accomplishment—part of how people expected women to perform gentility—and a real practice—what women actually did. At the same time, her ethnographic reading of binder’s volumes, letters and diaries, and a wealth of other archival material informs new and vital interpretations of women’s places in southern culture. A fascinating collective portrait of women's artistic and personal lives, Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-century South (University of Illinois Press, 2021) challenges entrenched assumptions about nineteenth-century music and the experiences of the southern women who made it.

Dr. Candace Bailey is professor of music at North Carolina Central University.

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Sebastian N. Page, "Black Resettlement and the American Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Based on sweeping research in six languages, Sebastian N. Page's Black Resettlement and the American Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2021) offers the first comprehensive, comparative account of nineteenth-century America's greatest road not taken: the mass resettlement of African Americans outside the United States. Building on resurgent scholarly interest in the so-called 'colonization' movement, the book goes beyond tired debates about colonization's place in the contest over slavery, and beyond the familiar black destinations of Liberia, Canada, and Haiti. Striding effortlessly from Pittsburgh to Panama, Toronto to Trinidad, and Lagos to Louisiana, it synthesizes a wealth of individual, state-level, and national considerations to reorient the field and set a new standard for Atlantic history. Along the way, it shows that what haunted politicians from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln was not whether it was right to abolish slavery, but whether it was safe to do so unless the races were separated.

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Todd M. Kerstetter, "Flood on the Tracks: Living, Dying, and the Nature of Disaster in the Elkhorn River Basin" (Texas Tech UP, 2019)

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

If floods are inevitable, why do humans insist on building alongside riverbanks? Todd Kerstetter, professor of history at Texas Christian University, tries to answer that question in Flood on the Tracks: Living, Dying, and the Nature of Disaster in the Elkhorn River Basin (Texas Tech University Press, 2019). Kerstetter examines a relatively small river system, the Elkhorn River basin in Nebraska, and describes the waterway's deep history. Floods happen for explicable reasons, and while humans have used the Elkhorn for thousands of years, different societies have found different approaches to dealing with the river's tendency to flood. The problem, Kerstetter argues, is not with the river itself, but rather with the tendency of Americans to build right up close to the riverbanks and staying put. Unlike many places in the American West, a region often defined by aridity, the problem of the Elkhorn is too much water in places were people decided to build towns. In the West, rivers and the people who call them home maintain a love-hate relationship.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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Martin Summers, "Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

From the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, Saint Elizabeths Hospital was one of the United States' most important institutions for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. Founded in 1855 to treat insane soldiers and sailors as well as civilian residents in the nation's capital, the institution became one of the country's preeminent research and teaching psychiatric hospitals. From the beginning of its operation, Saint Elizabeths admitted black patients, making it one of the few American asylums to do so.

Martin Summers' book Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions (Oxford UP, 2019) is a history of the hospital and its relationship to Washington, DC's African American community. It charts the history of Saint Elizabeths from its founding to the late-1980s, when the hospital's mission and capabilities changed as a result of deinstitutionalization, and its transfer from the federal government to the District of Columbia. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including patient case files, the book demonstrates how race was central to virtually every aspect of the hospital's existence, from the ways in which psychiatrists understood mental illness and employed therapies to treat it to the ways that black patients experienced their institutionalization. The book argues that assumptions about the existence of distinctive black and white psyches shaped the therapeutic and diagnostic regimes in the hospital and left a legacy of poor treatment of African American patients, even after psychiatrists had begun to reject racialist conceptions of the psyche. Yet black patients and their communities asserted their own agency and exhibited a "rights consciousness" in large and small ways, from agitating for more equal treatment to attempting to manage the therapeutic experience.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Jeanne Pitre Soileau, "Yo' Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Louisiana Children's Folklore and Play" (UP of Mississippi, 2016)

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Children’s folklore is simultaneously a conservator of tradition and a site for creativity and innovation. For over five decades, Dr. Jeanne Pitre Soileau documented and collected the jokes, chants, rhymes, and games that that she observed on school playgrounds throughout her career as a public school teacher in southern Louisiana. From the early days of integration to the first decade of the 21st century, Dr. Soileau has taken note of the evolving forms in which children’s play take and its reflections of contemporary times. Her book, Yo’ Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux: Lousiana Children’s Folklore and Play (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), examines forty-four years of children’s folklore and play collected in southern Louisiana schools. The book has won the 2018 Chicago Folklore Prize for excellence in folklore scholarship and the 2018 Opie Prize for the best published scholarly book on children’s folklore.

In this podcast, we hear about Dr. Soileau’s early fascination with the sounds of children chanting and handclapping at Louisiana school playground and her subsequent efforts to collect and document them and mores. She shares the playground jokes she heard, the “dozens,” an African American insult ritual with specific patterns with “clean” and “dirty” versions. We also discuss chants and ring games that were played among girls, some of which had origins from the late 19th century, but still expressed expectations of womanhood. The rhymes and playing that children engaged with were often reflective of current trends and popular culture. While the 21st century saw the rise of electronic media in the play of children, traditional rings games and chants still persisted on the playground. Such inventions did not replace these familiar games, but simply added to them, allowing for a different type of creativity and play for children.

Dr. Jeanne Soileau was born in New Orleans and taught public school and university classes in Louisiana for forty-seven years. Though retired, she continues to collect and study children’s folklore. Her upcoming publication What The Children Said: Child Lore of Southern Louisiana (University Press of Mississippi, 2021) will explore children’s play and its influence on learning about race, history, and sexuality.

Nancy Yan received her PhD in folklore from The Ohio State University and taught First Year Writing, Comparative Studies, and Asian American studies for several years before returning to organizing work.

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Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, "The Digital Black Atlantic" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

How can scholars use digital tools to better understand the African diaspora across time, space, and disciplines? And how can African diaspora studies inform the practices of digital humanities? These questions are at the heart of this timely collection of essays about the relationship between digital humanities and Black Atlantic studies, offering critical insights into race, migration, media, and scholarly knowledge production.

The Digital Black Atlantic (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) spans the African diaspora’s range—from Africa to North America, Europe, and the Caribbean—while its essayists span academic fields—from history and literary studies to musicology, game studies, and library and information studies. This transnational and interdisciplinary breadth is complemented by essays that focus on specific sites and digital humanities projects throughout the Black Atlantic. Covering key debates, The Digital Black Atlantic asks theoretical and practical questions about the ways that researchers and teachers of the African diaspora negotiate digital methods to explore a broad range of cultural forms including social media, open access libraries, digital music production, and video games. The volume further highlights contributions of African diaspora studies to digital humanities, such as politics and representation, power and authorship, the ephemerality of memory, and the vestiges of colonialist ideologies.

Grounded in contemporary theory and praxis, The Digital Black Atlantic puts the digital humanities into conversation with African diaspora studies in crucial ways that advance both.

Digital Black Atlantic projects and a journal referenced in the interview:

sx: a small literary salon
Sonya Donaldson's Singing into the Nation
Kaiama Glover and Alex Gil's In the Same Boats
Schuler Espirit's Create Caribbean
Roopika Risam's The Global Du Bois Project

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

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Jody Edward Ginn, "East Texas Troubles: The Allred Rangers' Cleanup of San Augustine" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

When the gun smoke cleared, four men were found dead at the hardware store in a rural East Texas town. But this December 1934 shootout was no anomaly. San Augustine County had seen at least three others in the previous three years, and these murders in broad daylight were only the latest development in the decade-long rule of the criminal McClanahan-Burleson gang. Armed with handguns, Jim Crow regulations, and corrupt special Ranger commissions from infamous governors “Ma” and “Pa” Ferguson, the gang racketeered and bootlegged its way into power in San Augustine County, where it took up robbing and extorting local black sharecroppers as its main activity.

After the hardware store shootings, white community leaders, formerly silenced by fear of the gang’s retribution, finally sought state intervention. In 1935, fresh-faced, newly elected governor James V. Allred made good on his promise to reform state law enforcement agencies by sending a team of qualified Texas Rangers to San Augustine County to investigate reports of organized crime. In East Texas Troubles: The Allred Rangers' Cleanup of San Augustine (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), historian Jody Edward Ginn tells of their year-and-a-half-long cleanup of the county, the inaugural effort in Governor Allred’s transformation of the Texas Rangers into a professional law enforcement agency.

Besides foreshadowing the wholesale reform of state law enforcement, the Allred Rangers’ investigative work in San Augustine marked a rare close collaboration between white law enforcement officers and black residents. Drawing on firsthand accounts and the sworn testimony of black and white residents in the resulting trials, Ginn examines the consequences of such cooperation in a region historically entrenched in racial segregation.

In this story of a rural Texas community’s resurrection, Ginn reveals a multifaceted history of the reform of the Texas Rangers and of an unexpected alliance between the legendary frontier lawmen and black residents of the Jim Crow South.

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Edward G. Longacre, "Unsung Hero of Gettysburg: The Story of Union General David McMurtrie Gregg" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Edward G. Longacre about his new book Unsung Hero of Gettysburg: The Story of Union General David McMurtrie Gregg (University of Nebraska Press, 2021).

On the 3rd day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Union cavalry officer David Gregg ensured that Jeb Stuart’s Confederate cavalry troops didn’t succeed. Stuart’s orders were to attack the right flank of the Army of the Potomac and create a pincer movement by attacking from behind while Pickett’s forces made their disastrous frontal attack known as Pickett’s charge. Outnumbered by probably 2 to 1, Gregg’s men and the commandeered cavalry led by George Custer held off the Confederate horsemen, helping to seal the military victory. Gregg and Custer got along well but could hardly have been more different. One was reserved, the other flamboyant. And it would of course be Custer who went down in the history books for being impulsive, while the levelheaded Gregg provided solid leadership whether at Gettysburg or elsewhere during the war. This episode goes into all of that and more, including what type of person tended to be most attracted to the cavalry (independent, hell-for-leather types).

Ed Longacre is a retired historian for the U.S. Department of Defense and the award-winning author of numerous books on the Civil War in addition to writing top-secret documents for the U.S. Airforce. One of his ancestors took part in the torching of part of William and Mary College during the Civil War as an act of revenge following the Confederate seizure of some of his comrades in arms.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Timothy D. Walker, "Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad" (U Massachusetts Press, 2021)

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 09:00:00 -0000

More than 70 percent of the 103 pre-Emancipation slave narratives acknowledged using waterways as their method for escaping enslavement. However, much of the scholarship on the Underground Railroad has centered on land routes. Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) convincing asserts the role of maritime escapes as part of the Underground Railroad during the antebellum era. The ten essays in this volume bring together scholars at various stages of their careers, examines how enslaved people traveled by sea to seek freedom. This critical volume offers a new component to escape routes, recasting Underground Railroad scholarship

Readers interested in the book may use the promo code MAS022, which is good for 30 percent off the book’s cover price and free shipping when purchased through the University of Massachusetts Press website.

N'Kosi Oates is a Ph.D. candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at NKosiOates.

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No Choice: Why Is It So Hard to Get an Abortion in the South?

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today we are talking with Becca Andrews, a journalist at Mother Jones, where she writes about reproductive rights and gender. The story we discuss is “When Choice is 221 Miles Away: The Nightmare of Getting an Abortion in the South” and its follow up.

Becca’s debut work of nonfiction, No Choice, based on her Mother Jones cover story about the past, present, and future of Roe v. Wade, will be published by in 2022.

Andrews is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism and wrote for newspapers in her home state of Tennessee.

Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations.

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Todne Thomas, "Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality" (Duke UP, 2021)

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality (Duke University Press, 2021) by Todne Thomas takes a deep dive into the social and religious lives of two black evangelical churches in the Atlanta metro area. Thomas ethnographically renders the ways in which black evangelicals engage in a process of producing kin or crafting relatedness through bible study, socializing, talking, and forming prayer partnerships. She argues that they produce kincraft or construct themselves as brothers and sisters in Christ. In so doing, they "closed the gap between the presumably 'real' family relationships of biology and those of spiritual kin" (3). Examining the lives and activities of black evangelicals illuminates these communities which are often obscured by evangelicals who are racialized as white and the protestant orientation associated with the black church. Outlining the processes through which black evangelicals make kin, calls into question ideas of fictive kinship, a concept commonly used to characterize kinship ties that are not biological or through marriage. Kincraft locates black evangelicals and their practices of kinship formation at the center of their own story.

Todne Thomas is an Assistant Professor of African American Religions in the Harvard Divinity School.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Joshua D. Rothman, "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America" (Basic Book, 2021)

Thu, 20 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Joshua Rothman is a professor of history at the University of Alabama.

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Kathryn Benjamin Golden, "Armed in the Great Swamp': Fear, Maroon Insurrection, and the Insurgent Ecology of the Great Dismal Swamp" (2021)

Wed, 19 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In 2021, we are inundated with daily images of racial terror, state violence, and technologies of punishment showing pictures of broken down, beleaguered, and deceased Black people’s bodies, especially in Virginia and North Carolina. But state approved terror never gets the last word. In Kathryn Benjamin Golden’s 2021 Journal of African American History article "'Armed in the Great Swamp': Fear, Maroon Insurrection, and the Insurgent Ecology of the Great Dismal Swamp", we learn how enslaved people in Southeast Virginia and Northeast North Carolina utilized the “insurgent ecology” of the Great Dismal Swamp as a critical site to strategize for and enact rebellion. Enjoy the conversation!

Dr. Kathryn Benjamin Golden is an assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware.

Adam Xavier McNeil is a PhD Candidate in Early African American History at Rutgers University.

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Justene Hill Edwards, "Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Wed, 19 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Justene Hill Edwards is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (Columbia University Press, 2021). Unfree Markets focuses in on an area of slavery’s history that has seldom been explore: the economic lives of enslaved people, and its meaning for them, enslavers, non-enslavers, and the institution of slavery itself. Hill Edwards explores how the complicated history of the slaves’ economy from the colonial period to the Civil War, showing the relationship between it and the development of capitalism in the nation. Through a history of enterprise, cultivation, markets, and people, Hill Edwards shows just how much the tenuous the connection between economic activity and freedom for the enslaved became throughout this time period, and what that meant for everyone involved.

Justene Hill Edwards is an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia.

Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park.

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Susan M. Reverby, "Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy" (UNC Press, 2013)

Wed, 05 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Some books are new, others are newly relevant – and so worth looking at from a new, contemporary perspective. Such is the case with Susan Reverby’s book Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy (UNC Press, 2013). When the book was published in 2009, our world was reeling from a global financial crisis that exposed how subprime mortgages disproportionately affected Black homeowners; today we reel from a global pandemic that has starkly exposed how Black Americans and other people of color are disproportionately affected by the virus SARS-CoV-2 and its effects. Another inequity connected to the pandemic relates to vaccine distribution and uptake: they are much lower among Black (and Latinx) than white Americans.

Examining Tuskegee is a deeply researched work that ranges from the trial’s origins within a public health partnership between the Tuskegee Institute and the Public Health Service, to portraits of its protagonists – the researchers, the men who were its subjects, the complex Nurse Rivers, and the persistent Peter Buxton, whose efforts eventually exposed the full truth of the study after it ran for 40 years – to the ways it was portrayed in popular culture and the media, to matters of bioethics and presidential apologies. In our conversation, Susan Reverby explains what actually happened in the study – no, the men were not injected by the researchers with syphilis – what it meant 50 years ago, and how it pertains, or not, to issues such as vaccine hesitancy among African Americans today.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist. Her third book, an examination of the history of acupuncture as a means of social and political revolution, is under contract with the University of Michigan Press.

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Karlos K. Hill, "The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021)

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

On the evening of May 31, 1921, thousands of white Oklahomans assaulted the Greenwood District of the city of Tulsa. In what would come to be known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, dozens of Black residents were killed and thousands more displaced as armed whites looted their homes and businesses before burning them to the ground.

Karlos K. Hill’s The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021) provides a visual record of the attack upon the community and the destruction it wrought upon the neighborhood, along with pictures of the aftermath and the testimony of the survivors.

As Hill’s images reveal, Greenwood had established itself as the most prosperous Black community in the United States prior to the massacre. This prosperity was a source of resentment for many whites, and fueled much of the anger reflected in the massacre. Yet Hill’s photos also reveal the resilience of a community, as in the aftermath of the devastation the residents of Greenwood rallied to rebuild much of what had been destroyed, serving as a foundation for further prosperity in the decades that followed.

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E. Patrick Johnson, "Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South" (U of North Carolina Press, 2011)

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 04:00:00 -0000

E. Patrick Johnson's Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) has been a monograph, a documentary film, a stage play, and now a published script from Northwestern University Press.

This play weaves together interviews Johnson conducted with gay Black men from the South with Johnson's own recollections of growing up young, gifted, gay, and Black in Hickory, North Carolina. These stories are funny, heart-breaking, and inspiring, and reveal a collective portrait of gay Black Southern life that is much more complex than the simple narrative of repression and escape so often associated with this community.

In this interview we discuss what keeps Johnson returning to these stories, his relationship to Black spirituality, and the techniques he used to embody these men when he performed Sweet Tea as a one man show.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Fatima Shaik, "Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood" (HNOC, 2021)

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Fatima Shaik's book Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood (Historic New Orleans Collections, 2021) tells the story of the Sociâetâe d'Economie et d'Assistance Mutuelle, a New Orleans mutual aid society founded by free men of color in 1836. The group was one of the most important multiethnic, intellectual communities in the US South: educators, world-traveling merchants, soldiers, tradesmen, and poets who rejected racism and colorism to fight for suffrage and education rights for all. The author drew on the meeting minutes of the Sociâetâe d'Economie as well as census and civil records, newspapers, and numerous archival sources to write a narrative stretching from the Haitian Revolution through the early jazz age.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Tamika Y. Nunley, "At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C." (UNC Press, 2021)

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty, nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., was both an entrepot of urban slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave trade and the enactment of Black codes placed the city's Black women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by race and gender. At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. (UNC Press, 2021) reveals how these women--enslaved, fugitive, and free--imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from ever experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power.

Consulting newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, Tamika Y. Nunley traces how Black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, Nunley places Black women at the vanguard of the history of Washington, D.C., and the momentous transformations of nineteenth-century America.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Regina N. Bradley, "Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South" (UNC Press, 2021)

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) pulses with the beats of a new American South, probing the ways music, literature, and film have remixed southern identities for a post–civil rights generation. For scholar and critic Dr. Regina N. Bradley, OutKast’s work is the touchstone, a blend of funk, gospel, and hip-hop developed in conjunction with the work of other culture creators—including T.I., Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward. This work, Bradley argues, helps define new cultural possibilities for Black southerners who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s and have used hip-hop culture to buffer themselves from the historical narratives and expectations of the civil rights era. André 3000, Big Boi, and a wider community of creators emerge as founding theoreticians of the hip-hop South, framing a larger question of how the region fits into not only hip-hop culture but also contemporary American society as a whole. Chronicling Stankonia reflects the ways that culture, race, and southernness intersect in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Although part of southern hip-hop culture remains attached to the past, Bradley demonstrates how younger southerners use the music to embrace the possibility of multiple Souths, multiple narratives, and multiple points of entry to contemporary southern Black identity.

Dr. Regina N. Bradley is an alumna Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at Harvard University and an Assistant Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University

Check out Bradley's podcast about Southern hip-hop, Bottom of the Map.

Bradley also has another OutKast book coming in August 2021, An OutKast Reader:

Essays on Race, Gender, and the Postmodern South (UGA Press).

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B. K. Mitchell, et al., "Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana" (HNOC, 2021)

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Brian K. Mitchell describes Reconstruction as the most misunderstood period in American history. In the Jim Crow era, there was a concerted effort to reverse the achievements of African Americans. White supremacists also removed the history of figures such as Louisiana’s Oscar Dunn, the first Lieutenant Governor and acting governor, from the official narrative. Since the second grade, when he learned he was related to Oscar Dunn, Mitchell has been pushing against this historical amnesia.

Mitchell’s graphic history Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana was published by The Historic New Orleans Collection in 2021. He worked on Monumental with Nick Weldon, an associate editor at The Historic New Orleans Collection. Barrington S. Edwards of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design illustrated the book.

Dr. Brian K. Mitchell is an assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock and an associate faculty member at the Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity. He earned his Ph.D. in urban studies with a concentration in public history at the University of New Orleans, his hometown. His research on race, violence, and the Elaine Massacre has been covered by CNN, NPR, Atlas Obscura, The Guardian, and the Associated Press. Previously he was a senior federal investigator for Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.

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Julio Capó Jr., "Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940" (UNC Press, 2017)

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017)highlights how transnational forces—including (im)migration, trade, and tourism—to and from the Caribbean shaped Miami’s queer past. The book has received six awards and honors, including the Charles S. Sydnor Award from the Southern Historical Association for the best book written on Southern history.

