books

• 
• SOURCE: WNYC
  10/5/2021
  

  Keisha Blain Joins Melissa Harris Perry and Shanta Covington to Talk Fannie Lou Hamer and Black Freedom

  Award-winning historian and New York Times best-selling author Keisha Blain joins us to discuss her new book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America and the relevance of the civil and voting rights icon today.

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  8/16/2021
  

  The US is Not a "Nation of Immigrants" (Excerpt)

  by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  Celebrations of multiculturalism obscure the country’s settler colonial history—and the role that immigrants play in perpetuating it, argues Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in a new book excerpted here.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/16/2021
  

  Where America Went Wrong in Afghanistan (Review Essay)

  by Fredrik Logevall

  "It will be up to historians of the future, writing with broad access to official documents and with the kind of detachment that only time brings, to fully explain the remarkable early-morning scene at Bagram and all that led up to it. But there’s much we can already learn — abundant material is available."

• 
• SOURCE: NBC News
  8/3/2021
  

  Historian Rebecca Hall's New Graphic Novel Highlights Women's Role in Slave Revolts

  With illustrator Hugo Martinez, Rebecca Hall's debut graphic novel examines women's roles in slave rebellions during the Middle Passage and in the Americas. 

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  7/5/2021
  

  AAIHS Book Club: Jean Casimir's "The Haitians" (Convenes Online in August)

  The African American Intellectual History Society will convene an online book club discussing Jean Casimir's "The Haitians: A Decolonial History" with events beginning in August. 

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Review
  6/30/2021
  

  Looking for Nat Turner

  Christopher Tomlins' new book takes seriously the apocalyptic Christianity of Nat Turner, viewing it not as a metaphor for liberation but a key part of how Turner understood freedom. 

• 
• SOURCE: Woodrow Wilson Center and National History Center
  6/8/2021
  

  For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality (Washington History Seminar, June 14)

  In a bold rewriting of twentieth-century political history, Dorothy Sue Cobble reclaims social democracy as a central thread of American feminism and shows how global forces, peoples, and ideas shaped US politics and social movements.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/28/2021
  

  Was the Constitutional Right to Bear Arms Designed to Protect Slavery?

  Randall Kennedy reviews Carol Anderson's "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America," and charges that Anderson overstates the influence of suppressing slave rebellion on the drafting of the Second Amendment. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/12/2021
  

  Elizabeth Hinton: Unearthing the Roots of Black Rebellion

  Elizabeth Hinton's new book argues that anti-police uprisings, commonly called "riots," were frequent and widespread in American Black communities in the 1960s, and should be understood as a political movement against inequality and the inherently abusive nature of the "war on crime." 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  5/11/2021
  

  Ending the Kennedy Romance (Frederick Logevall's JFK Bio Reviewed)

  by Michael Kazin

  Frederick Logevall's biography, written by a scholar who didn't experience the Camelot myth firsthand, should point toward a clearer-headed consideration of JFK's legacy, argues Michael Kazin. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  5/3/2021
  

  White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea, by Tyler Stovall

  Tyler Stovall's new book argues that Enlightenment concepts of liberty and the slave trade were not contradictory; whiteness and freedom were mutually necessary to each other. 

• 
• SOURCE: Car and Driver
  4/25/2021
  

  Author Mia Bay Talks About Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance

  Mia Bay's new book examines how the forces of Black freedom and White supremacy collided over freedom of movement. 

• SOURCE: Majority Report with Sam Seder
  4/19/2021
  

  How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America w/ Joshua D. Rothman

  Historian Joshua D. Rothman discusses "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America," a new book linking the internal slave trade to the development of American capitalism. 

• 
• SOURCE: Arkansas Democrat & Gazette
  4/11/2021
  

  Unsung and Unknown — Graphic Biography Details Life of First Black Lieutenant Governor, Oscar Dunn

  Professor Brian Mitchell's path into history began with a teacher's disbelief that one of his relatives had been the Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana. He now tells the story of Oscar Dunn in a graphic form to make it as widely accessible as possible. 

• 
• SOURCE: Oxford (OH) Observer
  4/9/2021
  

  Miami Professor Writes Book for Young Readers about Roosevelt’s Fight with Polio

  Journalism professor and FDR biographer James Tobin describes the work of making the story of Roosevelt's battle with polio and its effect on his political life accessible to young readers.

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  4/8/2021
  

  Black Soldiers and the Civil War

  by Aston Gonzalez

  Deborah Willis's book "The Black Civil War Soldier" utilizes visual imagery other historians have often passed over to describe how Black soldiers understood military service in relation to their hopes for future economic, political, and familial security. 

• 
• SOURCE: New Statesman
  4/6/2021
  

  Can Joe Biden Replicate FDR’s Success in Rebuilding the Democrats’ Coalition?

  Eric Rauchway's latest book on the FDR era shows that the New Deal was a complex undertaking, administered often through local channels, which meant it sometimes enabled democracy and sometimes suppressed it. The Biden administration can win allegiance from voters by expanding the safety net and strategic spending, but it won't be simple. 

• 
• SOURCE: OU Daily
  4/6/2021
  

  'This is still being suppressed': OU professor's book of recovered photos preserves history of Tulsa Race Massacre

  by Ari Fife

  Oklahoma University historian Karlos Hill has published a photographic history of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, working to bridge images often created by hostile whites to the experiences of Black survivors. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  3/24/2021
  

  Paleo Con

  by Daniel Immerwahr

  Why do the lifestyles of paleolithic hunter-gatherers repeatedly pop up as foils for western capitalist modernity? 

• 
• SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
  3/26/2021
  

  Lindsay Chervinsky's Five Best Books on Presidential Cabinets

  The author of an acclaimed book about George Washington's creation of the cabinet recommends five books about presidential cabinets, including those of Lincoln, Eisenhower and JFK, the unofficial team of African American advisors to FDR, and the consequential relationship between George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.