Shows / New Books in African American Studies
New Books in African American Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in African American Studies
Javier Wallace, "Basketball Trafficking: Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams" (Duke UP, 2025)
Every year, hundreds of international student athletes arrive in the U.S. chasing their basketball dreams — many on F-1 student visas. But for some their…
- New Books in African American Studies
Patrick Parr, "Malcolm Before X" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
Drawing upon interviews, correspondence, and nearly 2000 pages of never-before-used prison records, Malcolm Before X is the definitive examination of the…
- New Books in African American Studies
Ashley D. Farmer, "Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore" (Pantheon, 2025)
In the world of Black radical politics, the name Audley Moore commands unquestioned respect. Across the nine decades of her life, Queen Mother Moore…
- New Books in African American Studies
Michael W. Twitty, "Recipes from the American South" (Phaidon Press, 2025)
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…
- New Books in African American Studies
Peter D. Blackmer, "Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers" (UVA Press, 2025)
Unleashing Black Power: Grassroots Organizing in Harlem and the Advent of the Long, Hot Summers (UVA Press, 2025) explores the local dynamics, national…
- New Books in African American Studies
Peter C. Zimmerman, "The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it. In the…
- New Books in African American Studies
Bill V. Mullen, "James Baldwin: Living in Fire" (Pluto Press, 2019)
In the first major biography of Baldwin in more than a decade, James Baldwin: Living in Fire (Pluto Press, 2019), Bill V. Mullen celebrates the personal and…
- New Books in African American Studies
Darren Mueller, "At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz" (Duke UP, 2024)
In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and production of jazz…
- New Books in African American Studies
Melissa M. Matthes, "When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Since World War II, Protestant sermons have been an influential tool for defining American citizenship in the wake of national crises. In the aftermath of…
- New Books in African American Studies
Claire Whitlinger, "Between Remembrance and Repair: Commemorating Racial Violence in Philadelphia, Mississippi" (UNC Press, 2020)
Few places are more notorious for civil rights–era violence than Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murders. Yet in a…
- New Books in African American Studies
John Minton, "Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
In the late 1930s, fieldworkers with the Works Progress Administration interviewed about 3,500 formerly enslaved people resulting in approximately 20,000 pages…
- New Books in African American Studies
Zara Anishanslin, "The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution" (Harvard UP, 2025)
The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists armed…
- New Books in African American Studies
Marion Orr, "House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr." (UNC Press, 2025)
At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922-1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980…
- New Books in African American Studies
Meredith L. Roman, "The Black Panthers and the Soviets: A Comparative History of Human Rights Movements" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
The contemporaneous movements for human rights that Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers waged during the 1960s are analysed in a comparative fashion…
- New Books in African American Studies
Ashleigh Wade on How Black Girls Use Social Media
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Ashleigh Greene Wade, Assistant Professor of Digital Studies with a joint appointment in Media Studies and…
- New Books in African American Studies
Mary E. Hicks, "Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2025)
From the bustling ports of Lisbon to the coastal inlets of the Bight of Benin to the vibrant waterways of Bahia, Black mariners were integral to every space of…
- New Books in African American Studies
Constance Bailey, "Conversations with Kiese Laymon" (UP of Mississippi, 2025)
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…
- New Books in African American Studies
Deborah Willis, "The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship" (NYU Press, 2025)
A stunning collection of stoic portraits and intimate ephemera from the lives of Black Civil War soldiers Though both the Union and Confederate armies excluded…
- New Books in African American Studies
Nicholas Bromell, "The Time is Always Now: Black Political Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2013)
Nick Bromell is the author of By the Sweat of the Brow: Labor and Literature in Antebellum American Culture and Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in…
- New Books in African American Studies
Kenja McCray, "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025)
Academics and popular commentors have expressed common sentiments about the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—that it was male dominated and overrun…
- New Books in African American Studies
Calvin Schermerhorn, "The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made" (Yale UP, 2025)
Dr. J Calvin Schermerhorn is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His books…
- New Books in African American Studies
Jonathan White and Lucas Morel, "Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln" (Reedy Press, 2025)
In Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln (Reedy Press, 2025), acclaimed scholars Lucas E. Morel and Jonathan W. White…
- New Books in African American Studies
Marcus Rediker, "Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea" (Penguin Group, 2025)
Conspiracy, mutiny and liberation on America’s waterfront by the award-winning author of The Slave Ship. Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping…
- New Books in African American Studies
Jessica B. Harris, "Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine" (Clarkson Potter, 2025)
Discover the sweeping story of how Indigenous, European, and African traditions intertwined to form an entirely new cuisine, with over 90 recipes for the…
- New Books in African American Studies
Keisha N. Blain, "Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights" (W.W. Norton, 2025)
Even before they were recognized as citizens of the United States, Black women understood that the fights for civil and human rights were inseparable. Over the…
- New Books in African American Studies
Maria R. Montalvo, "Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)
Explores the relationship between the production of enslaved property and the production of the past in the antebellum United States. It is extraordinarily…
- New Books in African American Studies
Susana M. Morris, "Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler" (Amistad Press, 2025)
A magnificent cultural biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (Amistad, 2025) charts the life of one of our greatest writers…
- New Books in African American Studies
Patrice D. Douglass, "Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence" (Stanford UP, 2025)
In Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence (Stanford UP, 2025) Patrice D. Douglass interrogates the relationship between sexual…
- New Books in African American Studies
Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football
Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality…
- New Books in African American Studies
Elaine Weiss, "Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Elaine Weiss, acclaimed author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, follows that magisterial work with a work of equal scholarly significance…