Dr. Julio Capó, Jr. is a transnational historian whose research and teaching interests include modern U.S. history, especially the United States’s relationship to the Caribbean and Latin America. He addresses how gender and sexuality have historically intersected with constructions of ethnicity, race, class, nation, age, and ability. He teaches introductory and specialized courses on all these subjects, as well as courses on public history.

Leo Valdes is a graduate student in the History Department at Rutgers University. In addition to being a host for the LGBTQ Studies channel on the New Books Network, they are an oral historian with the Latino New Jersey Oral History Project at Rutgers University and Voces of the Pandemic, a collaborative oral history project with Voces Oral History Center at UT Austin. Their dissertation explores how criminalization and race shaped trans cultures and politics in the 20th century.

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Thomas C. Holt, "The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The civil rights movement was among the most important historical developments of the twentieth century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. Not only did it decisively change the legal and political status of African Americans, but it prefigured as well the moral premises and methods of struggle for other historically oppressed groups seeking equal standing in American society. And, yet, despite a vague, sometimes begrudging recognition of its immense import, more often than not the movement has been misrepresented and misunderstood. For the general public, a singular moment, frozen in time at the Lincoln Memorial, sums up much of what Americans know about that remarkable decade of struggle.

In The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights (Oxford UP, 2021), Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, privileging the aspirations and initiatives of the ordinary, grassroots people who made it. Holt conveys a sense of these developments as a social movement, one that shaped its participants even as they shaped it. He emphasizes the conditions of possibility that enabled the heroic initiatives of the common folk over those of their more celebrated leaders. This groundbreaking book reinserts the critical concept of "movement" back into our image and understanding of the civil rights movement.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com

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Mary Ann Cherry, "Morris Kight: Humanist, Liberationist, Fantabulist: A Story of Gay Rights and Gay Wrongs" (Process, 2020)

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 04:00:00 -0000

How did the gay movement, which began as a sedate group of intellectuals, become what is arguably the most dynamic civil rights crusade in America? How did a deviant and marginalized fraction of society evolve into powerful, effective, and respected leaders? Activist Morris Kight, a sometimes ignored leader of the post-Stonewall gay rights movement, self-aggrandizing and egotistical in a room full of egos, always found the camera and a way to give gay rights a seat at the table of social reform. His style of organizing and activism showed the power of the “influencer” decades before social media brought millions together with a meme.

His work in the 1950s as a part of an underground network of gay ‘safe houses’ that provided bail, health care, and legal advice was based on his early Socialist beliefs. He turned his unique charisma and organizing skills to the 1960s anti-war movement before deciding to devote the rest of his life to the public fight for “Gay Liberation.” He fostered key relationships with fellow activists such as Harvey Milk, politicians, socialites, and gangsters. He had backroom deals with wealthy business owners and handshake agreements with power brokers. This led to a new quality of life for homosexuals, liberated homo youths and, eventually, led to the first generation of never-closeted Gays.

Kight helped organize the first gay pride parade in the country in 1970. He founded groups that lead seminal protests that resulted in: The American Psychiatric Association removing homosexuality as a disease from its diagnostic manual, protecting civil rights for gay citizens in California, and reducing police violence against the gay community. And for every good thing he did, he took credit for more. He was a man who, with his many flaws, managed to alienate as many people as he brought together. His story brings to life his work as remembered by those who loved and loathed him. Mary Ann Cherry befriended Morris Kight in the last decade of his life. She, with Morris’s permission, began writing his biography. Cherry is a Los Angeles based writer whose wide-ranging work includes, television and film producing as well as creating and maintaining the historical archives for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

Morris Ardoin is the author of STONE MOTEL – MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY (2020, University Press of Mississippi). A communications practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin

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Elizabeth L. Jemison, "Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Post-Emancipation South" (UNC Press, 2020)

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Elizabeth L. Jemison, who teaches American religious history at Clemson University, South Carolina, has written an outstanding new book, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Post-Emancipation South (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Focusing on the Lower Mississippi River Valley, and working from the 1860s to 1900, Jemison explains how white and African-American protestants developed strikingly different accounts of Christian citizenship. Paying attention to the variety of perspective within and between the Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian and Episcopalian denominations, and to the perspectives of men and women, Jemison asks troubling questions about white violence and the religious character of the segregated society to which the white protestant counter-revolution eventually led.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Zach Sell, "Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital" (UNC Press, 2021)

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The middle decades of the 19th century witnessed the expansion of slavery and white settlement and dispossession of Indigenous lands west of the Mississippi River, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire followed by the importation of indentured laborers from India and China into the West Indies, the consolidation of British rule in India followed by the so-called Indian Mutiny, and the expansion of settler colonialism in Australia. These processes were all tied together by commerce, empire, and the spread of racial ideologies, yet their histories have largely been written separately. Until now.

Zach Sell’s new book Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) highlights the connections between the “second slavery” in the Deep South of the United States, efforts to socially engineer mono-crop agriculture in India by a British colonial state that lip service to laissez-faire and free labor even as it tried to import plantation management techniques from the US south, how the attempt to create plantation-style agriculture in Queensland, Australia bumped up against the logic of white settler colonialism and attempts to expand plantation agriculture in Belize in the age of so-called “free” labor using indentured labor from Asia. This is a story of racial formation on a global scale, and of the limits of capital’s ability to remake social relations and environments in its own image, despite the capacity for organized brutality that it had at its disposal. This book is particularly important at a time when many American, British and French commentators have tried to downplay the violence of expansion and colonialism and to portray white supremacy as some sort of American peculiarity and relic of the past.

Zach is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Drexel University and was previously Ruth J. Simmons Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Slavery and Justice at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.

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David A. Less, "Memphis Mayhem: A Story of the Music That Shook Up the World" (ECW Press, 2020)

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to David A. Lees about his book Memphis Mayhem: A Story of the Music That Shook Up the World (ECW Press, 2020)

David Less has studied Memphis music for over 40 years, including work done for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Gibson Guitar Foundation. He’s been published in Rolling Stone and DownBeat, among other places.

This episode seizes first on three major events that happened in Memphis: the formal start of the blues (W.C. Handy 1909), the start of rock n’ roll (Elvis Presley 1954), and the tragic assignation of Martin Luther King (1968). Along the way, this episode explores everything from the impact of yellow fever epidemics on Memphis racial dynamics, including the rise of the South’s first (black) millionaire; and later the development of Beale Street into “Black America’s Main Street.” Other highlights include: the creation of America’s first all-female radio station (WHER, 1955) by Sam Phillips of Sun Studio fame; and the wealth of independent studios from Stax to Ardent that made Memphis the 3rd largest center for recording music in America for over a decade from the early 1960s onward.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Jonathan S. Holloway, "The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. If being "American" means living in a land of freedom and opportunity, what are we to make of those Americans who were enslaved and who have suffered from the limitations of second-class citizenship throughout their lives? African American history illuminates the United States' core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being.

Jonathan S. Holloway's The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 2021) considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans' present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation's obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in the country's founding document, namely, that all people were created equal.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network.

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William C. Kashatus, "William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia" (U Notre Dame Press, 2021)

Fri, 12 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

William Still looms large in the history of the Underground Railroad, both for his role coordinating the Eastern Line and the records he maintained of the fugitives he saved. In William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), William C. Kashatus provides his readers with both an account of Still’s life and a comprehensive database compiled from the many interviews his subject conducted with the runaway slaves he assisted. Himself the son of former slaves, Still grew up in the free black community of Philadelphia, at that time the largest in America. Employed by the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society (PASS), Still worked alongside many of the leading figures of the abolitionist movement throughout the 1850s, playing a vital role in helping people escape from bondage. Though Still left PASS in 1861 for a successful career in business and philanthropy he remained a prominent figure in the postwar civil rights movement, while his authorship of the first published history of the Underground Railroad provided subsequent generations with a priceless resource about the hundreds of people he aided.

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B. Brian Foster, "I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life" (UNC Press, 2020)

Thu, 11 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Brian Foster, self-identified Black boy from rural Mississippi, joins us today for a conversation about his book, I Don't Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020). In this interview, he shares with us how his experiences growing up in, leaving and returning home to Mississippi shaped his storytelling. Foster first began this ethnographic project as a doctoral student in Sociology at UNC Chapel Hill. As he tells us, the project started as an exploration of educational inequality and race. It became something very different as he let himself be guided by the stories and experiences of the community he was researching. Brian tells us about a few of the folks he met while living in Clarksdale who shaped the direction and core ideas of this book; their stories highlighted perplexing and sometimes uncomfortable contradictions about what it meant to love and not like the Blues. We learn about Clarksdale, MI and the unique history of the Mississippi Delta, the development of the Blues Commission and Blues tourism as an effort to combat declining manufacturing and agricultural industries, the significance of the Blues to the Delta region, and the contradictions between investing in the Blues and investing in Black communities. We discuss storytelling, examining positionality in ethnographic research and how Foster sees Blues Epistemology as a lens to prioritize seeing Black Southerners as complex human rather than constructed caricatures.

I Don’t Like the Blues tells us an often-overlooked history of a community who has come to be defined as just one thing – Black Southerners – by just one thing – the Blues. By taking us into the homes, cars, backyards and neighborhoods of Black Clarksdalians, Foster gives us the stories and the framework for thinking about how race, place and community development has shaped the lives of Black folks in contemporary Mississippi.

Recently, his public writing “How We Got Here” on his Mississippian family and the tradition of hog slaughter, was developed into an award-winning short film. You can learn more about Brian’s ongoing work on his website.

Nafeesa Andrabi a 4th year Sociology PhD student with specialization in Race/Ethnicity and Health/Illness. I am currently a Biosocial Fellow at Carolina Population Center.

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Michael J. Pfeifer, "The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience" (NYU Press, 2021

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 10:00:00 -0000

Michael J. Pfeifer's The Making of American Catholicism: Regional Culture and the Catholic Experience (NYU Press, 2021 traces the development of Catholic cultures in the South, the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast, and their contribution to larger patterns of Catholicism in the United States. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book argues that American Catholicism developed as transnational Catholics creatively adapted their devotional and ideological practices in particular American regional contexts. They emphasized notions of republicanism, individualistic capitalism, race, ethnicity, and gender, resulting in a unique form of Catholicism that dominates the United States today. The book also offers close attention to race and racism in American Catholicism, including the historical experiences of African American and Latinx Catholics as well as Catholics of European descent.

Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.

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Theodore D. Segal, "Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice" (Duke UP, 2021)

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Duke University officially integrated its student body in the early 1960s, but the University itself did little to make students of color feel as though Duke was their academic home. During this decade, black students organized, agitated, protested, and finally took the bold step of occupying the University's main administrative building for one harrowing day, all in an effort to bring equality and rights to this historically white university campus.

In his deeply researched book, Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice (Duke University Press, 2021) Theodore D. Segal tells the story of the students, administrators, and activists who forced Duke to acknowledge and address its segregation and disparity.

Lane Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University where he studies American religious history. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis

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Ty Seidule, "Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause" (St. Martin's Press, 2021)

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

We're very fortunate to be joined by the editor of The West Point History of the Civil War (Simon and Schuster, 2014), the Head of the History Department at the United States Military Academy, Colonel Ty Seidule. Unlike most surveys, the new West Point History of the Civil War draws upon some of the best talent in the field of Civil War history, all called together to craft a synthetic text that not only forms the basis of the Military Academy's course on the subject, but also provides a very informative overview for the general public. Lavishly illustrated and featuring well-conceived maps and graphs, The West Point History of the Civil War is served by a fully digitized version, optimized for use on tablet platforms. Our interview with Colonel Seidule focuses on the special challenges he and his team confronted in crafting this text, and the place of the Civil War in the American experience.

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Robert Elder, "Calhoun: American Heretic" (Basic Books, 2021)

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In Calhoun: American Heretic (Basic Books, 2021), historian Robert Elder documents the life and thought of one of America's most controversial statesman, John C. Calhoun.

A congressman, a vice president, and a senator, Calhoun represented Jeffersonian republicanism during a time of national expansion and imperialism. He became the nation's most ardent defender of slavery and one of its most complex thinkers on the issue of state sovereignty. Elder's book reconsiders the legacy of this consequential political figure and what it means for America's past and present.

Lane Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University where he studies American religious history. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis

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Kaitland M. Byrd, "Real Southern Barbecue: Constructing Authenticity in Southern Food Culture" (Lexington, 2019)

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Kaitland Byrd’s new book Real Southern Barbecue: Constructing Authenticity in Southern Food Culture (Lexington Press, 2019) examines an archive of oral histories collected by the Southern Foodways Alliance featuring the voices of barbecue pit masters and restaurant owners from the South. Byrd argues that barbecue as a cultural product has a unique relationship to the idea of authenticity. There are some clearly defined elements that seem to make it easy for diners to decide if their barbecue is authentic from the particular cuts of meat and sauces to the sights and smells of the restaurant. However, like all cuisines, barbecue has to respond to the world around it in ways that might challenge traditional definitions of authenticity. Byrd considers “authenticity” to be an unspoken agreement between producers and consumers, something that can be “constructed” and “fabricated” and “consumed.” Byrd applies the idea of “impression management” from sociology to describe how barbecue producers communicate authenticity to consumers even as they have to innovate and deviate from some of their traditional methods in response to changing circumstances.

As Byrd explains, some barbecue purveyors have adapted to changes in consumer tastes and interests in health by offering leaner cuts of meat and emphasizing their traditional vegetable side dishes. They have also adapted to changes in agriculture and meat industries and responses to concerns about the environment, promoting barbecue as an original farm to table, tail to snout cuisine, embracing this vegetable-centric, lean-meat, farm-to-table movement as part of their impression management. One of the most significant challenges to authenticity that restauranteurs must manage are fire and building codes related to smoke, sometimes banning open pit smokers or requiring smokers to be separate buildings. As barbecue restaurants adopt electric smokers or impart flavor from liquid smoke, they must continue to communicate authenticity to consumers through other means. Byrd’s investigation highlights the creative and innovative methods of Southern pit masters and entrepreneurs.

Kaitland Byrd is Lecturer in sociology and visiting scholar at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

Eliza Weeks is a recent graduate of the Master of Food Studies program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA. She hopes to do work related to amplifying diverse and often marginalized voices within the food system so that the opportunity to represent and share food and food culture is not limited to the privileged few. When Eliza is not on the job hunt she enjoys adventuring through new recipes, sharing food and stories with others, and cohosting her podcast Dear Human.

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Stephanie McCurry, "Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a doctoral candidate and School of Arts and Sciences Excellence Fellow in the Department of History at Rutgers.

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Studying LBGT Organizing in China: A Conversation with Caterina Fugazzola

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In today’s episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, Sneha Annavarapu talks with Dr. Caterina Fugazzola, Earl S Johnson Instructor in Sociology at the University of Chicago, about her research on the contemporary tongzhi (LGBT) movement in the People’s Republic of China. Dr. Fugazzola briefly discusses her current book project (under contract with Temple University Press) in which she explains how grassroots groups organizing around sexual identity have achieved significant social change—in terms of visibility, social acceptance, and participation—in virtual absence of public protest, and under conditions of tightening governmental control over civil society groups. But, more pertinently to our special series, our guest tells us about what drew her to the project, and the kinds of dilemmas, issues, and opportunities that marked her fieldwork in the region. For instance, she walks us through what it is like to do ethnographic fieldwork on a cruise ship! We also chat about what it means to do ethnographic observations online and why teaching digital ethnographic methods is a welcome opportunity to rethink our very dated presumptions around physical co-presence in fieldwork being desirable to gather more “authentic” data.

In all, tune in for a very candid, witty, and insightful conversation around fieldwork and for a dose of Dr. Fugazzola’s vivacious and contagious energy for the affordances of digital ethnography.

Learn more about Ethnographic Marginalia here.

Dr. Caterina Fugazzola is is an Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Sociology. Her general interests include social movements, gender and sexuality studies, transnational sociology, and qualitative research methods.

Dr. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago.

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Daniel B. Rood, "The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological expansion into the industrial age. As The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford UP, 2020) shows, ambitious planters throughout the Greater Caribbean hired a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other "plantation experts" to assist them in adapting industrial technologies to suit their "tropical" needs and increase profitability. Not only were technologies reinvented so as to keep manufacturing processes local but slaveholders' adaptation of new racial ideologies also shaped their particular usage of new machines. Finally, these businessmen forged a new set of relationships with one another in order to sidestep the financial dominance of Great Britain and the northeastern United States.

In addition to promoting new forms of mechanization, the technical experts depended on the know-how of slaves alongside whom they worked. Bondspeople with industrial craft skills played key roles in the development of new production processes and technologies like sugar mills. While the very existence of such skilled slaves contradicted prevailing racial ideologies and allowed black people to wield power in their own interest, their contributions grew the slave economies of Cuba, Brazil, and the Upper South. Together reform-minded planters, technical experts, and enslaved people modernized sugar plantations in Louisiana and Cuba; brought together rural Virginia wheat planters and industrial flour-millers in Richmond with the coffee-planting system of southeastern Brazil; and enabled engineers and iron-makers in Virginia to collaborate with railroad and sugar entrepreneurs in Cuba.

Through his examination of the creation of these industrial bodies of knowledge, Daniel B. Rood demonstrates the deepening dependence of the Atlantic economy on forced labor after a few revolutionary decades in which it seemed the institution of slavery might be destroyed. The reinvention of this plantation world in the 1840s and 1850s brought a renewed movement in the 1860s, especially from enslaved people themselves in the United States and Cuba, to end chattel slavery.

This account of capitalism, technology, and slavery offers new perspectives on the nineteenth-century Americas.

Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany.

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Paul O. Jenkins, "Bluegrass Ambassadors: The McLain Family Band in Appalachia and the World" (West Virginia UP, 2020)

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Paul O. Jenkins about his book Bluegrass Ambassadors: The McLain Family Band in Appalachia and the World (West Virginia UP, 2020). This episode covers a band that defies expectations. Coming from Hindman, Kentucky, this band formed in 1968 served as ambassadors of U.S. culture in over 60 countries. T were also fairly unique in being an intergenerational band and by having female band members who were both singers and musicians. roles beyond being singers to be musicians as well. The episode explores how bluegrass music varies from country music, and how musically inventive the group was. Finally, comparisons to the Beatles close out the episode.

Paul O. Jenkins is the University Librarian at Franklin Pierce University. A music lover since childhood, he has written books and articles on numerous musicians, including Richard Dyer-Bennet, the McLain Family Band, and the Beatles.

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Richard Kreitner, "Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union" (Little Brown, 2020)

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Journalists, scholars, politicians, and citizens often assume that calls for secession are political or historical aberrations. Our founding myth is that the Civil War divided an otherwise united nation and we soon reconstructed the United States to form a more perfect union. But Richard Kreitner’s provocative new book,

Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union (Little Brown, 2020), argues that “disunion” is the hidden thread in the history of the United States. Kreitner is a contributing writer to The Nation who has also published in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, Raritan, and The Baffler.

American politics from colonial times to the present, Break it Up argues, has always included “forces that have conspired to divide it” and Kreitner insists that we get a more nuanced and comprehensive “understanding of both our contentious past and our uncertain future” if we confront that history. Drawing on rich scholarship from multiple disciplines Break It Up argues that the United States has “always been riven by race and religion, cleaved by class and culture, sundered by section, and fragmented by geography.” The United States was always a “tentative proposition” – an “experiment that might fail at any time.” The book insists that asking questions about unity is the “prerequisite for serious discussion about what we Americans want the future to hold for ourselves and this perennially divided union.” Moreover, facing disunion assists in the work of building an inclusive, multiracial democracy capable of combating climate change or racial equality. As the book starkly puts it, the U.S. should either finish the work of Reconstruction or give up on the idea of the “united” states as currently conceived.

Break It Up uses four eras to trace the theme of disunion. “A Vast, Unwieldy Machine” deals with the colonial and Revolutionary periods with Kreitner arguing that resisting a common enemy in the British should not be mistaken for unity. For example, the process of unification was characterized by bitter disagreements over representation and the protection of enslavement in the proposed Constitution. Here, Kreitner reviews some of what is well known in the literature but also smaller (and heated) controversies that may surprise those who think they know the period well. The second era highlights the disagreements in the early Republic over the increase in land (e.g., the Louisiana Purchase) and Aaron Burr’s attempt to break off parts of the country to form an independent Empire. For Hamilton: An American Musical buffs, Kreitner challenges some of Chernow’s assumptions to create a more nuanced understanding of the first Secretary of the Treasury. Kreitner’s third era documents the increasing appetite for disunion in the years before the American Civil War – and the ultimate schism. The fourth period is less defined by chronology. “Return of the Repressed” ranges from Reconstruction to 21st century plans for secession. Kreitner argues that Reconstruction’s failure to resolve fundamental conflicts leave us with a nation perpetually split over race and class.

Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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Earl Wright II, "Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology" (University of Cincinnati Press, 2020)

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology (U Cincinnati Press, 2020) is an extraordinary new volume that examines the origin, development, and significance of Black Sociology through the accomplishments of early African American sociologists at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) such as Atlanta University, Tuskegee Institute, Fisk University, and Howard University. Black Sociology is a concept that weaponizes the discipline for that which is “right and good" and prioritizes scholar-activist inspired research directed at impacting real world conditions of African Americans.

Guided by this approach, this book debunks the idea that the sociology practiced by early African Americans does not exemplify scholarly excellence. Instead, Earl Wright II demonstrates that Tuskegee Institute, under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, established the first applied program of rural sociology. Fisk University, first under the guidance of George Edmund Haynes then Charles S. Johnson, developed one of the earliest and most impactful programs of applied urban sociology. Wright extends our understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois's Atlanta Sociological Laboratory with an articulation of the contributions of women to the first American school of sociology.

Jim Crow Sociology forces contemporary scholars to grapple with who are and who are not included in the disciplinary canon. Specifically, this book forces us to ask why early African American sociologists and HBCUs are not canonized. What makes this book most consequential is that it provides evidence supporting the proposition that sociology began in earnest in the United States as a Black and southern enterprise.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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Gretchen Sorin, "Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights" (Liveright, 2020)

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Gretchen Sorin’s book, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (Liveright, 2020) is Sorin’s ode to a part of history that has not been told to its fullest. Its pages include 75 powerful images that together, demonstrate that the car—the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility—has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the dangers presented them by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Melding new archival research with her family’s story, Sorin recovers a lost history and shows how, when combined with black travel guides, including the famous Green Book, the automobile encouraged a new way of resisting oppression.

Gretchen Sorin is the director and a distinguished professor of the State University of New York (SUNY) Oneonta Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies—one of the oldest museum studies programs in the United States and still “at the forefront of the profession today.” She holds a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Rutgers University, a master’s degree in Museum Studies from SUNY Oneonta, and a Ph.D. in History from SUNY Albany and has for over thirty years curated innumerable exhibits for organizations like the Smithsonian, the Jewish Museum, and the New York State Historical Association.

One can find Dr. Sorin’s book in print, digital, and audio formats. Its Steeplechase Films documentary, directed by Ric Burns, Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America, can be streamed online on PBS for free via a link on its documentary page: http://www.dwbfilm.com/.

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Michael Gorra, "The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War" (Liveright, 2020)

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Michael Gorra about his new book The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (Liveright, 2020). This episode touches on two of William Faulkner’s novels in particular: The Sound and the Fury as well as Absalom, Absalom! It considers the role of memory and history, Faulkner’s alcoholism, the sexual exploitation practiced by plantation owners, and the greater presence of Nathan Bedford Forrest over Robert E. Lee in Faulkner’s fiction writings. Ties to today’s reckoning for racial justice is a part of the episode, too.

The author of Portrait of a Novel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Michael Gorra is a Professor English Language and Literature at Smith College and the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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Jason Berry, "City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300" (UNC Press, 2018)

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Jason Berry delivers a history of New Orleans at its tricentennial. Beyond its ancient streets, jazz, and Carnival lies a richer, more textured New Orleans than anyone imagined. Berry spotlights the tension between a culture of spectacle, rooted in African burial dances, and a city of laws anchored in white supremacy. Discussing how culture and law grind against each other, the narrative is a parade of New Orleanians faced with these tensions.

Learn more about the forthcoming documentary City of a Million Dreams here.

Jason Berry is an independent writer, documentary film producer, and journalist living in New Orleans.

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Chris Hamby, "Soul Full of Coal Dust: The True Story of an Epic Battle for Justice" (Little Brown, 2020)

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Today I talked to Chris Hamby about his book Soul Full of Coal Dust: The True Story of an Epic Battle for Justice (Little Brown, 2020). Hamby looks into why there has been a surge in black-lung disease in West Virginia and elsewhere in recent years. Poor self-policing and rapacious business practices go a long way in explaining the upsurge. Add in a tradition of fatalism caused by King Coal, and it becomes a minor miracle –but a miracle all the same—that some miners have been able to secure a measure of justice.

Chris Hamby is an investigative reporter for the New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism in 2014 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting in 2017.

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Elizabeth Catte, "Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia" (Belt, 2021)

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia (Belt, 2021), a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States. Virginia's twentieth-century eugenics program was not the misguided initiative of well-meaning men of the day, writes Catte, with clarity and ferocity. It was a manifestation of white supremacy. It was a form of employment insurance. It was a means of controlling "troublesome" women and a philosophy that helped remove poor people from valuable land. It was cruel and it was wrong, and yet today sites where it was practiced like Western State Hospital, in Staunton, VA, are rehabilitated as luxury housing, their histories hushed up in the service of capital. As was amply evidenced by her acclaimed 2018 book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Catte has no room for excuses; no patience for equivocation. What does it mean for modern America, she asks here, that such buildings are given the second chance that 8,000 citizens never got? And what possible interventions can be made now, repair their damage?

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Queer Voices of the South: Year in Review

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In this final episode of 2020, New Books Network hosts and fellow authors take a look back at the evolution of their podcast Queer Voices of the South, recount their conversations with authors during the first six episodes, offer listeners a taste of what to expect in 2021, answer listener questions, and share their resolutions for a new year.

About the Co-Hosts: Each of the books by the three co-hosts was published by the University Press of Mississippi.

John Marszalek is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University and the author of COMING OUT of the MAGNOLIA CLOSET - SAME SEX COUPLES in MISSISSIPPI. https://johnmarszalek3.com/ Twitter: @marsjf3.
Pip Gordon is Associate Professor of English, and Gay Studies Coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, and the author of GAY FAULKNER - UNCOVERING a HOMOSEXUAL PRESENCE in YOKNAPATAWPHA and BEYOND. Follow him on Instagram: gayfaulknerthebook and his blog: http://gayfaulknerthebook.blogspot.com.
Morris Ardoin is author of STONE MOTEL – MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY. A communications practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin.

Happy New Year, everyone!

The Queer Voices of the South (QVOTS) podcast is part of the New Books Network. We interview the writers, editors, and publishers of recent books in the Nonfiction LGBT+ genre who cover the Southern U.S. LGBT+ experience within their work. To inquire about appearing on the podcast, email: queervoicesofthesouth@gmail.com. Find us on Facebook and Twitter: @voices_south.

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Ashon T. Crawley, "The Lonely Letters" (Duke UP, 2020)

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In The Lonely Letters (Duke UP, 2020), A tells Moth: “Writing about and thinking with joy is what sustains me, daily. It nourishes me. I do not write about joy primarily because I always have it. I write about joy, Black joy, because I want to generate it, I want it to emerge, I want to participate in its constant unfolding.” But alongside joy, A admits to Moth, come loneliness, exclusion, and unfulfilled desire. The Lonely Letters is an epistolary blackqueer critique of the normative world in which Ashon T. Crawley—writing as A—meditates on the interrelation of blackqueer life, sounds of the Black church, theology, mysticism, and love. Throughout his letters, A explores blackness and queerness in the musical and embodied experience of Blackpentecostal spaces and the potential for platonic and erotic connection in a world that conspires against blackqueer life. Both a rigorous study and a performance, The Lonely Letters gestures toward understanding the capacity for what we study to work on us, to transform us, and to change how we inhabit the world.

Ashon T. Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia and author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility.

John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Carl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962" (U Virginia Press, 2020)

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

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Pip Gordon, "Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond" (UP Mississippi, 2019)

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

The life and works of William Faulkner have generated numerous biographical studies exploring how Faulkner understood southern history, race, his relationship to art, and his place in the canons of American and world literature. However, some details on Faulkner’s life collected by his early biographers never made it into published form or, when they did, appeared in marginalized stories and cryptic references. The biographical record of William Faulkner’s life has yet to come to terms with the life-long friendships he maintained with gay men, the extent to which he immersed himself into gay communities in Greenwich Village and New Orleans, and how profoundly this part of his life influenced his “apocryphal” creation of Yoknapatawpha County.

Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (U Mississippi Press, 2019) explores the intimate friendships Faulkner maintained with gay men, among them Ben Wasson, William Spratling, and Hubert Creekmore, and places his fiction into established canons of LGBTQ literature, including World War I literature and representations of homosexuality from the Cold War. The book offers a full consideration of his relationship to gay history and identity in the twentieth century, giving rise to a new understanding of this most important of American authors.

Phillip "Pip" Gordon was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in nearby Jackson. A proud West Tennessean, he holds degrees from the University of Tennessee-Martin (BA, 2005) and the University of Mississippi (MA, 2008; PhD, 2013). He currently lives and works in Platteville, Wisconsin, where he teaches American Literature, Film, and Gay and Lesbian Studies. He lives with his dog, Scout.

Morris Ardoin is the author of Stone Motel: Memoirs of a Cajun Boy, (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He writes the blog “Parenthetically Speaking,” focusing on food from Louisiana and life as a Cajun New Yorker. Website: morrisardoin.com

Twitter: @morrisardoin

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John Garrison Marks, "Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas" (U of South Carolina Press, 2020)

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 10:00:00 -0000

Prior to the abolition of slavery, thousands of African-descended people in the Americas lived in freedom. Their efforts to navigate daily life and negotiate the boundaries of racial difference challenged the foundations of white authority—and linked the Americas together.

In Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas (U of South Carolina Press, 2020), John Garrison Marks examines how these individuals built lives in freedom for themselves and their families in two of the Atlantic World's most important urban centers: Cartagena, along the Caribbean coast of modern-day Colombia, and Charleston, in the low country of North America's Atlantic coast. Marks reveals how skills, knowledge, reputation, and personal relationships helped free people of color improve their fortunes and achieve social distinction in ways that undermined whites' claims to racial superiority.

Built upon research conducted on three continents, this book takes a comparative approach to understanding the contours of black freedom in the Americas. It reveals in new detail the creative and persistent attempts of free black people to improve their lives and that of their families. It examines how various paths to freedom, responses to the Haitian Revolution, opportunities to engage in skilled labor, involvement with social institutions, and the role of the church all helped shape the lived experience of free people of color in the Atlantic World.

As free people of color worked to improve their individual circumstances, staking claims to rights, privileges, and distinctions not typically afforded to those of African descent, they engaged with white elites and state authorities in ways that challenged prevailing racial attitudes. While whites across the Americas shared common doubts about the ability of African-descended people to survive in freedom or contribute meaningfully to society, free black people in Cartagena, Charleston, and beyond conducted themselves in ways that exposed cracks in the foundations of American racial hierarchies. Their actions represented early contributions to the long fight for recognition, civil rights, and racial justice that continues today.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Connor Towne O’Neill, "Down Along with That Devil’s Bones" (Algonquin Books, 2020)

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In Down Along with That Devil’s Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy (Algonquin Books, 2020), journalist Connor Towne O’Neill takes a deep dive into American history, exposing the still-raging battles over monuments dedicated to one of the most notorious Confederate generals, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Through the lens of these conflicts, O’Neill examines the legacy of white supremacy in America, in a sobering and fascinating work sure to resonate with readers of Tony Horwitz, Timothy B. Tyson, and Robin DiAngelo.

When O’Neill first moved to Alabama, as a white Northerner, he felt somewhat removed from the racism Confederate monuments represented. Then one day in Selma, he stumbled across a group of citizens protecting a monument to Forrest, the officer who became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and whom William Tecumseh Sherman referred to as “that devil.” O’Neill sets off to visit other disputed memorials to Forrest across the South, talking with men and women who believe they are protecting their heritage, and those who have a different view of the man’s poisonous history.

O’Neill’s reporting and thoughtful, deeply personal analysis make it clear that white supremacy is not a regional affliction but is in fact coded into the DNA of the entire country. Down Along with That Devil’s Bones presents an important and eye-opening account of how we got from Appomattox to Charlottesville, and where, if we can truly understand and transcend our past, we could be headed next.

Connor Towne O’Neill’s writing has appeared in New York magazine, Vulture, Slate, RBMA, and the Village Voice, and he works as a producer on the NPR podcast White Lies, which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting. Originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at Auburn University and with the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project. This is his first book.

Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature.

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Robert Fieseler, "Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation" (Liveright, 2018)

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

An essential work of American civil rights history, Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation (Liveright, 2018) mesmerizingly reconstructs the 1973 fire that devastated New Orleans’ subterranean gay community. Buried for decades, the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy has only recently emerged as a catalyzing event of the gay liberation movement. In revelatory detail, Robert W. Fieseler chronicles the tragic event that claimed the lives of thirty-one men and one woman on June 24, 1973, at a New Orleans bar, the largest mass murder of gays until 2016. Relying on unprecedented access to survivors and archives, Fieseler creates an indelible portrait of a closeted, blue- collar gay world that flourished before an arsonist ignited an inferno that destroyed an entire community. The aftermath was no less traumatic—families ashamed to claim loved ones, the Catholic Church refusing proper burial rights, the city impervious to the survivors’ needs—revealing a world of toxic prejudice that thrived well past Stonewall. Yet the impassioned activism that followed proved essential to the emergence of a fledgling gay movement. Tinderbox restores honor to a forgotten generation of civil-rights martyrs.

Robert W. Fieseler is the 2019 National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association "Journalist of the Year" and the acclaimed debut author of Tinderbox-- winner of the Edgar Award and the Louisiana Literary Award, shortlisted for the Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Queer literary icon Andrew Holleran reviewed Tinderbox as "far more than just a history of gay rights," and Michael Cunningham praised it as "essential reading at any time." Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School and is a recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. Born and raised in Chicago, Fieseler now lives with his husband and dog in New Orleans.

Morris Ardoin is the author of Stone Motel - Memoirs of a Cajun Boy, published in April 2020 by the University Press of Mississippi. His blog, "Parenthetically Speaking," about the food and culture of Louisiana and his life as a New Yorker, can be found at morrisardoin.com.

John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Website: Johnmarszalek3.com Twitter: @marsjf3

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Karlos K. Hill, "The Murder of Emmett Till: A Graphic History" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The image of Emmett Till’s open coffin, revealing the 14-year old’s horrifically disfigured face, is one of the most heart-wrenching images of the Civil Rights Era. The Chicago teenager was murdered while visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1955. Enraged white men kidnapped, tortured, and killed him for having dared to have whistled at a white woman. In an equally horrific miscarriage of justice, only two men stood trial and the all-white jury quickly found them not guilty. The photograph of Emmett Till served to mobilize a campaign against the violence of the late Jim Crow South. Professor Karlos K. Hill’s The Murder of Emmett Till: A Graphic History (Oxford UP, 2020) tells the story of this crime, placing it in the context of both the African American experience and the practice of white supremacy. As part of Oxford University Press’ acclaimed Graphic History Series, Hill’s book is a comic rendering of Emmett Till’s death and the frustrating struggle for justice. The book captures Emmett Till’s humanity in the face of inhumane evil.

Dr. Karlos K. Hill is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of African and African-American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 and has taught at St. Olaf College, Luther College, and Texas A&M. Professor Hill specializes in the history of anti-Black violence and its legacies. In addition to scores of articles, he is the author of Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory, out in 2016 with Cambridge University Press. He is also the author of a forthcoming book The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History, out next year with the University of Oklahoma Press.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Morris Ardoin, "Stone Motel: Memoirs of a Cajun Boy" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to find creative ways to stay cool and out of trouble. When they were not doing their chores—handling a colorful cast of customers, scrubbing motel-room toilets, plucking chicken bones and used condoms from under the beds—they played canasta, an old ladies’ game that provided them with a refuge from the sun and helped them avoid their violent, troubled father.

Morris was successful at occupying his time with his siblings and the children of families staying in the motel’s kitchenette apartments but was not so successful at keeping clear of his father, a man unable to shake the horrors he had experienced as a child and, later, as a soldier. The preteen would learn as he matured that his father had reserved his most ferocious attacks for him because of an inability to accept a gay or, to his mind, broken, son. It became his dad’s mission to “fix” his son, and Morris’s mission to resist—and survive intact. He was aided in his struggle immeasurably by the love and encouragement of a selfless and generous grandmother, who provides his story with much of its warmth, wisdom, and humor. In Stone Motel: Memoirs of a Cajun Boy (UP of Mississippi, 2020), the reader will also find suspense, awkward romance, naughty French lessons, and an insider’s take on a truly remarkable, not-yet-homogenized pocket of American culture.

Morris Ardoin earned a bachelor’s in journalism from Louisiana State University and a master’s in communication from the University of Louisiana. A public relations practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com.

John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Twitter: @marsjf3

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Denise E. Bates, "Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884-1984" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Before the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana became one of the state’s top private employers—with its vast landholdings and economic enterprises—they lived well below the poverty line and lacked any clear legal status.

After settling in the Bayou Blue in 1884, they forged friendships with their neighbors, sparked local tourism, and struck strategic alliances with civic and business leaders, aid groups, legislators, and other tribes. Coushattas also engaged the public with stories about the tribe’s culture, history, and economic interests that intersected with the larger community, all while battling legal marginalization exacerbated by inconsistent government reports regarding their citizenship, treaty status, and eligibility for federal Indian services.

Well into the twentieth century, the tribe had to overcome several major hurdles, including lobbying the Louisiana legislature to pass the state’s first tribal recognition resolution (1972), convincing the Department of the Interior to formally acknowledge the Coushatta Tribe through administrative channels (1973), and engaging in an effort to acquire land and build infrastructure.

Basket Diplomacy: Leadership, Alliance-Building, and Resilience among the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, 1884-1984 (University of Nebraska Press) demonstrates how the Coushatta community worked together—each generation laying a foundation for the next—and how they leveraged opportunities so that existing and newly acquired knowledge, timing, and skill worked in tandem.

Denise E. Bates is a historian and an assistant professor of leadership and interdisciplinary studies at Arizona State University.

David Dry is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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B. Heersink and J. A. Jenkins, "Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Prior to the 1960s, Democrats were seen as having a lock on the South in national and local electoral politics, while Republicans had strengths in other parts of the country. While this was the case for some time, Boris Heersink and Jeffrey A. Jenkins, in their new book,Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), look a bit more deeply into the role of the Republican Party in the Southern states following the Civil War, and they find some interesting dynamics at play across the next hundred years. Heersink and Jenkins argue that the overly simplified view of the “solid Democratic South” creates an incomplete narrative. Outlining the role of the Republican Party in the former states of the Confederacy, they explain how Southern Republicans had meaningful roles in selecting Republican presidential candidates even if few of those candidates carried any electoral college votes from Southern states.

Heersink and Jenkins describe how Southern Republicans, despite their unpopularity in the South, remained nationally important through their regular participation at the Republican national conventions. They explain that Southern delegates made up a sizable portion of the conventions, and candidates often vied for support from these delegates. Southern delegates were so valuable that candidates often turned to corrupt practices, including bribery, to win over these delegates. As a result, many GOP delegates were able to leverage their support for candidates for patronage appointments back home, even if they couldn’t produce broad-based state support for Republican presidential candidates. Heersink and Jenkins created a complex data set that came from census records, delegate rosters, local newspaper articles from the time, and information about patronage appointments. This is a fascinating multi-methods analysis, and they are continuing to expand the analysis to look more closely at these questions of patronage appointments.

Additionally, Heersink and Jenkins discuss electoral strategies of the Republican Party over the century that followed the Civil War. They recount the different ways that the GOP, in different states, approached party building and political engagement. This dimension of the research and the book is particularly rich since it dives into how the parties operated at the state level and how the approach of those operations also changed and shifted over time. As Reconstruction ended and as Southern states began to institute laws and regulations that would come to form the Jim Crow era, the various state-level Republican parties (and Democratic Parties) pursued support among voters, especially white voters as Black voters were pushed out of active political participation in the South. This hundred-year span is both nuanced and complex, and Heersink and Jenkins guide the reader through the evolution of the Republican Party, how this paved the way for Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy and partisan realignment of the South in the latter part of the 20th century.

Adam Liebell-McLean assisted with this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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John F. Marszalek III, "Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi" (U Mississippi Press, 2020)

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (University of Mississippi Press, 2020), John F. Marszalek III shares conversations with same-sex couples living in small-town and rural Mississippi. In the first book of its kind to focus on Mississippi, couples tell their stories of how they met and fell in love, their decisions on whether or not to marry, and their experiences as sexual minorities with their neighbors, families, and churches. Their stories illuminate a complicated relationship between many same-sex couples and their communities, influenced by southern culture, religion, and family norms.

As Marszalek guides readers into the homes of diverse same-sex couples, he weaves in his own story of meeting his husband and living as a married gay man in Mississippi. Both the couples and he explain why they remain in one of the most conservative states in the country rather than moving to a place with a large, vibrant gay community.