- New Books in African American Studies
Gregg Mitman, "Empire of Rubber: Firestone's Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia" (New Press, 2021)
In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s…
- New Books in African American Studies
LaShawn Harris, "Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City" (Beacon, 2025)
On October 29, 1984, 66-year-old beloved Black disabled grandmother Eleanor Bumpurs was murdered in her own home. A public housing tenant 4 months behind on…
- New Books in African American Studies
Steve Luxenberg, "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation" (Norton, 2019)
Steve Luxenberg has created an unusual history of the famous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson and the 19th century’s segregationist practices in his book…
- New Books in African American Studies
Timothy Messer-Kruse, "Slavery’s Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution" (LSU Press, 2024)
Slavery's Fugitives and the Making of the United States Constitution (LSU Press, 2024) unearths a long-hidden factor that led to the Constitutional Convention…
- New Books in African American Studies
Rima Vesely-Flad, "Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation" (NYU Press, 2022)
Finalist, Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Constructive-Reflective Studies, given by the American Academy of ReligionExplores how Black Buddhist…
- New Books in African American Studies
Shennette Garrett-Scott, "Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal" (Columbia UP, 2019)
Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard? Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South. Shennette Garrett-Scott's new book…
- New Books in African American Studies
Glenn Ligon, "Distinguishing Piss from Rain" (Hauser & Wirth, 2024)
An expansive volume featuring over two decades of incisive reflections on race, art and pop culture by one of the greatest artists working today This…
- New Books in African American Studies
Marlee S. Bunch, "Unlearning the Hush: Oral Histories of Black Female Educators in Mississippi in the Civil Rights Era"
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…
- New Books in African American Studies
Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson, "Racial Resentment in the Political Mind" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson challenge the commonly held notion that all racial negativity, disagreements…
- New Books in African American Studies
Christopher M. Reali, "Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
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…
- New Books in African American Studies
Harriet Jacobs, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (Norton, 2025)
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…
- New Books in African American Studies
Bryon L. Garner, "Black Veteranality: Military Service and the Illusion of Inclusive Patriotism" (Routledge, 2025)
Military service in the United States has long been associated with patriotism. But for Black veterans, this association with patriotism, love for country, is…
- New Books in African American Studies
Manuel Barcia, "The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2020)
As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic…
- New Books in African American Studies
Kenneth Jones, "African American Males and Video Games: How Gaming Technology Can Motivate and Enhance Learning" (Myers Education, 2025)
African American males are confronted with formidable barriers in their pursuit of quality education, resulting in stark disparities in academic performance…
- New Books in African American Studies
Stephanie McCurry, "Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War" (Harvard UP, 2019)
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…
- New Books in African American Studies
Irvin Weathersby Jr., "In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space" (Viking, 2025)
Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the…
- New Books in African American Studies
Kit W. Myers, "The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States"(U California Press, 2025)
This episode features Dr. Kit W. Myers, associate professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced, discussing…
- New Books in African American Studies
Teacher by Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives
Teacher By Teacher traces the journey of the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education and is a deeply personal love letter to all the teachers in our lives. The story…
- New Books in African American Studies
Neil Roberts, “A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass” (UP of Kentucky, 2018)
The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’ birth. It can hardly be said that scholars have neglected Douglass; indeed, he is one of the…
- New Books in African American Studies
Arianne Edmonds, "We Now Belong to Ourselves: J. L. Edmonds, the Black Press, and Black Citizenship in America" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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…
- New Books in African American Studies
Dan-el Padilla Peralta, "Classicism and Other Phobias" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton University Press, 2025) shows how the concept of “classicism” lacks the capacity to affirm the aesthetic value of Black…
- New Books in African American Studies
Asha Jeffers, "Against! Rebellious Daughters in Black Immigrant Fiction in the United States" (Ohio State UP, 2025)
Against! is the first book-length study of Afro-Caribbean and African immigrant and second-generation writing in the United States. In it, Asha Jeffers…
- New Books in African American Studies
Foluke Taylor, "Unruly Therapeutic: Black Feminist Writings and Practices in Living Room" (Norton, 2023)
In 1977, The Combahee River Collective, a group of Black American feminists issued a statement communicating the harrowing following: “The psychological toll…
- New Books in African American Studies
Michael Vorenberg, "Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War" (Random House, 2023)
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…
- New Books in African American Studies
Shani Adia Evans, "We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods of Northeast…
- New Books in African American Studies
Michael Stauch, "Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
The criminalization of Black youth was central to policing in urban America during the civil rights era and continued in Detroit even after the rise of Black…
- New Books in African American Studies
Joseph O. Jewell, "White Man’s Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era" (UNC Press, 2023)
In the financial chaos of the last few decades, increasing wealth inequality has shaken people's expectations about middle-class stability. At the same time…
- New Books in African American Studies
Ashley Howard, "Midwest Unrest: 1960s Urban Rebellions and the Black Freedom Movement" (UNC Press, 2025)
This episode features Dr. Ashley Howard, assistant professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Iowa, discussing her book, Midwest…
- New Books in African American Studies
The Tug of War: Why Racial Progress Often Meets Resistance and Backlash
Dr. Karyne Messina and Dr. Felicia Powell-Williams, the host and co-host of “Psychoanalytic Perspectives of Racism in America” sponsored by The American…
- New Books in African American Studies
Katie Mitchell, "Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores" (Random House, 2025)
Traversing teeming metropolises and tiny towns, Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores (Random House, 2025) explores these spaces, chronicling…