In addition to sharing his own experiences, Marszalek reviews the literature on the topic, including writings from southern and rural queer studies, history, sociology, and psychology, to explain how the couples’ relationships and experiences compare to those of same-sex couples in other areas and times. Consequently, Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet is written for both the scholar of southern and queer studies and for anyone interested in learning about the experiences of same-sex couples.

John F. Marszalek III is clinical faculty of the online clinical mental health counseling program at Southern New Hampshire University. He is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi, published by University Press of Mississippi. He lives in Mississippi with his husband and their two dogs.

Chris Babits is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Utah State University. In addition to teaching, he’s feverishly writing his book, To Cure a Sinful Nation: A History of Conversion Therapy in the United States (University of Chicago Press).

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Colin Woodard, "Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood" (Viking, 2020)

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Colin Woodard's new book Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood (Viking, 2020) tells the story of the struggle to create a national myth for the United States, one that could hold its rival regional cultures together and forge, for the first time, an American nationhood. It tells the dramatic tale of how the story of our national origins, identity, and purpose was intentionally created and fought over in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On one hand, a small group of individuals--historians, political leaders, and novelists--fashioned and promoted a history that attempted to transcend and erase the fundamental differences and profound tensions between the nation's regional cultures. America had a God-given mission to lead humanity toward freedom, equality, and self-government and was held together by fealty to these ideals.

This emerging nationalist story was immediately and powerfully contested by another set of intellectuals and firebrands who argued that the United States was instead an ethno-state, the homeland of the allegedly superior "Anglo-Saxon" race, upon whom Divine and Darwinian favor shined. Their vision helped create a new federation--the Confederacy--prompting the bloody Civil War. While defeated on the battlefield, their vision later managed to win the war of ideas, capturing the White House in the early twentieth century, and achieving the first consensus, pan-regional vision of U.S. nationhood in the years before the outbreak of the first World War. This narrower, more exclusive vision of America would be overthrown in mid-century, but it was never fully vanquished. Woodard tells the story of the genesis and epic confrontations between these visions of our nation's path and purpose through the lives of the key figures who created them, a cast of characters whose personal quirks and virtues, gifts and demons shaped the destiny of millions.

Colin Woodard is a New York Times bestseller writer-historian, and journalist who has reported from more than fifty foreign countries and six continents. A longtime foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and The San Francisco Chronicle, he is a reporter at the Portland Press Herald, where he received a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and Politico. He is the author of American Nations, American Character, The Lobster Coast, The Republic of Pirates, and Ocean’s End.

Diana DePasquale is an Associate Teaching Professor at Bowling Green State University. She teaches courses on race, gender, sexuality, and American culture. Diana has been published in Studies in American Humor, and online at In Media Res. She is also a proud winner of The Moth Story Slam in Detroit.

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Aaron Carico, "Black Market: The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865" (UNC Press, 2020)

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

On the eve of the Civil War, the estimated value of the U.S. enslaved population exceeded $3 billion--triple that of investments nationwide in factories, railroads, and banks combined, and worth more even than the South's lucrative farmland. Not only an object to be traded and used, the slave was also a kind of currency, a form of value that anchored the market itself. And this value was not destroyed in the war. Slavery still structured social relations and cultural production in the United States more than a century after it was formally abolished.

As Aaron Carico reveals in Black Market: The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865 (UNC Press, 2020), slavery's engine of capital accumulation was preserved and transformed, and the slave commodity survived emancipation. Through both archival research and lucid readings of literature, art, and law, from the plight of the Fourteenth Amendment to the myth of the cowboy, Carico breaks open the icons of liberalism to expose the shaping influence of slavery's political economy in America after 1865. Ultimately, Black Market shows how a radically incomplete and fundamentally failed abolition enabled the emergence of a modern nation-state, in which slavery still determined--and now goes on to determine--economic, political, and cultural life.

Aaron Carico received his PhD in American Studies from Yale University.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Jennifer Atkins, "New Orleans Carnival Balls: The Secret Side of Mardi Gras, 1870-1920" (LSU Press, 2017)

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In New Orleans Carnival Balls: The Secret Side of Mardi Gras, 1870-1920 (LSU Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Atkins draws back the curtain on the origin of the exclusive Mardi Gras balls, bringing to light unique traditions unseen by outsiders.

The oldest Carnival organizations emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and ruled Mardi Gras from the Civil War until World War I. For these organizations, Carnival balls became magical realms where krewesmen reinforced their elite identity through sculpted tableaux vivants performances, mock coronations, and romantic ballroom dancing.

They used costume and movement to reaffirm their group identity, and the crux of these performances relied on a specific mode of expression—dancing. Using the concept of dance as a lens for examining Carnival balls, Atkins delves deeper into the historical context and distinctive rituals of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Jennifer Atkins is graduate program director at Florida State University’s School of Dance.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

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J. Browning and T. Silver, "An Environmental History of the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2020)

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

This sweeping new history recognizes that the Civil War was not just a military conflict but also a moment of profound transformation in Americans' relationship to the natural world.

To be sure, environmental factors such as topography and weather powerfully shaped the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and the war could not have been fought without the horses, cattle, and other animals that were essential to both armies. But in An Environmental History of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver weave a far richer story, combining military and environmental history to forge a comprehensive new narrative of the war's significance and impact.

As they reveal, the conflict created a new disease environment by fostering the spread of microbes among vulnerable soldiers, civilians, and animals; led to large-scale modifications of the landscape across several states; sparked new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world; and demanded a reckoning with disability and death on an ecological scale.

And as the guns fell silent, the change continued; Browning and Silver show how the war influenced the future of weather forecasting, veterinary medicine, the birth of the conservation movement, and the establishment of the first national parks.

In considering human efforts to find military and political advantage by reshaping the natural world, Browning and Silver show not only that the environment influenced the Civil War's outcome but also that the war was a watershed event in the history of the environment itself.

Judkin Browning is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Appalachian State University and has written two military histories of the Civil War: Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina (2011) and The Seven Days’ Battle: The War Begins Anew (2012).

Timothy Silver is Professor of History at Appalachian State University and the author of Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America and A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800, a foundational work in the field of environmental history.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Alex Sayf Cummings, "Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy" (Columbia UP, 2020)

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Beginning in the 1950s, a group of academics, businesspeople, and politicians set out on an ambitious project to remake North Carolina’s low-wage economy. They pitched the universities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill as the kernel of a tech hub, Research Triangle Park, which would lure a new class of highly educated workers. In the process, they created a blueprint for what would become known as the knowledge economy: a future built on intellectual labor and the production of intellectual property.

In Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy (Columbia UP, 2020), Alex Sayf Cummings reveals the significance of Research Triangle Park to the emergence of the high-tech economy in a postindustrial United States. She analyzes the use of ideas of culture and creativity to fuel economic development, how workers experienced life in the Triangle, and the role of the federal government in bringing the modern technology industry into being. As Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill were transformed by high-tech development, the old South gave way to a distinctly new one, which welded the intellectual power of universities to a vision of the suburban good life. Cummings pinpoints how the story of the Research Triangle sheds new light on the origins of today’s urban landscape, in which innovation, as exemplified by the tech industry, is lauded as the engine of economic growth against a backdrop of gentrification and inequality. Placing the knowledge economy in a broader cultural and intellectual context, Brain Magnet offers vital insight int

Dr. Alex Sayf Cummings is a historian of law, technology, and American political culture at Georgia State University. She earned a BA in History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and her PhD in History from Columbia University.

Chris Babits is an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He researches the intersecting histories of medicine, religion, and gender and sexuality and is currently working on his book about the history of conversion therapy in the United States.

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Anne Lindsay, "Reconsidering Interpretation of Heritage Sites: America in the Eighteenth Century" (Routledge, 2020)

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

2020 had been an intense year for Americans reflecting on their nation’s history. From attacks on statues to public debates about the 1619 Project to the release of Hamilton on a streaming service, Americans have been taking a hard look at how the history of the founding of the United States is memorialized.

Anne Lindsay’s Reconsidering Interpretation of Heritage Sites: America in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2020) explores a number of tourist attractions that play a crucial role in teaching Americans about their past. This thoughtful and critical book notes the ways in which enslaved Blacks, women, Native Americans, and working people are often neglected by plantation tours, historic houses, and other popular cultural attractions such as Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Colonial Williamsburg. She argues that in addition to including these silenced voices, such sites should also engage environmental history and colonial America’s global context. Based on a decade of research and field work, Anne Lindsay challenges these heritage sites to do a better job at integrating current historiography into their interpretations. While grounded in the coastal settlements of the East Coast of the United States of America, her arguments have relevance to larger conversations about history and memory, transcending her geographic and temporal area of expertise.

Dr. Anne Lindsay is an Associate Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento. She earned her Ph.D. in Public History at the University of California, Riverside, and taught at the University of Central Florida before returning to California. She runs Sac State’s Capital Public History Program. In addition to being a scholar, she is a public history practitioner, focusing on historic preservation and heritage tourism.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford, 2018). When he’s not quietly reading or happily talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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Lesly-Marie Buer, "RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky" (Haymarket, 2020)

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by documenting how women, families, and communities cope with generational systems of oppression. Prescription opioids are associated with rising rates of overdose deaths and hepatitis C and HIV infection in the US, including in rural Central Appalachia. Yet there is a dearth of studies examining rural opioid use.

RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky (Haymarket, 2020) explores the gendered inequalities that situate women’s encounters with substance abuse treatment as well as additional state interventions targeted at women who use drugs in one of the most impoverished regions in the US.

Lesly-Marie Buer is a harm reductionist and medical anthropologist in Knoxville, TN.

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Ann Tucker, "Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy" (UVA Press, 2020)

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

From the earliest stirrings of southern nationalism to the defeat of the Confederacy, analysis of European nationalist movements played a critical role in how southerners thought about their new southern nation. Southerners argued that because the Confederate nation was cast in the same mold as its European counterparts, it deserved independence. In Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy (UVA Press, 2020), Ann Tucker utilizes print sources such as newspapers and magazines to reveal how elite white southerners developed an international perspective on nationhood that helped them clarify their own national values, conceive of the South as distinct from the North, and ultimately define and legitimize the Confederacy.

While popular at home, claims to equivalency with European nations failed to resonate with Europeans and northerners, who viewed slavery as incompatible with liberal nationalism. Forced to reevaluate their claims about the international place of southern nationalism, some southerners redoubled their attempts to place the Confederacy within the broader trends of nineteenth-century nationalism. More conservative southerners took a different tack, emphasizing the distinctiveness of their nationalism, claiming that the Confederacy actually purified nationalism through slavery. Southern Unionists likewise internationalized their case for national unity. By examining the evolution of and variation within these international perspectives, Tucker reveals the making of a southern nationhood to be a complex, contested process.

Dr. Ann Tucker is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Georgia. Her research focuses on the U.S. South from an international perspective.

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Emily Wallace, "Road Sides: An Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American South" (U Texas Press, 2019)

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Emily Wallace, author and illustrator of the new book Road Sides: An Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American South (University of Texas Press, 2019).

Road Sides pays homage to popular travel guides with its short chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet containing a brief contextualizing essay followed by a feature of a specific location, business, or product. “A” is for Architecture, a tribute to buildings in the shape of foods one might find on the highway; “B” is for Billboards, their ubiquity and creativity and sometimes, as in the case of the “South of the Border” billboards, racial insensitivity.

Road Sides is clearly aimed at a general audience of readers with its journalistic style of participant observation and whimsical illustrations, but Wallace makes use of her folklore training and scholarly connections in both the historical contextualizing of automobile culture and the critical lens with which she points out the good, the bad, and the ugly of Southern history and practice.

While Road Sides is certainly a celebration of Southern foodways, it is not without criticism. A thread runs throughout the book that there is not a single story of Southern road travel. Wallace is careful to remind readers that before the civil rights era, there are two very distinct experiences for black and white Southerners, and after the ostensible end of racial segregation in public spaces, a third story emerges that changes the experience for all travelers.

Wallace addresses these disparate narratives most directly in “D” for Directions, focusing on the Negro Motorist Green-Book that ran counter to the Official Automobile Blue Book for white travelers, and in V for Vacancy, about the black-owned hotels that catered to black travelers.

Similarly, in a chapter about the crossroads general store, Wallace reminds readers that Emmett Till was murdered after an encounter with white people in such a store. What emerges from this wide-ranging investigation is an story of innovation, both technological and entrepreneurial, about the creative minds who came up with a new product or process or marketing strategy to adapt to a world that is changed irrevocably by car travel.

Emily Wallace is a writer and illustrator with a masters in folklore who serves as art director & deputy editor of Southern Cultures Quarterly at UNC-Chapel Hill, and has written and illustrated work for other publications including The Washington Post, Southern Living, The Oxford American, and GOOD. In 2015, Wallace was nominated for a James Beard Award in humor writing.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

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Jerry Gershenhorn, "Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle" (UNC Press, 2018)

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

James West speaks with Jerry Gershenhorn, Julius L. Chambers Professor of History at North Carolina Central University, about Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), ahead of the book's paperback release.

Gershenhorn's award-winning study recovers the life and activism of Louis Austin and the influence of his newspaper, the Carolina Times, the preeminent Black newspaper in the state. Spanning much of the twentieth century, this absorbing account explores the long Black freedom struggle in North Carolina from a fresh vantage point, shedding new light on the role of the Black press in the twentieth century.

James West is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in American History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He is the author of Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (Illinois, 2020)

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Nicole Myers Turner, "Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia" (UNC Press, 2020)

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In her nuanced case study of postemanciaption Virginia, Nicole Myers Turner, (Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University) challenges assumptions regarding the intersection between black religion and politics in this “signal moment of political and cultural transformation in the African-American experience.” Using traditional archival records from churches, political institutions and personal documents -- as well as ArcGIS to create layered maps of black religious and political participation -- Turner interrogates the integral role black churches played in postbellum Virginia politics. Black political engagement is an understudied facet of the postemancipation period but Turner explores developing relationships between two realms of life and how politics were shaped by the racial positioning of the denominations and of black people within those denominations.

In her new book Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia (UNC Press, 2020), Turner argues that the relationship between black religious institutions and political institutions drastically shifted as the Reconstruction amendments established rights for black citizens. That shift, and the myriad challenges black citizens encountered in their newfound citizenship, necessitated that they pursue a means for education and political power. Soul Liberty focuses on the political involvement and bargaining through which black communities achieved these goals. The term “soul liberty” captures the “combination of religious freedom, righteousness, equity and justice” that fueled remarkable institution building in the period. For example, she highlights the interracial coalitions forged with the Republican and Readjuster parties and political magnates, such as William Mahone: one of the first white politicians to recognize the political power of black churches. Turner trenchantly investigates how women in the church were pushed away from ministerial positions, and thus, often ignored as religious and political leaders. She identifies several aspects of churches and their political connections in which women demonstrated agency, such as voting on ministerial positions and tenure, leading discussions, and fundraising. She also diagnoses theological education and its male focus as the main reason that women were held out of leadership positions in the ministry. She provides a nuanced account of the election of John Mercer Langston, the first African-American congressman elected in 1890.

Soul Liberty uses the powerful tools of archival research and GIS to illustrate the transformation of black churches, explicitly and implicitly, into centers of political organization. It is currently available in three forms: print book, verbatim open access e-book, and enhanced open-access e-book, which allows the reader to manipulate some of the layered maps that Turner created with her research. A website based on her research is available at mappingblackreligion.com.

Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013) and, most recently, “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” in the Journal of Politics (August 2020).

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Nicole Maurantonio, "Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century" (UP of Kansas, 2019)

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In a time of contentious debate over Confederate monuments, Nicole Maurantonio (Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication studies and American Studies at the University of Richmond) provides an intriguing look into how revisionist ideas of the Confederacy have seeped into mainstream culture. Based in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, she is well-positioned to comment on the neo-Confederate groups in the South and around the country. Their goal, she recognizes, is to separate the legacy of slavery and racism that is so deeply intertwined with Confederate symbols and isolate an idyllic portrayal of “the South.” These groups proudly wave Confederate battle flags, put up monuments to Confederate generals, and even sell Confederate cookbooks. Together, these attempts to embrace and revise the history of the Confederacy create Confederate Exceptionalism.

Maurantonio’s interdisciplinary book treats the state of Virginia as a confederate museum to be analyzed. The book combines carefully selected language and wide-ranging case studies of Confederate Exceptionalism including the infamous Monument Avenue in Richmond, songs and anthems, cookbooks, the exhibit of Stonewall Jackson’s stuffed horse, the myth of Black confederate soldiers, and the manipulation of social media to trivialize counter-protesters in the #Tarpwars after Charlottesville. The podcast allows Maurantonio to connect the thesis to protesters toppling the statue of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy on Monument Row in June 2020 -- and offer a fascinating analysis of the decision not to clean graffiti and how this empowers members of the community to use the monuments to oppose white supremacy,

Maurantonio defines Confederate Exceptionalism as a mix of Lost Cause ideology and American Exceptionalism, two ideas with deep roots in the South and the broader United States. The former constitutes the attempts of Southerners to twist the narrative of the Civil War, painting the Confederates as noble heroes, fighting for the protection of states’ rights and their way of life. This line of thinking also blames the North and abolitionists for sectional tensions before the war, and perhaps most dangerously, perpetuates the “loyal slave” cliché, representing enslaved people as willing participants in their own bondage. American exceptionalism, present at the founding of the United States, presents the United States as superior to any other nation or civilization. Gaining steam as the U.S. became a global superpower in the early 20th century, the concept ignores the negative aspects of the nation, pointing to liberalism, diversity, and freedom, as well as military might, to illustrate greatness. When the two concepts are merged by neo-Confederate groups, the amalgamation of Southern superiority and rewritten history undergird Confederate Exceptionalism.

Confederate Exceptionalism: Civil War Myth and Memory in the Twenty-First Century (University Press of Kansas, 2019) explores the impacts and motivations of its namesake through conversations with neo-Confederates and investigations into the institutions that allow Confederate exceptionalism to exist and prosper in a world where its roots are so widely denounced.

Benjamin Warren assisted with this podcast.

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Michael Goldfield, "The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The golden key to understanding the last 75 years of American political development, the eminent labor relations scholar Michael Goldfield argues, lies in the contests between labor and capital in the American South during the 1930s and 1940s. Labor agitation and unionization efforts in the South in the New Deal era were extensive and bitterly fought, and ranged across all of the major industries of the region.

In The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford UP, 2020), Goldfield charts the rise of labor activism in each and then examines how and why labor organizers struggled so mightily in the region. Drawing from meticulous and unprecedented archival material and detailed data on four core industries-textiles, timber, coal mining, and steel-he argues that much of what is important in American politics and society today was largely shaped by the successes and failures of the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s. Most notably, Goldfield shows how the broad-based failure to organize the South during this period made it what it is today. He contends that this early defeat for labor unions not only contributed to the exploitation of race and right-wing demagoguery in the South, but has also led to a decline in unionization, growing economic inequality, and an inability to confront and dismantle white supremacy throughout the US.

A sweeping account of Southern political economy in the New Deal era, The Southern Key challenges the established historiography to tell a tale of race, radicalism, and betrayal that will reshape our understanding of why America developed so differently from other advanced industrial nations over the course of the last century.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute’s Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Howard Philips Smith, "Southern Decadence in New Orleans" (LSU Press, 2018)

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Almost a year ago, on my second interview for this podcast, I talked to Howard Philips Smith about Unveiling the Muse: The Lost History of Gay Carnival in New Orleans. I invited him back to tell us about his follow up book: Southern Decadence in New Orleans. Co-written with Frank Perez (the president of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana) and published by the Louisiana State University Press in 2018, Southern Decadence in New Orleans provides the first comprehensive historical look at another important event in the Crescent City’s LGBTQ+ calendar.

Commonly referred to as “Gay Mardi Gras,” the Southern Decadence festival began in 1972 as a spontaneous end-of-the-summer celebration of a group of friends who felt like outcasts because of their political views, sexual orientation, and/or racial identity. Over the last four decades, it has transformed into a gay extravaganza lasting almost a full week and culminating on a grand parade on the Sunday before Labor Day. It attracts hundreds of thousands of revellers from all over the world and is one of the city’s largest (and most lucrative) annual events. Smith and Frank combined interviews, participant observation, and archival materials to do document the trajectory of this fascinating phenomenon.

Dr Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Department of History of the University of Memphis. Her forthcoming book uses Carnival as a vehicle to understand social and cultural changes in Mobile, Alabama (USA) in the second half of the 20th century. Her new research project is an investigation of different generations of artists and performers who challenge gender normativity in Monterrey, Nuevo León (Mexico). She also works as an Assistant Producer for the Sexing History podcast.

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)

Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.

John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd.

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E. Engelhardt and L. Smith, "The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Table" (Ohio UP, 2019)

Mon, 25 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Elizabeth Engelhardt, co-editor of the new collection The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables (Ohio University Press, 2019), also edited by Lora Smith and published by Ohio University Press. We are also joined by Courtney Balestier who is a contributor to the collection.

Though the collection is diverse in genre – including academic essays alongside poetry, memoir, and illustration – the contents are united around challenging and complicating a notion of a single Appalachia. The editors and many of the contributors are connected to the Appalachian Food Summit, a symposium of foodways scholars, professionals, and enthusiasts who meet for dinners, dialogues, and annual conferences. Engelhardt describes the popular and scholarly attention to Appalachian stereotypes as “a dead end conversation” that the collection tries to avoid and undo by highlighting the creativity and diversity of the region, its people, and its food. As Engelhardt explains in the introduction, the collection’s eclectic mix of genres, topics, and contributors reflects the complexities of the contemporary region by generating cognitive dissonance through the structure of the book.

The collection features the voices of people living in and out of the region from a wide variety of experiences and ethnicities, Like many of the contributors in the collection, Balestier describes her own path toward Appalachian identity through living outside the region. Her essay on the “Hillbilly Highway” and the Kentucky social club of Detroit asks if perhaps a coherent Appalachian identity is most meaningful to people who have left the geographic region of the mountains. The topics of the essays run the gamut from the idealized and organic home-canned chow-chow to the mass produced and capitalized Banquet frozen fried chicken and factory-packed pickle spears. Many of the objects that come to represent Appalachia are a compromise, a negotiation between the local and the global: repurposed Cool Whip containers of leftovers, a mass-marketed cookbook with a life story inside, Blue Ridge tacos and kimchi in soup beans, a store-bought dinner that approximates home-made just closely enough to keep a family’s matriarch as the cultural heart of the family. Engelhardt explains in the interview that these stories are not intended to be a definitive representation of Appalachia; rather, she hopes they will be an invitation to a conversation about the relationships of people to place.

Elizabeth Engelhardt is John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies in the department of American studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. .

Lora Smith directs the Appalachian Impact Fund, a social impact investment fund focused on economic transition and opportunity in Eastern Kentucky.

Courtney Balestier is a writer whose work focuses on the intersection of place and identity, particularly in her native Appalachia.

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Carl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934" (UVA Press, 2020)

Mon, 04 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Peter La Chapelle, "I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Historians, musicologists, and sociologists have long studied the relationship between politics and music. Peter La Chapelle’s new book, I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music (University of Chicago Press, 2019) traces interactions between country music and politics beginning with two late nineteenth-century politicians who fiddled to their supporters and ending with the 2016 election season. He establishes some long-standing associations between celebrity candidates, populist insurgents, outsider politics and country music. La Chapelle also does not shy away from exposing the ways that racist and anti-Semitic political figures have used country music to support their beliefs. While today many people think of country music as a politically conservative genre, La Chapelle brings to light a more complex story of politicians across the spectrum looking to country music to support their beliefs, publicize their campaigns, and establish their authenticity with their constituents.

Peter La Chapelle is a professor of history at Nevada State College. A cultural historian, his research centers on the intersections between country music, politics, and national identity in the United States.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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Adam H. Domby, "The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory" (U Virginia Press, 2020)

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Adam H. Domby, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Charleston, has written a rigorous analysis of American political memory as it connects to the Civil War and long shadow of the Confederacy. The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020) unpacks a variety of threads all connected to the Lost Cause ideology, and all based on falsehoods. These dimensions of the ideology include Domby’s examination of the history of dishonest claims to confederate pensions by white veterans, and also the accusations of fraud associated with claims made by former slaves and free people of color for much smaller pensions.

The False Cause digs into the historical claims made about the heroics demonstrated on the battlefield during the Civil War. In this context, The False Cause unpacks the myth that the Confederate army was one of the best ever, and these heroic claims, many of which were made at least forty years after the war itself, are not the only heroic assertions made in context of the Lost Cause ideology. Domby also explores the “soldiers who weren’t” – the enslaved individuals who were compelled to accompany their masters to war, and were then transformed, within this constructed political memory, into Black Confederates, which is yet another myth within the ideology. The book begins with an extremely topical component of the Lost Cause ideology and political memory, the monuments to confederate soldiers that were built long after the war, and that have become contemporary political lightning rods. Through all of these cases, Domby weaves the thread of how each particular area was used to buttress white supremacy and to re-narrate or re-cast the Civil War itself and those who engaged in it. Issues of white masculinity and grievance are embedded within the mythology and are also unpacked in context of these heroic declarations. This is an important historical examination that leads the reader through the facts and the subsequently created mythologies, which continue to shape and impact American politics and historical understandings.

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Christopher Tomlins, "In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History" (Princeton UP, 2020)

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In 1831, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed.

Christopher Tomlins' new book In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History (Princeton University Press, 2020) penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel, telling of his self-discovery and the dawning of his Christian faith, of an impossible task given to him by God, and of redemptive violence and profane retribution.

Much about Turner remains unknown. His extraordinary account of his life and rebellion, given in chains as he awaited trial in jail, was written down by an opportunistic white attorney and sold as a pamphlet to cash in on Turner’s notoriety. But the enigmatic rebel leader had an immediate and broad impact on the American South, and his rebellion remains one of the most momentous episodes in American history. Tomlins provides a luminous account of Turner's intellectual development, religious cosmology, and motivations, and offers an original and incisive analysis of the Turner Rebellion itself and its impact on Virginia politics. Tomlins also undertakes a deeply critical examination of William Styron’s 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which restored Turner to the American consciousness in the era of civil rights, black power, and urban riots.

A speculative history that recovers Turner from the few shards of evidence we have about his life, In the Matter of Nat Turner is also a unique speculation about the meaning and uses of history itself.

Rob Denning is Associate Dean for Liberal Arts at Southern New Hampshire University’s Global Campus. He received his Ph.D from The Ohio State University, where he researched environmental policymaking in California during Ronald Reagan’s terms as governor. Rob hosts Working Historians, a podcast about the various career opportunities open to students with history degrees. He can be reached by email at rdenning13@gmail.com or on Twitter @DrRobHistory.

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Mary Stanton, "Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950" (U Georgia Press, 2019)

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Mary Stanton's Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930–1950 (University of Georgia Press, 2019) is the first narrative history of the American communist movement in the South since Robin D. G. Kelley's groundbreaking Hammer and Hoe and the first to explore its key figures and actions beyond the 1930s. Written from the perspective of the district 17 (CPUSA) Reds who worked primarily in Alabama, it acquaints a new generation with the impact of the Great Depression on postwar black and white, young and old, urban and rural Americans.

After the Scottsboro story broke on March 25, 1931, it was open season for old-fashioned lynchings, legal (courtroom) lynchings, and mob murder. In Alabama alone, twenty black men were known to have been murdered, and countless others, women included, were beaten, disabled, jailed, “disappeared,” or had their lives otherwise ruined between March 1931 and September 1935. In this collective biography, Mary Stanton―a noted chronicler of the left and of social justice movements in the South―explores the resources available to Depression-era Reds before the advent of the New Deal or the modern civil rights movement. What emerges from this narrative is a meaningful criterion by which to evaluate the Reds’ accomplishments.

Through seven cases of the CPUSA (district 17) activity in the South, Stanton covers tortured notions of loyalty and betrayal, the cult of white southern womanhood, Christianity in all its iterations, and the scapegoating of African Americans, Jews, and communists. Yet this still is a story of how these groups fought back, and fought together, for social justice and change in a fractured region.

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Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger, "Southern Comforts: Drinking and the US South" (LSU Press, 2020)

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger about their edited collection, Southern Comforts: Drinking and the US South from Louisiana State University Press’s Southern Literary Studies Series.

This collection of seventeen essays focuses on the mythologies and representations of alcohol production, distribution, and consumption (or rejection) in the literature and culture of the US South. Picken and Dischinger argue in the introduction that the relationship between the US South and alcohol has been overdetermined in popular imagination. The region is simultaneously known for its “dry” counties, temperance laws, and religious teetotalers as well as “harddrinking authors, bootleggers, moonshiners, and distillers, to name but a few.” Picken and Dischinger interrogate the assumption that alcohol consumption is a community-building activity, arguing that drinking together, like eating together, often obscures underlying and persistent inequalities of race, class, and gender. Representations of Southern drinking culture tend to reify rather than resist hegemonic power structures. The collection explores and deconstructs these contradictory stereotypes through analysis of literary, historical, and pop culture representations of drink and drinking. Essays focus on a variety of texts and subjects from female blues singers, male country musicians, and Mardi Gras cocktails to the works of Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, and John Kennedy Toole – among many other representations in literature and film.

Conor Picken is an Assistant Professor of English and the Faculty Director of the Compassio Learning Community at Bellarmine University. His teaching and research encompass 20th- and 21st-century American Literature, southern literature, modernism, and social change.

Matthew Dischinger is a Lecturer at Georgia State University. Matt works at the intersections of American Studies, Southern Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. His research explores contemporary U.S. Multi-Ethnic literatures, literary melancholia, and speculative aesthetics.

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Lane Windham, "Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide" (UNC Press, 2017)

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Lane Windham, Associate Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, discusses her book, Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and why the 1970s should be seen as more than a moment of decline for the U.S. labor movement.

The power of unions in workers' lives and in the American political system has declined dramatically since the 1970s. In recent years, many have argued that the crisis took root when unions stopped reaching out to workers and workers turned away from unions. But here Windham tells a different story. Highlighting the integral, often-overlooked contributions of women, people of color, young workers, and southerners, Windham reveals how in the 1970s workers combined old working-class tools--like unions and labor law--with legislative gains from the civil and women's rights movements to help shore up their prospects. Through close-up studies of workers' campaigns in shipbuilding, textiles, retail, and service, Windham overturns widely held myths about labor's decline, showing instead how employers united to manipulate weak labor law and quash a new wave of worker organizing.

Recounting how employees attempted to unionize against overwhelming odds, Knocking on Labor's Door dramatically refashions the narrative of working-class struggle during a crucial decade and shakes up current debates about labor's future. Windham's story inspires both hope and indignation, and will become a must-read in labor, civil rights, and women's history.

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Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.

The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more.

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Jessica Wilkerson, "To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice" (U Illinois Press, 2018)

Fri, 27 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Jessica Wilkerson, Assistant Professor of History and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, discusses her book, To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2018) and the recent history of feminist social justice activism in Appalachia.

Launched in 1964, the War on Poverty quickly took aim at the coalfields of southern Appalachia. There, the federal government found unexpected allies among working-class white women devoted to a local tradition of citizen caregiving and seasoned by decades of activism and community service. Jessica Wilkerson tells their stories within the larger drama of efforts to enact change in the 1960s and 1970s. She shows white Appalachian women acting as leaders and soldiers in a grassroots war on poverty--shaping and sustaining programs, engaging in ideological debates, offering fresh visions of democratic participation, and facing personal political struggles. Their insistence that caregiving was valuable labor clashed with entrenched attitudes and rising criticisms of welfare. Their persistence, meanwhile, brought them into unlikely coalitions with black women, disabled miners, and others to fight for causes that ranged from poor people's rights to community health to unionization. Inspiring yet sobering, To Live Here, You Have to Fight reveals Appalachian women as the indomitable caregivers of a region--and overlooked actors in the movements that defined their time.

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Marcus P. Nevius, "City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856" (U Georgia Press, 2020)

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In his newly released book City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856 (University of Georgia Press, 2020), Professor Marcus P. Nevius (Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island) tells the interrelated histories of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities.

In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

Jerrad P. Pacatte is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey-New Brunswick studying eighteenth and nineteenth-century African American women’s history and the history of slavery and capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Jerrad_Pacatte!

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John Weber, "From South Texas to the Nation: The Exploitation of Mexican Labor in the Twentieth Century" (UNC Press, 2015)

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

John Weber, Assistant Professor of History at Old Dominion University, discusses his book, From South Texas to the Nation: The Exploitation of Mexican Labor in the Twentieth Century(University of North Carolina Press, 2015), migrant agricultural labor, immigration policy, and the long-term impacts of the labor relations model that developed in South Texas during the early twentieth century.

In the early years of the twentieth century, newcomer farmers and migrant Mexicans forged a new world in South Texas. In just a decade, this vast region, previously considered too isolated and desolate for large-scale agriculture, became one of the United States' most lucrative farming regions and one of its worst places to work. By encouraging mass migration from Mexico, paying low wages, selectively enforcing immigration restrictions, toppling older political arrangements, and periodically immobilizing the workforce, growers created a system of labor controls unique in its levels of exploitation.

Ethnic Mexican residents of South Texas fought back by organizing and by leaving, migrating to destinations around the United States where employers eagerly hired them--and continued to exploit them. In From South Texas to the Nation, John Weber reinterprets the United States' record on human and labor rights. This important book illuminates the way in which South Texas pioneered the low-wage, insecure, migration-dependent labor system on which so many industries continue to depend.

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Alan Taylor, "Thomas Jefferson’s Education" (W. W. Norton, 2019)

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Alan Taylor is the author of Thomas Jefferson’s Education published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2019. Thomas Jefferson’s Education tells the story of how Jefferson’s vision for educating the next generations of American came to be. Taking readers through Virginia’s, at time struggling, educational infrastructure, Taylor shows how Jefferson’s experience with education was both shaped by and contributed to his own vision of what a university should look like. Culminating in what is today the University of Virginia, Jefferson’s goals were, as Taylor points out, both achieved and left by the wayside in the complicated development of a university and education system.

Taylor is Professor of History and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair at the University of Virginia.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Melissa Walker and Giselle Roberts, "Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South" (U South Carolina Press)

Fri, 13 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Professors Melissa Walker of Converse College and Giselle Roberts of Australia’s La Trobe University, editors of the Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South series, discuss the field of documentary editing and how the personal writings of southern women reveal the broader history of life in the U.S. South during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Jamie L. H. Goodall, "Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars" (The History Press, 2020)

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The story of Chesapeake pirates and patriots begins with a land dispute and ends with the untimely death of an oyster dredger at the hands of the Maryland Oyster Navy. From the golden age of piracy to Confederate privateers and oyster pirates, the maritime communities of the Chesapeake Bay are intimately tied to a fascinating history of intrigue, plunder, and illicit commerce trading. In Pirates of the Chesapeake Bay: From the Colonial Era to the Oyster Wars (The History Press, 2020), Jamie L. H. Goodall introduces infamous men like Edward “Blackbeard” Teach and “Black Sam” Bellamy, as well as lesser-known local figures like Gus Price and Berkeley Muse, whose tales of piracy are legendary from the harbor of Baltimore to the shores of Cape Charles.

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Justin Nystrom, "Creole Italian: Sicilian Immigrants and the Shaping of New Orleans Food Culture" (U Georgia Press, 2018)

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Justin Nystrom about his latest book, Creole Italian: Sicilian Immigrants and the Shaping of New Orleans Food Culture, published in 2018 by the University of Georgia Press as part of the Southern Foodways Alliance series Studies in Culture, People, and Place. The book was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Book Award in 2019.

Nystrom argues in Creole Italian that the discourse about New Orleans has been narrowed to a single story and controlled by something vaguely defined as “Creole” which has “long robbed the city of the potential for a richer cultural self-image.” This view of New Orleans history and culture privileges the story of a minority of social elites, obscures the diversity of the city, and elides the existence and contributions of a great many groups, including Sicilian immigrants and their descendants. Nystrom complicates the received narratives of Sicilians in New Orleans, resisting the stereotypes that link all Italians with organized crime and instead revealing how Sicilians became an integral part of New Orleans culture and economy through their entrepreneurship, particularly in importing lemons, working on sugar plantations, selling oysters, establishing restaurants, popularizing spaghetti in America, manufacturing pasta, selling groceries, and defining New Orleans fine dining. Not merely the inventors of the famed muffuletta (which Nystrom reveals is the name for the bread, not the combination of fillings in the sandwich), Sicilians creatively use the food and food service industry to make an indelible mark on the city and the nation. Nystrom recovers a history of New Orleans through archival research and oral history interview that is becoming harder to see as the city changes. “If there’s a ghost of the city’s Sicilian past, it surely haunts the streets of the Lower French Quarter,” Nystrom writes. “Impressions of the immigrant century remain visible on the landscape if one knows where to look.”

Justin Nystrom is Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Documentary and Oral History Studio at Loyola University of New Orleans. Dr. Nystrom has written extensively about the history of New Orleans and the South on topics ranging from the Civil War and Reconstruction, racial identity, labor history, foodways, and cultural history, including the 2015 New Orleans after the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom (Johns Hopkins Press, 2015). He also produces documentary films, including a feature length film titled This Haus of Memories (2012). You can follow Dr. Nystrom on Twitter @JustinNystrom.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica,Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

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Ellen Griffith Spears, "Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town" (UNC Press, 2016)

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Professor Ellen Griffith Spears of the University of Alabama, author of Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) discusses the decades long struggle for environmental and civil rights justice in Anniston, Alabama, and broader lessons to be learned from this fight to address one community's exposure to toxic chemicals.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice, exposing how systemic racial and class inequalities reinforced during the Jim Crow era played out in these intense contemporary social movements.

Spears focuses attention on key figures who shaped Anniston--from Monsanto's founders, to white and African American activists, to the ordinary Anniston residents whose lives and health were deeply affected by the town's military-industrial history and the legacy of racism. Situating the personal struggles and triumphs of Anniston residents within a larger national story of regulatory regimes and legal strategies that have affected toxic towns across America, Spears unflinchingly explores the causes and implications of environmental inequalities, showing how civil rights movement activism undergirded Anniston's campaigns for redemption and justice.

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Emily E. LB. Twarog, "Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America" (Oxford UP, 2017)

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

The history of women's political involvement has focused heavily on electoral politics, but throughout the twentieth century women engaged in grassroots activism when they found it increasingly challenging to feed their families and balance their household ledgers. Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines how working- and middle-class American housewives used their identity as housewives to protest the high cost of food. In doing so, housewives' relationships with the state evolved over the course of the century. Shifting the focus away from the workplace as a site of protest, Emily E. LB. Twarog looks to the homefront as a starting point for protest in the public sphere.

With a focus on food consumption rather than production, Twarog looks closely at the ways food--specifically meat--was used by women as a political tool. Engaging in domestic politics, housewives both challenged and embraced the social and economic order as they sought to craft a unique political voice and build a consumer movement focused on the home.

The book examines key moments when women used consumer actions to embrace their socially ascribed roles as housewives to demand economic stability for their families and communities. These include the Depression-era meat boycott of 1935, the consumer coalitions of the New Deal, and the wave of consumer protests between 1966 and 1973. Twarog introduces numerous labor and consumer activists and their organizations in both urban and suburban areas--Detroit, greater Chicago, Long Island, and Los Angeles.

Emily E. LB. Twarog is an Associate Professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations, and Affiliate Faculty in the Gender in Global Perspectives Program and European Union Center at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike.

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Bryant Simon, "The Hamlet Fire: A Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives" (The New Press, 2017)

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Bryant Simon, Professor of History at Temple University, discusses his new book, The Hamlet Fire: A Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives (The New Press, 2017), and the tragic consequences of the ethos of "cheap" for workers, communities, and the nation.

For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses searching for cheap labor with little or almost no official oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial Food Products. The company paid its workers a dollar above the minimum wage to stand in pools of freezing water for hours on end, scraping gobs of fat off frozen chicken breasts before they got dipped in batter and fried into golden brown nuggets and tenders. If a worker complained about the heat or the cold or missed a shift to take care of their children or went to the bathroom too often they were fired. But they kept coming back to work because Hamlet was a place where jobs were scarce. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991, the day after Labor Day, this factory that had never been inspected burst into flame. Twenty-five people—many of whom were black women with children, living on their own—perished that day behind the plant’s locked and bolted doors.

Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past. After spending several years talking to local residents, state officials, and survivors of the fire, award-winning historian Bryant Simon has written a vivid, potent, and disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time that shows how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was bound for tragedy.

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Donald L. Miller, "Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy" (Simon and Schuster, 2019)

Wed, 19 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Jessica Moloughney is a graduate student in history and library science at Queens College in New York

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Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, "Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy" (The New Press, 2018)

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, Professors of History at California State University—Fresno, discuss their co-authored book, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (The New Press, 2018), competing narratives about slavery in the South, and the fraught history of race, memory and memorialization in the region.

Hailed by the New York Times as a “fascinating and important new historical study that examines . . . the place where the ways slavery is remembered mattered most,” Denmark Vesey’s Garden “maps competing memories of slavery from abolition to the very recent struggle to rename or remove Confederate symbols across the country” (The New Republic). This timely book reveals the deep roots of present-day controversies and traces them to the capital of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the slaves brought to the United States stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof murdered nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, which was co-founded by Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822.

As they examine public rituals, controversial monuments, and competing musical traditions, “Kytle and Roberts’s combination of encyclopedic knowledge of Charleston’s history and empathy with its inhabitants’ past and present struggles make them ideal guides to this troubled history” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). A work the Civil War Times called “a stunning contribution, ” Denmark Vesey’s Garden exposes a hidden dimension of America’s deep racial divide, joining the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting interpretations of slavery’s enduring legacy in the United States.

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Megan Kate Nelson, "The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West" (Scribner, 2019)

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 10:00:00 -0000

What did the American Civil War look like from Diné Bikéyah and Apacheria? This is just one of the many questions that drives historian Megan Kate Nelson’s The Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner, 2020), which details the Civil War’s impact on a diversity of historical actors vying for control, opportunity, and survival in the continental southwest. As both the Union and the Confederacy vied for claim to Indigenous lands, Diné, Apache, and other Indigenous nations fought back. The narratives of Juanita, a Diné woman who resisted Union encroachments upon her community and Diné lands, and Mangas Coloradas, a Chiricahua Apache chief who sought to expand and protect Apache territories, reveal the difficult choices Indigenous peoples made in the face of competitive expansion.

Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian with a background in the American Civil War, U.S. western history, and American culture. In The Three-Cornered War, Nelson combines meticulous research in military records, letters and diaries, oral histories, and photographs with novel-like prose to tell the story of the American Civil War through the experiences of nine individuals. As Nelson shows how each of these individuals shaped and were shaped by the Civil War in the continental southwest, the result is a history of the American Civil War truly continental in its scope yet deeply individual in its impact.

Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

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Blain Roberts, "Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South" (UNC Press, 2016)

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Professor Blain Roberts of California State University, Fresno, talks about intersections of race, identity, and memory in the South in a wide-ranging discussion that starts in the segregated beauty parlors of the Jim Crow era and ends with remembrances of slavery in modern-day Charleston, South Carolina.

From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. In these times of strained relations in the South, beauty became a signifier of power and affluence while it reinforced racial strife.

In Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Roberts examines a range of beauty products, practices, and rituals--cosmetics, hairdressing, clothing, and beauty contests--in settings that range from tobacco farms of the Great Depression to 1950s and 1960s college campuses. In so doing, she uncovers the role of female beauty in the economic and cultural modernization of the South. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.

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R. Scott Huffard, Jr., "Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South" (UNC Press, 2019)

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

R. Scott Huffard Jr. is the author of Engines of Redemption: Railroads and the Reconstruction of Capitalism in the New South, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2019. Engines of Redemption is a fascinating history of capitalism in the South, which tells the story of how railroads revitalized the region following the Civil War. Huffard examines the myriad of was that railroads were used to secure political and economic growth and power in the South throughout the Reconstruction era. Railroads, however, were not always seen as a blessing, and Huffard pays close attention to how the rapid southern growth of the locomotive was accompanied by rising anxieties, from race to disease.

R. Scott Huffard Jr. is Assistant Professor of History at Lees-McRae College.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Jacob Remes, "Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era" (U Illinois Press, 2015)

Fri, 31 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Professor Jacob Remes of SUNY Empire State College discusses his book, Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (University of Illinois Press, 2015), and challenges prevailing assumptions about how ordinary people, governments, and institutions act in the wake of natural disasters.

A century ago, governments buoyed by Progressive Era–beliefs began to assume greater responsibility for protecting and rescuing citizens. Yet the aftermath of two disasters in the United States-Canada borderlands--the Salem Fire of 1914 and the Halifax Explosion of 1917--saw working class survivors instead turn to friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members for succor and aid. Both official and unofficial responses, meanwhile, showed how the United States and Canada were linked by experts, workers, and money. In Disaster Citizenship, Remes draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions--both formal and informal--that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. He explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as he shows, these methods--though often quick and effective--remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive "solutions" on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape. Innovative and engaging, Disaster Citizenship excavates the forgotten networks of solidarity and obligation in an earlier time while simultaneously suggesting new frameworks in the emerging field of critical disaster studies.

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K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.

Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

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Lowell Mick White, "Burnt House" (Buffalo Times Press, 2018)

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

After her parents' divorce, Jackie Stalnaker is sent to her grandmother’s dilapidated house in a tiny town in West Virginia. It’s a hot, mid 1970’s summer in Burnt House, where the only thing to look forward to is a weekly old movie shown at the library. But Jackie is grateful to be away from her squabbling parents and delighted with the crazy characters she meets in Burnt House (Buffalo Times Press, 2018). In these charming short stories, White creates a world of complex characters, some lazy, cranky or perfectly satisfied, others lonely and lost, but all connected by history and their shared geography.

Lowell Mick White is the author of six books and his work has been published in many literary journals, including Callaloo, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Short Story. A winner of the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, awarded by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters, White lived in Austin, Texas, for 25 years, at various times making his living working as a cab driver, a shade tree salesman, and an Internal Revenue Service bureaucrat. He is Editor of Alamo Bay Press and has been the National Endowment for the Arts Artist-in-Residence at the federal prison in Bryan, Texas. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, White is an Instructional Associate Professor at Texas A&M University, where he earned his PhD. When not reading or writing, White enjoys drinking beer, eating turkey legs, and taking long drives in the Texas countryside.

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G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes.

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Adrienne Petty, "Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War" (Oxford UP, 2013)

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Professor Adrienne Petty discusses her book, Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2013), the black and white farmers in the South who were part of the "small farming class," and their evolving strategies for holding onto their land through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The transformation of agriculture was one of the most far-reaching developments of the modern era. In analyzing how and why this change took place in the United States, scholars have most often focused on Midwestern family farmers, who experienced the change during the first half of the twentieth century, and southern sharecroppers, swept off the land by forces beyond their control.

Departing from the conventional story, this book focuses on small farm owners in North Carolina from the post-Civil War era to the post-Civil Rights era. It reveals that the transformation was more protracted and more contested than historians have understood it to be. Even though the number of farm owners gradually declined over the course of the century, the desire to farm endured among landless farmers, who became landowners during key moments of opportunity. Moreover, this book departs from other studies by considering all farm owners as a single class, rejecting the widespread approach of segregating black farm owners. The violent and restrictive political culture of Jim Crow regime, far from only affecting black farmers, limited the ability of all farmers to resist changes in agriculture.

By the 1970s, the vast reduction in the number of small farm owners had simultaneously destroyed a Southern yeomanry that had been the symbol of American democracy since the time of Thomas Jefferson, rolled back gains in landownership that families achieved during the first half century after the Civil War, and remade the rural South from an agrarian society to a site of global agribusiness.

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Brian Cervantez, "Amon Carter: A Lone Star Life" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)

Tue, 21 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Raised in a one-room log cabin in a small North Texas town, Amon G. Carter (1879–1955) rose to become the founder and publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a seat of power from which he relentlessly promoted the city of Fort Worth, amassed a fortune, and established himself as the quintessential Texan of his era. The first in-depth, scholarly biography of this outsize character and civic booster, Amon Carter: A Lone Star Life (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019) chronicles a remarkable life and places it in the larger context of state and nation.

Though best known for the Star-Telegram, Carter also established WBAP, Fort Worth’s first radio station, which in 1948 became the first television station in the Southwest. He was responsible for bringing the headquarters of what would become American Airlines to Fort Worth and for securing government funding for a local aircraft factory that evolved into Lockheed Martin.

Historian Brian A. Cervantez has drawn on Texas Christian University’s rich collection of Carter papers to chart Carter’s quest to bring business and government projects to his adopted hometown, enterprises that led to friendships with prominent national figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Will Rogers, H. L. Mencken, and John Nance Garner.

After making millions of dollars in the oil business, Carter used his wealth to fund schools, hospitals, museums, churches, parks, and camps. His numerous philanthropic efforts culminated in the Amon G. Carter Foundation, which still supports cultural and educational endeavors throughout Texas. He was a driving force behind the establishment of Texas Tech University, a major contributor to Texas Christian University, a key figure in the creation of Big Bend National Park, and an art lover whose collection of the works of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell served as the foundation of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

Amon Carter: A Lone Star Life testifies to the singular character and career of one man whose influence can be seen throughout the cultural and civic life of Fort Worth, Texas, and the American Southwest to this day.

Dr. Brian Cervantez is Associate Professor at Tarrant County College in Texas, where he specializes in the history of the American South.

Rob Denning is the host of the excellent podcast Working Historians. Subscribe to Working Historians here.

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Blake Perkins, "Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks" (U Illinois Press, 2017)

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Blake Perkins, assistant professor of history at Williams Baptist College, discusses his new book, Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks (University of Illinois Press, 2017), regional relations with the federal government, and the evolution of grassroots politics.

Perkins searches for the roots of rural defiance in the Ozarks--and discovers how it changed over time. Eschewing generalities, Perkins focuses on the experiences and attitudes of rural people themselves as they interacted with government in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He uncovers the reasons local disputes and uneven access to government power fostered markedly different reactions by hill people as time went by. Resistance in the earlier period sprang from upland small farmers' conflicts with capitalist elites who held the local levers of federal power. But as industry and agribusiness displaced family farms after World War II, a conservative cohort of town business elites, local political officials, and Midwestern immigrants arose from the region's new low-wage, union-averse economy. As Perkins argues, this modern anti-government conservatism bore little resemblance to the populist backcountry populism of an earlier age but had much in common with the movement elsewhere.

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Mark Barr, "Watershed" (Hub City Press, 2019)

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

It’s 1937 and rural Tennessee is still recovering from the Great Depression. The construction of a huge dam brings job seekers, fortune hunters, and the promise of electricity to the area. Claire, a young mother of two, realizes her marriage is over when she wakes up with a sexually transmitted disease brought home by her husband. Nathan is an engineer with a shameful secret who changes his name to get work at the dam. Everyone in this colorful cast of dog-fighting neighbors, beer-guzzling ex-husbands, and power-hungry employers is trying to survive in the mosquito-infested heat of a southern summer.

Mark Barr has been awarded fellowships from Blue Mountain Center, I-Park Artists Enclave, Jentel Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. Favorably reviewed by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist, his debut novel, Watershed (Hub City, 2019), was featured in the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance’s fall Okra list and Deep South Magazine's Fall/Winter Reading List, and named as one of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's "12 Southern Books You'll Want to Read This Fall" and one of Nashville Lifestyles Magazine’s "Four Fall Reads." Mark holds undergraduate degrees from Hendrix College and University of Iowa, and an M.F.A. from Texas State University. He lives with his wife and sons in Arkansas, where he develops software and bakes bread.

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Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America" (W. W. Norton, 2019)

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters chose vastly different lives. Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and Katharine reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation’s attention to issues of region, race, and labor.

In Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America (W. W. Norton, 2019), National Humanities Award–winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters, who were “estranged and yet forever entangled” by their mutual obsession with the South. Tracing the wounds and unsung victories of the past through to the contemporary moment, Hall revives a buried tradition of Southern expatriation and progressivism; explores the lost, revolutionary zeal of the early twentieth century; and muses on the fraught ties of sisterhood.

Grounded in decades of research, the family’s private papers, and interviews with Katharine and Grace, Sisters and Rebels unfolds an epic narrative of American history through the lives and works of three Southern women.

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emeritus at UNC-Chapel Hill. She was one of the founders of the modern field of women’s history and helped to spark a thriving scholarship in southern labor history and to turn the study of the civil rights movement in new directions. She was awarded a National Humanities Medal for her efforts to deepen the nation’s engagement with the humanities by “recording history through the lives of ordinary people, and, in so doing, for making history.” She is past president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association and founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association.

Hall's books and articles include Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (1979, 1993), winner of the Francis B. Simkins and Lillian Smith Awards; Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987, 2000), winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award, Merle Curti Award, and the Philip Taft Labor History Prize; and “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History (2005), an effort to challenge the myth that the movement was a short, successful bid to overcome segregation in the Jim Crow South. She has also won awards for graduate teaching and contributions to the fields of oral history and working-class history. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, and other institutions. She was elected to the Society of American Historians in 1990 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, in 2011.

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Chad Pearson, "Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Professor Chad Pearson of Collin College, author of Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) traces the roots of modern anti-unionism in the U.S. to the early 20th century open shop movement and a push by business interests nationwide to break unions and stall the momentum of organized labor.

Historians have characterized the open-shop movement of the early twentieth century as a cynical attempt by business to undercut the labor movement by twisting the American ideals of independence and self-sufficiency to their own ends. The precursors to today's right-to-work movement, advocates of the open shop in the Progressive Era argued that honest workers should have the right to choose whether or not to join a union free from all pressure. At the same time, business owners systematically prevented unionization in their workplaces.

While most scholars portray union opponents as knee-jerk conservatives, Chad Pearson demonstrates that many open-shop proponents identified themselves as progressive reformers and benevolent guardians of America's economic and political institutions. By exploring the ways in which employers and their allies in journalism, law, politics, and religion drew attention to the reformist, rather than repressive, character of the open-shop movement, Pearson's book forces us to consider the origins, character, and limitations of this movement in new ways. Throughout his study, Pearson describes class tensions, noting that open-shop campaigns primarily benefited management and the nation's most economically privileged members at the expense of ordinary people.

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Keri Leigh Merritt, "Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Fri, 03 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Keri Leigh Merritt discusses her book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and intersections of race, class, politics, and slavery in the pre-Civil War South.

Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these 'masterless' men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.

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Alex Lichtenstein, "Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid" (Indiana UP, 2016)

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Alex Lichtenstein, Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, discusses his new book with co-author Rick Halpern, Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid (Indiana University Press, 2016) photojournalism, and writing transnational histories of labor and social justice movements.

As a photographer for Life and Fortune magazines, Margaret Bourke-White traveled to Russia in the 1930s, photographed the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and recorded the liberation of Buchenwald at the end of WWII. In 1949, Life sent her to South Africa to take photographs in a country that was becoming racially polarized by white minority rule. Life published two photo-essays highlighting Bourke-White’s photographs, but much of her South African work remained unpublished until now. Here, these stunning photographs collected by Alex Lichtenstein and Rick Halpern offer an unparalleled visual record of white domination in South Africa during the early days of apartheid. In addition to these powerful and historically significant photographs, Lichtenstein and Halpern include two essays that explore Bourke-White's artistic and political formation and provide background material about the cultural, political, and economic circumstances that produced the rise and triumph of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa. This richly illustrated book brings to light a large body of photography from a major American photographer and offers a compelling history of a reprehensible system of racial conflict and social control that Bourke-White took such pains to document.

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Talitha LeFlouria, "Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South" (UNC Press, 2016)

Fri, 20 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Professor Talitha LeFlouria, a fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, discusses her book, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and the lives, labors, and legacies of incarcerated black women and the convict lease system in the early 20th century South.

In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia's prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women's presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women's lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

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Katherine Rye Jewell, "Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century" (Cambridge UP, 2017)

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Katherine Rye Jewell, Assistant Professor of History at Fitchburg State University, discusses her book, Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and the evolution of political and economic conservatism in the twentieth-century South.

Organized in 1933, the Southern States Industrial Council's (SSIC) adherence to the South as a unique political and economic entity limited its members' ability to forge political coalitions against the New Deal. The SSIC's commitment to regional preferences, however, transformed and incorporated conservative thought in the post-World War II era, ultimately complementing the emerging conservative movement in the 1940s and 1950s. In response to New Dealers' attempts to remake the southern economy, the New South industrialists - heirs of C. Vann Woodward's 'new men' of the New South - effectively fused cultural traditionalism and free market economics into a brand of southern free enterprise that shaped the region's reputation and political culture. Dollars for Dixie demonstrates how the South emerged from this refashioning and became a key player in the modern conservative movement, with new ideas regarding free market capitalism, conservative fiscal policy, and limited bureaucracy.

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Wilson Jeremiah Moses, "Thomas Jefferson: A Modern Prometheus" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

In Greek mythology Prometheus is the trickster Titan who gives fire to humanity. As Wilson Jeremiah Moses explains in his book Thomas Jefferson: A Modern Prometheus (Cambridge University Press, 2019) America’s third president demonstrated many of the same traits as this legendary figure over the course of his long life of intellectual activity. As Moses reveals, this is reflected in the malleable nature of Jefferson’s legacy, which has been reinterpreted continuously by generations of politicians and historians in the generations since his death. To better understand Jefferson’s thinking, Moses dissects the corpus of Jefferson’s writings and examines the span of his activities to draw from them his views on everything from politics and economics to his understanding of the various fields of science which he explored. What emerges from this effort is the complex and sometimes contradictory stew of ideas which Jefferson applied over the course of his political career, during which he helped shape the ideology and institutions which Americans live with today.

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Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt, "Reconsidering Southern Labor History" (UP of Florida, 2018)

Fri, 06 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt discuss their new edited volume, Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power (University Press of Florida, 2018), the nexus of race, class and power in the history of labor in the South, and how a new generation of southern labor scholars are changing our understanding of labor's past, present and future in the region.

The American Dream of reaching success through sheer sweat and determination rings false for countless members of the working classes. This volume shows that many of the difficulties facing workers today have deep roots in the history of the exploitation of labor in the South. Contributors make the case that the problems that have long beset southern labor, including the legacy of slavery, low wages, lack of collective bargaining rights, and repression of organized unions, have become the problems of workers across the country.

Spanning nearly all of U.S. history, the essays in this collection range from West Virginia to Florida to Texas. They examine vagrancy laws in the early republic, inmate labor at state penitentiaries, mine workers and union membership, and strikes and the often-violent strikebreaking that followed. They also look at pesticide exposure among farmworkers, labor activism during the civil rights movement, and foreign-owned auto factories in the rural South. They distinguish between different struggles experienced by women and men, as well as by African American, Latino, and white workers.

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Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.

However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.

In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.

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Kathryn Holliday, "The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture" (U Texas Press, 2019)

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 09:00:00 -0000

It may only be a slight exaggeration to say that one of David Dillon's career accomplishments was to put the words "Dallas" and "architecture" in the same sentence again. After a screed in 1980 entitled "Why Is Dallas Architecture So Bad?" launched his career as an architecture critic, Dillon took to the pages of the Dallas Morning News to praise, lament, explain, beg, scold, suggest, cajole, and influence how Dallas and its metropolitan region took shape throughout three revolutionary decades of development. To follow his career as a critic from the early 1980s, when downtown was dormant and street life an afterthought, to his retirement--when a new mindset for urban planning had largely set in, but still had far to go--is to listen to a larger story about how thinking about the built environment in North American cities has changed over the last generation, the new questions that have been raised, and the old ones that persist.

Some of Dillon's most memorable and enduring columns were recently published by University of Texas Press in a collection called The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture, part of a series furnished by the Roger Fullington Endowment in Architecture. The book is edited and introduced by Kathryn Holliday, associate professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she is also the founding director of the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture.

Holliday is the author of Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Gilded Age (W. W. Norton & Company, 2008) and Ralph Walker: Architect of the Century (Rizzoli, 2012).

David Dillon was the nationally acclaimed architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, where his work received awards from the Associated Press, the Dallas Press Club, and the Texas Society of Architects.

Nathan Bierma is a writer, instructional designer, and voiceover talent in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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Cindy Hahamovitch, "The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945" (UNC Press, 2010)

Fri, 29 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Today Professor Cindy Hahamovitch of the University of Georgia discusses her research connecting the global histories of 19th-century indentured servants and today's guestworkers.

In 1933 Congress granted American laborers the right of collective bargaining, but farmworkers got no New Deal. In The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Hahamovitch shows how growers enlisted the aid of the state in an unprecedented effort to keep their fields well stocked with labor.

This is the story of the farmworkers--Italian immigrants from northeastern tenements, African American laborers from the South, and imported workers from the Caribbean--who came to work in the fields of New Jersey, Georgia, and Florida in the decades after 1870. These farmworkers were not powerless, the author argues, for growers became increasingly open to negotiation as their crops ripened in the fields. But farmers fought back with padrone or labor contracting schemes and 'work-or-fight' forced-labor campaigns. Hahamovitch describes how growers' efforts became more effective as federal officials assumed the role of padroni, supplying farmers with foreign workers on demand.

Today's migrants are as desperate as ever, the author concludes, not because poverty is an inevitable feature of modern agricultural work, but because the federal government has intervened on behalf of growers, preventing farmworkers from enjoying the fruits of their labor.

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Michelle Haberland, "Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South, 1930-2000" (U Georgia Press, 2015)

Fri, 22 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Professor Michelle Haberland of Georgia Southern University, author of Striking Beauties: Women Apparel Workers in the U.S. South (University of Georgia Press, 2015), discusses the dynamics of gender, class, race and globalization in the southern apparel industry from the 1930s to today.

Apparel manufacturing in the American South, by virtue of its size, its reliance upon female labor, and its broad geographic scope, is an important but often overlooked industry that connects the disparate concerns of women’s history, southern cultural history, and labor history. In Striking Beauties, Haberland examines its essential features and the varied experiences of its workers during the industry’s great expansion from the late 1930s through the demise of its southern branch at the end of the twentieth century.

The popular conception of the early twentieth-century South as largely agrarian informs many histories of industry and labor in the United States. But as Haberland demonstrates, the apparel industry became a key part of the southern economy after the Great Depression and a major driver of southern industrialization. The gender and racial composition of the workforce, the growth of trade unions, technology, and capital investment were all powerful forces in apparel’s migration south. Yet those same forces also revealed the tensions caused by racial and gender inequities not only in the region but in the nation at large. Striking Beauties places the struggles of working women for racial and economic justice in the larger context of southern history. The role of women as the primary consumers of the family placed them in a critical position to influence the success or failure of boycotts, union label programs and ultimately solidarity.

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Dave Tell, "Remembering Emmett Till" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Dave Tell (he/him/his)--Professor of Communication at The University of Kansas--on the insightful Remembering Emmett Till (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The book takes a rhetorical approach on the commemoration of Emmett Till by looking at acts of remembering Emmett following his brutal murder in the 1960s until the present day. Tell persuasively demonstrates the way in which the act of commemorating has saturated the physical landscape of the Mississippi Delta. In addition to a fascinating discussion of Till’s legacy and the current commemoration of racial tragedy in the American South, Dave also introduces listeners to the Emmett Till Memory Project (ETMP), which, among other things, offers a free app through which all of us can calibrate our relationship to Emmett to civil rights as an ongoing collective project.

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Kenneth Fones-Wolf, "Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie" (U Illinois Press, 2015)

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Professor Kenneth Fones-Wolf of West Virginia University discusses his book, co-authored with Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (University of Illinois Press, 2015), the role of religion in the CIO's Operation Dixie, and provides perspective on the participation of faith communities in the modern labor movement.

In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites.

The authors' nuanced look at working class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the authors show, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today.

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John Shelton Reed, "Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s" (LSU Press, 2012)

Thu, 07 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

John Shelton Reed, William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology (emeritus) at the University of North Carolina, has been observing the South for decades. This week he and Al Zambone talk about New Orleans in the 1920s, the subject of his book Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s (LSU Press, 2012).

In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents, faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square had become the center of a vibrant if short-lived bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane University, resided among the "artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter." In Dixie Bohemia John Shelton Reed introduces Faulkner's circle of friends -- ranging from the distinguished Sherwood Anderson to a gender-bending Mardi Gras costume designer -- and brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the Jazz Age.

Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing

Sun, 03 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it.

How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in.

Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com.

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Jay Driskell, "Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School" (UVA Press, 2014)

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Professor Jay Driskell of Hood College, author of Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics (University of Virginia Press, 2014), traces the roots of black protest politics to early 20th century Atlanta and the fight for equal education.

In 1919 the NAACP organized a voting bloc powerful enough to compel the city of Atlanta to budget $1.5 million for the construction of schools for black students. This victory would have been remarkable in any era, but in the context of the Jim Crow South it was revolutionary. Schooling Jim Crow tells the story of this little-known campaign, which happened less than thirteen years after the Atlanta race riot of 1906 and just weeks before a wave of anti-black violence swept the nation in the summer after the end of World War I. Despite the constant threat of violence, Atlanta’s black voters were able to force the city to build five black grammar schools and Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s first publicly funded black high school. Schooling Jim Crow reveals how they did it and why it matters.

In this pathbreaking book, Driskell explores the changes in black political consciousness that made the NAACP’s grassroots campaign possible at a time when most black southerners could not vote, let alone demand schools. He reveals how black Atlantans transformed a reactionary politics of respectability into a militant force for change. Contributing to this militancy were understandings of class and gender transformed by decades of racially segregated urban development, the 1906 Atlanta race riot, Georgia’s disfranchisement campaign of 1908, and the upheavals of World War I. On this cultural foundation, black Atlantans built a new urban black politics that would become the model for the NAACP’s political strategy well into the twentieth century.

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Eileen Boris, "Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nations, unions, and employer associations. Before WWII, it focused on enhancing conditions for male industrial workers in Western, often imperial, economies, while restricting the circumstances of women's labors. Over time, the ILO embraced non-discrimination and equal treatment. It now promotes fair globalization, standardized employment and decent work for women in the developing world. In Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919-2019 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Eileen Boris illuminates the ILO's transformation in the context of the long fight for social justice.

Boris analyzes three ways in which the ILO has classified the division of labor: between women and men from 1919 to 1958; between women in the global south and the west from 1955 to 1996; and between the earning and care needs of all workers from 1990s to today. Before 1945, the ILO focused on distinguishing feminized labor from male workers, whom the organization prioritized. But when the world needed more women workers, the ILO (a UN agency after WWII) highlighted the global differences in women's work, began to combat sexism in the workplace, and declared care work essential to women's labor participation. Today, the ILO enters its second century with a mission to protect the interests of all workers in the face of increasingly globalized supply chains, the digitization of homework, and cross-border labor trafficking.

Eileen Boris is the Hull Professor and Chair of the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she directs the Center for Research on Women and Social Justice.

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Perla Guerrero, "Nuevo South: Asians, Latinas/os, and the Remaking of Place" (U Texas Press, 2017)

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Perla Guerrero is the author of Nuevo South: Asians, Latinas/os, and the Remaking of Place (University of Texas Press, 2017). Nuevo South explores the history of an ever diversifying U.S. South by examining the mixed reactions refugees, immigrants, and migrants, from different countries, received in Arkansas in the latter half of the 20th century. Comparing the experiences of Vietnamese, Cuban, and Mexican refugees and migrants, Guerrero demonstrates why we need a more nuanced understanding of how these groups, and others, changed the face of the South and its many regional racial thinking.

Perla Guerrero is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland – College Park. Guerrero studies race and ethnicity, with a focus on Latinas/os/xs and Asian Americans, space and place, immigration, labor, U.S. history, and the U.S. South specifically.

Derek Litvak is a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland.

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Timothy Lehman, "Up the Trail: How Texas Cowboys Herded Longhorns and Became an American Icon" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In 1866, a sixteen year old cowboy—the name was literal in his case—named J.M. Daugherty bought 1,000 cattle, hired five cowboys, and headed north for Missouri. In Indian Territory, he took the long way around Cherokee land, to avoid paying them for crossing their lands. As Daugherty told it, some Yankee “Jayhawkers” ambushed him, shot some of his companions, and took him prisoner, accusing him of bringing infected cattle into Kansas. Escaping, the teenager found his cowboys, rounded up the cattle, and then brought them to market.

Some of this story is true, and the true parts are probably the strangest. Cowboys were on average incredibly young. Only small numbers of them were able to drive immense numbers of cattle, and drove them for hundreds upon hundreds of miles. And, in the wake of the Civil War, there was always bad blood between “Yankees” in Kansas, and former Confederates in Texas.

But there is much else counterintuitive about cow drives, that didn’t make it into the movies. Cowboys liked vegetables, for one thing. For another, they were one part of continent-spanning industrial economy. That didn’t make it into Lonesome Dove, as best as I recall.

With me to discuss the great cattle drives from Texas is Timothy Lehman, author of Up the Trail: How Texas Cowboys Herded Longhorns and Became an American Icon, published by Johns Hopkins Press (2018) as part of their series “How Things Worked.”

Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.

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Greta de Jong, "You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2016)

Fri, 25 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Professor Greta de Jong of the University of Nevada, Reno, discusses her book, You Can’t Eat Freedom: Southerners and Social Justice after the Civil Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), rural organizing, social justice movements, and the connected histories of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty in the US South.

Two revolutions roiled the rural South after the mid-1960s: the political revolution wrought by the passage of civil rights legislation, and the ongoing economic revolution brought about by increasing agricultural mechanization. Political empowerment for black southerners coincided with the transformation of southern agriculture and the displacement of thousands of former sharecroppers from the land. Focusing on the plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Greta de Jong analyzes how social justice activists responded to mass unemployment by lobbying political leaders, initiating antipoverty projects, and forming cooperative enterprises that fostered economic and political autonomy, efforts that encountered strong opposition from free market proponents who opposed government action to solve the crisis.

Making clear the relationship between the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty, this history of rural organizing shows how responses to labor displacement in the South shaped the experiences of other Americans who were affected by mass layoffs in the late twentieth century, shedding light on a debate that continues to reverberate today.

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J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017).

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Karen Cox, "Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South" (UNC Press, 2017)

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Karen Cox, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, discusses her new book, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and what one murder case in 1930s Mississippi reveals about race relations, criminal justice, and life in the Jim Crow South.

In 1932, the city of Natchez, Mississippi, reckoned with an unexpected influx of journalists and tourists as the lurid story of a local murder was splashed across headlines nationwide. Two eccentrics, Richard Dana and Octavia Dockery—known in the press as the "Wild Man" and the "Goat Woman"—enlisted an African American man named George Pearls to rob their reclusive neighbor, Jennie Merrill, at her estate. During the attempted robbery, Merrill was shot and killed. The crime drew national coverage when it came to light that Dana and Dockery, the alleged murderers, shared their huge, decaying antebellum mansion with their goats and other livestock, which prompted journalists to call the estate "Goat Castle." Pearls was killed by an Arkansas policeman in an unrelated incident before he could face trial. However, as was all too typical in the Jim Crow South, the white community demanded "justice," and an innocent black woman named Emily Burns was ultimately sent to prison for the murder of Merrill. Dana and Dockery not only avoided punishment but also lived to profit from the notoriety of the murder by opening their derelict home to tourists.

Strange, fascinating, and sobering, Goat Castle tells the story of this local feud, killing, investigation, and trial, showing how a true crime tale of fallen southern grandeur and murder obscured an all too familiar story of racial injustice.

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Andrew C. Baker, "Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South" (U Georgia Press, 2018)

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The history of metropolitan expansion and suburbanization is often written from the perspective of the city. In Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South (University of Georgia Press, 2018), by contrast, Andrew C. Baker focuses his gaze on the rural counties that underwent significant social, cultural, political, and environmental change as southern cities expanded after World War II. Baker sees the expansion of Houston, Texas, and Washington, D.C. into the “metropolitan fringe” as emblematic of processes at work throughout the South—and, in many ways, throughout the nation. Metropolitan growth transformed prevailing land uses in these counties: open-range forests gave way to fenced fields and subdivisions; market-oriented agriculture gave way to hobby farms; and rural residents considered proposals to develop waterways to accommodate the growing cities. Finally, Baker examines the degree to which the environmental deterioration caused by rapid, unplanned suburbanization helped fuel postwar environmentalism. He concludes that while residents outside of Houston and Washington, D.C. faced failed septic systems, flooding, and other challenges, their environmental concerns rarely translated into environmentalist action. Rather, they typically addressed these concerns in ways that reinforced the emerging social and political order.

Andrew Baker is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M, Commerce.

Joshua Nygren is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Missouri. You can find him on Twitter @joshua_nygren. Thanks to Justin Dean and UCM’s Digital Media Production program for production assistance.

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Rafia Zafar, "Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning" (U Georgia Press, 2019)

Fri, 11 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In this this interview, Dr. Carrie Tippen talks with Rafia Zafar about her 2019 book Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, from the University of Georgia Press. It’s part of the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People and Place series. The book contains 7 chapters, covering the earliest formally-published African-American-authored hospitality books from the 1820s to Edna Lewis’s Taste of Country Cooking from the 1970s, as well as the unpublished and incomplete cookbook of Arturo Schomburg, with many other examples in between. Each chapter examines a set of related texts in conversation with one another and the historical moment of their publication, treating cookbooks not just as archives for historical information about how people eat but also as literary, artistic, and culture-making documents. Zafar argues that cookbooks written by and for African Americans provide “recipes for respect” alongside instructions for cooking. The avenues for respect vary between authors and eras, at turns offering advice for gaining the respect of white employers or membership in the black middle-class. The act of authorship itself is presented as a way to respect and agency, leveraging domestic knowledge into public acclaim. Implicit in each of the examples is the means for generating self-respect and self-love, as cookbooks show their readers how to participate in vibrant and storied African-American foodways.

Rafia Zafar is Professor of English, African and African-American Studies, and American Culture Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. Rafia writes about the intersection of food, authorship, and American identities, nineteenth century Black writers, and the Harlem Renaissance. She is the faculty director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her new book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

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Wiley Cash, "The Last Ballad" (William Morrow, 2017)

Fri, 11 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Wiley Cash discusses his novel, The Last Ballad (William Morrow, 2017) writing fiction inspired by the South, and exploring the complexities of southern class, race, and gender relations against the backdrop of the 1929 Loray Mill strike.

Intertwining myriad voices, Wiley Cash brings to life the heartbreak and bravery of the now forgotten struggle of the labor movement in early twentieth-century America—and pays tribute to the thousands of heroic women and men who risked their lives to win basic rights for all workers. Lyrical, heartbreaking, and haunting, this eloquent novel confirms Wiley Cash’s place among our nation’s finest writers.

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Gregory P. Downs, "After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War" (Harvard UP, 2015)

Wed, 09 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

On April 8, 1865, after four years of civil war, General Robert E. Lee wrote to General Ulysses S. Grant asking for peace. Peace was beyond his authority to negotiate, Grant replied, but surrender terms he would discuss. As Gregory P. Downs, Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, reveals in this gripping history of post–Civil War America, Grant’s distinction proved prophetic, for peace would elude the South for years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Harvard University Press, 2015; Paperback Edition, 2019) argues that the war did not end with Confederate capitulation in 1865. Instead, a second phase commenced which lasted until 1871—not the project euphemistically called Reconstruction but a state of genuine belligerency whose mission was to shape the terms of peace. Using its war powers, the U.S. Army oversaw an ambitious occupation, stationing tens of thousands of troops in hundreds of outposts across the defeated South. This groundbreaking study of the post-surrender occupation makes clear that its purpose was to crush slavery and to create meaningful civil and political rights for freed people in the face of rebels’ bold resistance. But reliance on military occupation posed its own dilemmas. In areas beyond Army control, the Ku Klux Klan and other violent insurgencies created near-anarchy. Voters in the North also could not stomach an expensive and demoralizing occupation. Under those pressures, by 1871, the Civil War came to its legal end. The wartime after Appomattox disrupted planter power and established important rights, but the dawn of legal peacetime heralded the return of rebel power, not a sustainable peace. Readers can also visit the book’s companion website.

Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Evan Bennett, "When Tobacco Was King: Families, Farm Labor, and Federal Policy in the Piedmont" (UP Florida, 2014)

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Professor Evan Bennett of Florida Atlantic University, author of When Tobacco Was King: Families, Farm Labor, and Federal Policy in the Piedmont (University Press of Florida, 2015) discusses the development and demise of family tobacco farms, tobacco farming culture, and the New Deal's Federal Tobacco Program.

Tobacco has left an indelible mark on the American South, shaping the land and culture throughout the twentieth century. In the last few decades, advances in technology and shifts in labor and farming policy have altered the way of life for tobacco farmers: family farms have largely been replaced by large-scale operations dependent on hired labor, much of it from other shores. However, the mechanical harvester and the H-2A guestworker did not put an end to tobacco culture but rather sent it in new directions and accelerated the change that has always been part of the farmer’s life.

In When Tobacco Was King, Bennett examines the agriculture of the South’s original staple crop in the Old Bright Belt—a diverse region named after the unique bright, or flue-cured, tobacco variety it spawned. He traces the region’s history from Emancipation to the abandonment of federal crop controls in 2004 and highlights the transformations endured by blacks and whites, landowners and tenants, to show how tobacco farmers continued to find meaning and community in their work despite these drastic changes.

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Thomas Aiello, "The Grapevine of the Black South" (U Georgia Press, 2018)

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In the summer of 1928, William Alexander Scott began a small four-page weekly with the help of his brother Cornelius. By 1932 the Atlanta World had become a daily paper and the basis of Scott's vision for a massive Southern newspaper chain - the Southern Newspaper Syndicate, later renamed as the Scott Newspaper Syndicate. At its peak, more than 240 papers were associated with the Syndicate, making it one of the largest black press institutions in the country. However, the extent of the Syndicate's reach and its centrality to Black southern life has remained largely overlooked.

In The Grapevine of the Black South: The Scott Newspaper Syndicate in the Generation before the Civil Rights Movement (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Thomas Aiello offers the first critical history of this influential newspaper syndicate, tracing its roots in the early 1930s through to its eventual dissolution in the 1950s. During this critically important period preceding the the "civil rights era" ushered in by the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on school segregation, the Syndicate helped to shape the collective identity and community networks of the Black South. While providing local editors with a large degree of control and the flexibility to emphasize regional concerns and interests, the Syndicate gave its readers a similar set of tools from which to craft their understanding of Black life and culture, a means to document racial injustice and oppression, and an unparalleled grapevine of information and news coverage.

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Jennifer A. Jones, "The Browning of the New South" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The dawn of the new millennium bore witness to an unprecedented transformation of the population in the Southeastern United States as evidenced by Dr. Jennifer A. Jones in her new book The Browning of the New South (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Jones, an Assistant Professor of Sociology as well as Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the evolution of race relations in the face of rapid demographic change as Mexican immigrants move into the traditionally biracial American South. Employing a community-based ethnographic approach, Jones vividly illustrates shifting Southern race relations through the case study of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Browning of the New South contributes to the scholarship on immigration and racial formation by revealing the mechanisms that spur collaboration (rather than division) between Latino immigrants and African Americans in a process that Jones calls “minority linked fate.” Counter to a generally national conception of racial formation, Jones emphasizes its local nature, not simply based on preexisting racial hierarchies or phenotype but instead on personal experiences of discrimination, unique social pressures, and local political dynamics. Ultimately, this study of the newly triracial South has immense implications for the future of U.S. politics and our understanding of how race is made.

Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr.

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Jeanne Theoharis, "The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South" (NYU Press, 2019)

Mon, 06 May 2019 10:00:00 -0000

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Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, "They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South" (Yale UP, 2019)

Fri, 29 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. In her new book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019) historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding.

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Erin Stewart Mauldin, “Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South” (Oxford UP, 2018)

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 11:00:00 -0000

The antebellum South was on the road to agricultural ruin, and the Civil War put a brick on the gas pedal. In Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (Oxford University Press, 2018), a sweeping reassessment of some of the oldest questions in U.S. historiography, Erin Stewart Mauldin draws on ecology to help her offer a fresh, powerful explanation for why a region that produced so much wealth for centuries became characterized by widespread poverty in the late nineteenth century. She argues that cotton plantations were hardly ecologically sustainable enterprises, yet their habits of shifting cultivation of staple crops and free-range livestock husbandry were better suited to the region’s nutrient-poor soils and oppressive climate than the prevailing land-use practices of northern farmers. But when the war came, the crisis southern farmers had kept in the offing arrived quickly at their shores. Both armies sustained themselves by emptying the South’s granaries, devouring its animals, and razings its forests and fences. Cotton agriculture would never be the same. That is partly because the resources needed to restore it were gone, but also because freed people would not consent to returning to working in gangs on operations large enough to resume shifting cultivation and, when renting or sharecropping fragments of former plantations, refused landowner’s demands that they labor under contract after harvest to maintain the ecological integrity of someone else’s property. So the region turned to growing more cotton in more places and more intensively than before the war and depending on costly fertilizers to do so. Subsistence practices vanished, migrants fled to the cities, and debt ruled the land.

Erin Stewart Mauldin is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. She is book review editor of Agricultural History and the co-editor of A Companion to Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is

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Zachary Lechner, “The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960–1980” (U Georgia Press, 2018)

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:00:00 -0000

When talking about the American South in the second half of the twentieth century, popular discourse tended to fall into one of three camps (on occasion, two might coexist simultaneously): the “Vicious South” which was violent and regressive, the “Down Home South” which was traditional and family oriented, and the “Changing South” which was moving past its earlier racial strife. While the Vicious South archetype predominated and fit into a narrative that showed the South as un-American, unrepresentative of the larger country, and repressive, by the end of the 1960s perceptions of the South were changing. Americans in different parts of the country began to consider the different ways that the real or perceived culture of the South might offer solutions to racism, masculinity, modern ennui, and crime.

Zachary Lechner’s The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960–1980 (University of Georgia Press, 2018) looks at this cultural transformation in the United States in the period from 1960 to 1980. Lechner examines different forms of cultural production to see how the South was being understood at different moments. That understanding was in turn shaped by a desire to use elements of southern culture to overcome social and cultural problems in the United States. Shows like Andy Griffith showed a traditional southern way of life that was able to work past the problems of consumerist modernity, movies like Walking Tall showed men using violence to restore order and to end crime, and the musical counterculture found both musical technique and personal style to mine in country music and the South. This culminated in the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, whose persona was built in part on having insight into overcoming the racial and social strife that had plagued the rest of the country.

Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

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William D. Bryan, “The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South” (U Georgia Press, 2018)

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Southern capitalists of the postbellum era have been called many things, but never conservationists. Until now. Environmental historian William D. Bryan has written a brilliantly disorienting reassessment of the South’s economic development in the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression. In The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South (University of Georgia Press, 2018), Bryan finds that in all corners of the region’s 800,000 square miles debates about reconstructing the South’s economy focused on how industries could derive profits from its natural resources in perpetuity. Boosters imagined a New South that would not exhaust its soils, denude its forests, empty its mines, or squander the potential of underappreciated resources. They spoke the language of conservation as enthusiastically as Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, but the South’s new, “permanent” economy was to be constructed by private interests alone—a pursuit animated in part by the specter of federal intervention if they were to fail. Bryan shows that this concern with permanence helps explain many of the era’s signature developments, such as the widespread adoption of fertilizer, the rapid development of the tourism sector, and the appearance of all manner of “waste” industries, from cottonseed to cement. But this more careful stewardship of resources came at great social and environmental costs. Agriculture remained a low-wage, labor-intensive sector, and new industries were no better. For boosters, this was a feature, not a bug. A permanent economy would maintain not only resource stocks but also white supremacy and the power of elites. And ensuring the persistence of natural resources was no safeguard of environmental quality. Many of the new enterprises that succeeded in sustaining their resource base, like the paper industry, exacted the greatest toll on southern air, waters, and bodies. Bryan has not only given us a more convincing, nuanced, and unified account of the New South, he also offers a cautionary tale of the dangers of a politics of sustainability too narrowly shaped around profits and growth.

William D. Bryan is an environmental historian based in Atlanta.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects.

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Charles Hughes, “Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South” (UNC Press, 2015)

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 10:00:00 -0000

As America changed in the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, the Southern music industry was changing as well. The music studios of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals–known as the “country-soul triangle”–began producing some of the most important music of the 1960s and 1970s. In Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Charles Hughes chronicles the ways in which inter-racialism, cultural appropriation, racism, and racial politics affected the musical studios and the country and soul industry. How could two separate musical sounds, one white and country, and the other Black and soul, be considered completely separate when many of the musicians and producers worked in the same buildings? Charles Hughes explains all!

Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews.

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Confederate Monuments with Kevin Levin

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 09:00:00 -0000

Can we change minds about Confederate monuments? Kevin Levin is a historian and educator studying the American Civil War and memory. His book, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), was just released in paperback and he is the author of a recent article in the Atlantic Why I Changed My Mind About Confederate Monuments.

The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project.

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Stephanie Hinnershitz, “A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South” (UNC Press, 2017)

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 11:00:00 -0000

In her recent book, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American Civil Rights in the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Stephanie Hinnershitz (Cleveland State University) examines the important but overlooked contributions of Asian Americans to civil rights activism in the U.S. South. Hinnershitz takes a thematic focus across the long 20th century to show how Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, and South Asians contested discrimination in land ownership, education, sexual relations and marriage, and business entrepreneurship. From “self-Orientalizing” as non-colored people to invoking their privileges as foreign nationals or refugees, the strategies and arguments that Asian Americans employed in the long and uneven struggle for equality were as varied as they were creative. Hinnershitz uses a wide-ranging source base including legal opinions, newspapers, and oral histories to narrate heartbreaking losses as well as surprising victories, such as the injunction against Klan violence that Vietnamese fishermen won in Texas in 1981. A Different Shade of Justice will interest readers of 20th-century US history, legal history, southern history, and Asian American history.

Ian Shin is C3-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the History Department at Bates College, where his teaching and research focus on the history of the U.S. in the world and Asian American history. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of Chinese art collecting in the United States in the early 20th century. Ian welcomes listener questions and feedback at kshin@bates.edu.

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Michael W. Twitty, “The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South” (Amistad, 2017)

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 10:00:00 -0000

The “ownership” of Southern food is a divisive cultural issue, reflective of the ongoing struggle for racial justice in America. Michael Twitty shares with us that struggle in The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (Harper Collins: Amistad 2017). He brings to life the unsung heroes of American food history, the black cooks in slavery and freedom who created an innovative and syncretic cuisine. Like them, he builds upon the South’s diverse botanical ecosystems, a continent of indigenous nations, and the long roots of memory, extending back across the middle passage to West Africa.

For Twitty, this is also a tale of family. He shares his ancestors experiences through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents. He travels from abandoned cotton plantations to black-owned organic farms, from synagogues in Georgia to vodun rituals in New Orleans.

As Twitty takes us on this journey, he shows how food and memory together can heal. He reminds that as uncomfortable as honest conversation about racism’s legacy can be, its the only path to rejuvenating body, soul, and American community.

Jeremy Wood is a Seattle appellate attorney. Much of his scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. He also serves as Co-Chair for the Seattle City Human Rights Commission and as a Jewish educator. You can learn more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@gmail.com.

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Brent Walker, “The Hidden South–Come Home” (Beaver’s Pond Press, 2016)

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 17:07:00 -0000

The Hidden South–Come Home (Beaver’s Pond Press, 2016) is the result of an ongoing project that documents intimate stories of people who are often overlooked in society. Photographer and author Brent Walker traveled around the southern United States meeting and interacting with people of different backgrounds and experiences. Many of his subjects live with addiction and struggle daily with their survival. Started in September 2014, The Hidden South Come Home soon developed a large online presence and subsequent following, and in 2015, the project followers supported the funding the book. After almost a year in production, the book was published in early 2016. Since the release of the book, Brent spends his time speaking, teaching, and working on a second book, which he considers a second phase of the project.

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Daniel Tortora, "Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southeast, 1756-1763" (UNC Press, 2015)

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 09:00:00 -0000

Long viewed conventionally through the lens of inter-European/colonist conflict, warfare in colonial era North America is currently experiencing a resurgence as a new generation of military historians employ a variety of tools and methods borrowed from other fields and disciplines. Our latest guest, Daniel Tortora, does so in his book Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southwest, 1756-1763. By focusing on the French and Indian War's Southern theater, particularly in the two Carolinas and Virginia, Tortora crafts a unique account of an area generally overlooked in the face of the larger body of scholarship focused on events in the Northern Colonies and Canada. Carolina in Crisis employs a conceptual narrative and analytical framework often associated with Borderlands theory to craft an intricate account of conflict and how it was viewed across three different cultural boundaries: white European, native American, and enslaved Africans. The end product is a rich and rewarding addition to the historiography of early American warfare.

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Julie M. Weise, “Corazon de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South Since 1910” (UNC Press, 2015)

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 12:18:00 -0000

Julie M. Weise‘s new book Corazon de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South Since 1910 (UNC Press, 2015) is the first book to comprehensively document Mexicans’ and Mexican Americans’ long history of migration to the U.S. South. It recounts the untold histories of Mexicanos’ migrations to New Orleans, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina as far back as 1910. In the heart of Dixie, Mexicanos navigated the Jim Crow system, cultivated community in the cotton fields, purposefully appealed for help to the Mexican government, shaped the southern conservative imagination in the wake of the civil rights movement, and embraced their own version of suburban living at the turn of the twenty-first century. Rooted in U.S. and Mexican archival research, oral history interviews, and family photographs, Corazon de Dixie unearths not just the facts of Mexicanos’ long-standing presence in the U.S. South but also their own expectations, strategies, and dreams.

Also, check out the book’s companion website here or primary sources, teaching materials, and more.

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Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, “Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights” (UNC Press, 2015)

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 13:22:00 -0000

In Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights (The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, a writer and former journalist, introduces us to the larger-than-life personality Harry Golden. A writer, publisher, and humorist, as well as activist, Golden used his popularity and incredibly wide network for a variety of causes, most notably the civil rights movement.

Hartnett explores the ways Golden utilized his talents (he was, at his core, a salesman) to make America more equal and free.

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Glenn Feldman, “Nation within a Nation: The American South and the Federal Government” (UP of Florida, 2014)

Mon, 18 Aug 2014 06:00:00 -0000

Glenn Feldman is the editor of Nation within a Nation: The American South and the Federal Government (University Press of Florida, 2014). Feldman is professor of history at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Painting Dixie Red: When, Where, Why, and How the South Became Republican and Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South. Some of political scientists included in the volume are: Thomas Schaller, Allan McBride, and Natalie Motise Davis.

In the introduction, Feldman writes “No other region has been more important than the South in determining the course of U.S. politics and history. This was so in 1776, and 1865, and is still true today, although in vastly different ways.” Nation within a Nation sets out to explore this history. The book is an interesting read for those concerned with the history of the South, but also for those interested in how newer issues such as the US-Mexican border and criminal justice policies fit within the region’s history. The chapters by Allan McBride and Natalie Motise Davis, in particular, provide new information on the relationship between the South and the Tea Party.

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Glenn Feldman, “The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865-1944” (University of Alabama Press, 2013)

Mon, 25 Nov 2013 06:00:00 -0000

Glenn Feldman is the author of The Irony of the Solid South: Democrats, Republicans, and Race, 1865-1944 (Alabama UP 2013). He is professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the author of eight other books.

Feldman’s book is a deeply provocative analysis of southern politics and political history. He explains the recurring themes in southern politics as an outgrowth of “Reconstruction Syndrome”. Themes of anti-government, anti-taxation, and deep suspicion of outsiders (African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants), run throughout the history of southern politics, and remain today. Feldman focuses much of his book on showing that the Democratic Party lost the south long before the passage of the civil rights laws in the 1960s. He tracks the shift in political allegiances back to the 1930s and even earlier.

The book challenges conventional notions and is likely to stimulate debate and controversy. It is a worthwhile read for historians of the time period and political scientists, alike.

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Jonathan D. Wells, “Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South” (Cambridge UP, 2011)

Wed, 23 Oct 2013 15:26:00 -0000

It’s getting harder and harder to trailblaze in the field of American Studies. More and more, writers have to follow paths created by others, imposing new interpretations on old ones in never-ending cycles of revision. But Jonathan Daniel Wells did find something new: Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge UP, 2011; paperback, 2013) is the first to focus in on women journalists, both black and white, in the nineteenth-century American South. The South had a vital periodical marketplace where curious women could engage with politics, belles lettres, science, diplomacy, and other allegedly unfeminine subjects. Examining evidence from both writers and readers, Wells’s book asks questions about literary culture, celebrity, the limits of dissent, and North-South differences that readers will find refreshing and engaging.

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Robert Cassanello, “To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville” (University Press of Florida, 2013)

Mon, 30 Sep 2013 14:34:00 -0000

The story of the rise of Jim Crow in Jacksonville, Florida is in many ways illustrative of the challenges facing newly emancipated African Americans throughout the South with local officials erecting barriers to black participation; blacks building institutions to overcome those obstacles; then Southern bigots using the reaction of blacks as justification for both the initial barriers and further draconian measures.

This usually involved labeling black political action as in some way primitive, corrupt or unfairly self-interested. For example, many in the white establishment in Jacksonville resented that blacks voted for Republicans out of loyalty, yet they also attacked blacks for voting for ‘reform Democrats’ out of self -interest. So, the solution? Political education of some kind? Outreach perhaps? No, instead they implemented what was called the ‘Australian ballot’: a subway map style list of candidates with intersecting names and titles intended to either confuse or disqualify many black voters.

This hostility to black political agency extended to all aspects of public life in Jacksonville, with each reaction forcing blacks further from power and from view. Robert Cassanello’s To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville (University Press of Florida, 2013) explores this dynamic in rich detail, helping further our understanding of the post Civil War but pre- Civil Rights era in the South. Robert was kind enough to speak with me. I hope you enjoy.

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Angela Pulley Hudson, “Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South” (University of North Carolina Press, 2010)

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 15:58:00 -0000

Most historians have understood Native American history through the use of the “middle ground” metaphor. Notably, historian Richard White used this metaphor to explain the social relationships between Native American with European Americans in the Great Lakes region in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. Increasingly, more studies have also emerged to explain such encounters between Native Americans and African Americans, particularly in the Southeast. Angela Pulley Hudson, Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M, is firmly engaged within this wide body of literature in her first published monograph, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). She vividly describes the history of Creeks and their ideas about encounters with outsiders of their land along the geographic borders of Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee from the early national era to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Her work not only contributes to the analysis of contested borderlands in American history, but also complicates our understanding about the intersections of racial, gender and kinship boundaries in an eloquent way that makes for a great read.

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Jeff Wilson, “Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South” (UNC Press, 2012)

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 20:33:00 -0000

Americanists have long employed a trope of regionalism to better understand American religions, beliefs, and practices. As many of us know, either by academic study or, more often, personal experience, the United States feels different in New England as compared to the Midwest, the West Coast, or the Deep South. Regional variations on culture play an important role in shaping our identities and informing our religious practices.

Scholars of American Buddhism, however, have been slow to recognize the importance of this trope in how they study Buddhism in the United States. In his new book, Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), Jeff Wilson approaches his subject with just this sort of regional gaze. How is Buddhism fundamentally different in the American South as opposed to the West Coast where the majority of ethnographic surveys to date have been done? How do Buddhist negotiate their minority religious status in an overwhelmingly Evangelical Christian culture? How does the physical environment affect their practices? How do they engage with the South’s specific racial history? The focus of his work is one particular community, the Ekoji Buddhist Sangha in Richmond, Virginia. Housed under one roof are five different Buddhist communities who must, first out of necessity and later out of friendship, share space and practice together.

Apart from his use of regionalism as a methodological tool, it is this ethnographic survey that makes Wilson’s book truly engaging. Dixie Dharma is the first book to focus on Buddhism as practiced in the American South, making it an important contribution to an emerging field of study.

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Malinda Lowery, “Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation” (UNC Press, 2010

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:40:00 -0000

When an Atlantic Coastline Railroad train pulled into Red Springs, North Carolina, the conductor faced a difficult dilemma. Whom to allow in coach class with whites and whom to relegate to the back? In an effort to clarify the matter, the mayor of neighboring Pembroke demanded that the railroad build three separate waiting rooms at the town train station.

Such confusion was common place in Robeson County, North Carolina, during the height of the Jim Crow era. That’s because Robeson is home to the Lumbee People, the largest Indian nation east of the Mississippi River and a thorn in the side of those who sought to maintain a simple black/white dichotomy in the South.

Malinda Mayor Lowery’s new book Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) dramatically rewrites accepted Jim Crow narratives. Not only did Indian communities persist in the U.S. South after the Removal – the period of ethnic cleansing generally cited as the denouement of indigenous peoples in the region – but they complicated the racial landscape in unexpected ways, negotiating a space of autonomy and independence with the forces of white supremacy in 20th century North Carolina.

Lowery, a Lumbee herself and assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, offers us that unique combination of scholarly rigor and passionate prose, exploring the complex process of identity formation in the face of – and occasionally in concert with – segregation, federal bureaucracy and the discourse of “race” and “blood.” For students and scholars of Native American Studies, Southern history, and the Jim Crow era, it is essential reading.

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New Books in the American South

Shannon McKenna Schmidt, "You Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson’s Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode With Her" (Sourcebooks, 2026)

Jason R. Young, "The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2026)

Constance Bailey et al. "Get It While It's Hot: Gas Station, Roadside, and Convenience Cuisine in the U.S. South" (LSU Press, 2026)

Kasey Jernigan, "Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity" (U Arizona Press, 2026)

Mark A. Johnson, "American Bacon: The History of a Food Phenomenon" (U Georgia Press, 2026)

Voices from a Century of Struggle: Writings of the Jim Crow Era

Michael W. Tuck, "The Castle Slaves of the Gambia River: A Creole Community in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World" (Brill, 2026)

Lindsay Rae Smith Privette, "The Surgeon's Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Abe Walker, "Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South" (Temple UP, 2026)

Antwain K. Hunter, "A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865" (UNC Press, 2025)

Danielle Wiggins, "Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Rebecca Sharpless, "People of the Wheat: Culture and Cultivation in North Texas" (U Texas Press, 2026)

Paul Gillingham, "Mexico: A 500-Year History" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025)

Sarah Jones Weicksel, "A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era" (UNC Press, 2026)

Fred Turner on Countercultures, Cybercultures, and Californian and Texan Ideologies

Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)

Danielle N. Boaz, "Voodoo: The History of a Racial Slur" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Blair Kelley, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class" (LIveright, 2023)

Thomas Aiello, "Return of the King: The Rebirth of Muhammad Ali and the Rise of Atlanta" (U Nebraska Press, 2025)

O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight, "We Paved the Way: Black Women and the Charleston Hospital Workers' Campaign" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, "Taco" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Caroline Peyton, "Radioactive Dixie: A Nuclear History of the American South" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

Brian Martin, "From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War" (ECW Press, 2022)

Sonya Lea, "American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture" (UP of Kentucky, 2025)

W. Ralph Eubanks, "When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land" (Beacon Press, 2026)

T. R. Johnson, "New Orleans: A Writer's City" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Robert D. Bland, "Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation" (UNC Press, 2026)

Jeff Roche, "The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right" (U Texas Press, 2025)

David Silkenat, "Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South" (Oxford UP, 2022)

Sylvia D. Hoffert, "Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle: Gossip, Rumor, and Reputation in a Small Southern Town" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

Gregory S. Wilson, "Poison Powder: The Kepone Disaster in Virginia and Its Legacy" (U Georgia Press, 2023)

Beau Cleland, "Between King Cotton and Queen Victoria: How Pirates, Smugglers, and Scoundrels Almost Saved the Confederacy" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

Gwyneth Mellinger, "Racializing Objectivity: How the White Southern Press Used Journalism Standards to Defend Jim Crow" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)

Erika Pani, "Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848-1867" (UNC ﻿Press, 2025)

Karen Auman, "The Good Forest: The Salzburgers, Success, and the Plan for Georgia" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Doug MacCash, "Mardi Gras Beads" (Louisiana UP, 2022)

Clint Smith, "How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America" (Little, Brown and Company, 2021)

Diane T. Feldman, "Borrowed Land, Stolen Labor, and the Holy Spirit: The Struggle for Power and Equality in Holmes County, Mississippi" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Amanda Laury Kleintop, "Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Michael W. Twitty, "Recipes from the American South" (Phaidon Press, 2025)

Kalle Kananoja, "Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

Michael T. Bertrand, "Southern History Remixed: On Rock 'n' Roll and the Dilemma of Race" (UP Florida, 2024)

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, "Fighting with the Past: How Seventeenth-Century History Shaped the American Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

Claire Whitlinger, "Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi" (UNC Press, 2020)

Constance Bailey, "Conversations with Kiese Laymon" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Philis Barragán-Goetz, "Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas" (U Texas Press, 2020)

Uzma Quraishi, "Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War" (UNC Press, 2020)

Marlee S. Bunch, "Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era"

Christopher M. Reali, "Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

Harriet Jacobs, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (Norton, 2025)

Matthew R. Sparks and Olivia Sizemore, "Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)

Meredith McCarroll, "Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film" (U Georgia Press, 2018)

Stephanie McCurry, "Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War" (Harvard UP, 2019)

Arianne Edmonds, "We Now Belong to Ourselves: J. L. Edmonds, the Black Press, and Black Citizenship in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Random House, 2023)

Charlotte Bentley, "New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859" (U of Chicago Press, 2022)

Ahmad Greene-Hayes, "Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Jeremy Black, "The Civil War" (Saint Augustine's Press, 2025)

Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth, "Finding the Singing Spruce: Musical Instrument Makers and Appalachia's Mountain Forests" (West Virginia UP, 2023)

Julia Brock, "Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South" (UNC Press, 2025)

John Bardes, "The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930" (UNC Press, 2024)

Bryan D. Jones, The Southern Fault Line: How Race, Class, and Region Shaped One Family's History" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Kathryn L. Beasley, "The Proof Is in the Dough: Rural Southern Women, Extension, and Making Money" (University of Georgia Press, 2025)

Victoria Bynum, "Deep Roots, Broken Branches: A History and Memoir" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Frank X Walker, "Load in Nine Times: Poems" (Liveright, 2024)

Carrie Helms Tippen, "Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)

Jennifer Lynn Gross, "Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South" (LSU Press, 2025)

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice

Frederick Knight, "Black Elders: The Meaning of Age in American Slavery and Freedom" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Lesley J. Gordon, "Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Megan Hunt, "Southern by the Grace of God: Religion, Race, and Civil Rights in Hollywood's American South" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Knopf, 2025)

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, "Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2023)

"Steadfast Democrats" Five Years Later: A Conversation with Chryl N. Laird

Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850" (UNC Press, 2025)

Jeffrey Thomas Perry, "Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)

Benjamin Heber Johnson, "Texas: An American History" (Yale UP, 2025)

The Soundworld of Harriet Tubman

The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn

Erika Pani, "Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848-1867" (UNC Press, 2025)