Advertise on podcast: New Books in African American Studies

Kelly Lytle Hernández joins Michael Stauch to discuss how the US immigration system has always been “racist by design.” Many Americans’ understanding of the immigration system begins with the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late nineteenth century. In Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control (Norton, 2026), Lytle Hernández expands that history by a full century, showing how the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s inspired not only America’s first immigration bans (to prevent news of a free Black republic from reaching our shores) but also its first refugee resettlement program (to welcome and support Haiti’s evicted enslavers.) She explains how Chinese Exclusion led the Supreme Court to disconnect immigration laws from the constitution. She reveals how eugenicists and Jim Crow segregationists built much of our current immigration regime as expressly "whites-only," and shows how during the Civil Rights Movement, Congress amended this system but never abolished it, leaving many of the regime’s racist rules and rituals intact today.  Highlights include:  - How an “Exclusion Quartet” of rulings by the Supreme Court in the late 19th century “unhinged” the Constitution from immigration policy; - How the “family reunification” clause of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, meant to favor European migrants, combined with global instability in the 1970s and ‘80s to create an enormous wave of non-white immigrants to the United States; - What changed (and didn’t change) in immigration policy during World War II and the Cold War;  - How guestworker programs, asylum restrictions, and the US “visa dome” contribute to the racist-by-design immigration regime;  - How immigrants and their advocates have long used cracks and loopholes in immigration legislation to create space for themselves in the United States.  Guest: Kelly Lytle Hernández is a Professor in the Departments of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she also holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair of History. She is one of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, and the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W. W. Norton, 2022).  Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Lilyanna D'Amato speaks with Rahim Kurwa about his book Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing (U California Press, 2025), which examines the policing of housing in Los Angeles' northernmost suburb, Antelope Valley. Kurwa traces the suburbs' relationship with Los Angeles from post WWII to the early 2000s and 2010s, when the region saw increased Black migration as result of the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program, the largest rental assistance program for low-income families in the nation. Kurwa contextualizes the adoption and reception of the voucher system in Los Angeles at the end of the 20th century, and explores the participatory policing and criminalization practices used to evict Black residents and re-segregate the region. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David N. Gellman interviews Nicholas P. Wood on Let the Oppressed Go Free: Abolitionism in Colonial and Revolutionary America In Let the Oppressed Go Free, Nicholas P. Wood presents the opponents of slavery who sustained and expanded the antislavery movement during the American Revolution in the face of widespread hostility. These early abolitionists were inspired by antislavery theology: the view that slavery was a sinful form of oppression that would provoke God’s wrath against slaveholding societies. These principles were first advanced by a handful of Quakers and Puritans as early as the 1600s, but they did not become widespread until the second half of the eighteenth century. Quakers embraced antislavery theology during the French and Indian War, which they interpreted as divine chastisement for the sin of colonial slavery. Citing the prophet Isaiah, they pledged to please the Lord by letting the oppressed go free.Antislavery theology became even more prominent during the American Revolution. When Parliament provoked an imperial crisis in the 1760s, abolitionists argued it was further evidence of God’s anger over slavery. The outbreak of war in 1775 made these arguments increasingly persuasive. Let the Oppressed Go Free demonstrates that antislavery activism during the Revolution by Quakers, African Americans, and evangelical patriots was more sophisticated and influential than historians have recognized. The northern states that began abolishing slavery during the Revolution did so in response to tenacious agitation and generally described their actions as designed to earn God’s blessing.Let the Oppressed Go Free challenges many common assumptions about abolitionism and the American Revolution. Wood demonstrates that religion remained central to abolitionism rather than being displaced by “secular” arguments about natural rights. And whereas some have argued that the Revolutionary War hindered antislavery progress and fueled racism, Wood shows that the war accelerated reform. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day’s headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.”In How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington (Pantheon, 2026), Pulitzer Prizing-winning author Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker; civil rights activist Rosa Parks gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program, and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before. Dr. Marcia Chatelain a Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of South Side Girls and Franchise, which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing, the Hagley Prize for Business History, and the Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians. An active public speaker and educational consultant, Chatelain has received awards and honors from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. You can find her on Instagram and TikTok.  Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Shows how apocalypticism helped drive anti-slavery abolitionism and inspire progressive social reform in nineteenth-century America In March 1844, Melissa Botsford of Meriden, Connecticut, defiantly left her local Methodist church because it supported slavery and other “sins” that permeated America. Botsford was among one hundred thousand other abolitionists who abandoned their evangelical churches throughout the decade. These protesters came out with a stern apocalyptic warning: God would soon judge America—and its churches—for the sins of slavery and race prejudice. It has long been assumed that apocalypticism is antithetical to social reform. Yet in Apocalyptic Abolitionism: How Millennialists Helped Abolish Slavery and Reform America (NYU Press, 2026), Kevin M. Burton uncovers the untold story of how apocalypticism shaped the abolitionist cause and helped destroy slavery in the United States. Contrary to popular opinion, the revival fires of the Second Great Awakening did not drive most evangelicals to progressive social reforms like abolitionism. Neither were the denominational schisms during that period a fight between northern abolitionists and southern slaveholders. Rather, before the Methodist and Baptist denominations split along sectional lines, most abolitionists, particularly members of the Adventist movement, had already left their churches in what was likely the largest mass exodus from mainstream evangelicalism in American history, precisely because most evangelicals opposed radical social reform movements. This volume makes the case that evangelicals receive undeserved credit for antislavery, and that it was apocalyptic abolitionists who led the way. Drawing from rare and overlooked sources to create a database of biographies of nearly 2000 people to track their religious affiliations and activism over time, Burton offers invaluable data to develop a robust framework for understanding apocalypticism, evangelicalism, and social reform politics of the nineteenth century. Kevin M. Burton is Assistant Professor of Church History, Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, Andrews University, where he also directs the Center for Adventist Research.  to American religious history." ~John Corrigan, author of The Feeling of Forgetting: Christianity, Race, and Violence in America Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In A Matter of Complexion: The Life and Fictions of Charles W. Chesnutt (St. Martin's Press, 2025), Tess Chakkalakal gives readers the first comprehensive biography of Charles W. Chesnutt. A complex and talented man, Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland to parents who were considered “mixed race.” He spent his early life in North Carolina after the Civil War. Though light-skinned, Chesnutt remained a member of the black community throughout his life. He studied among students at the State Colored Normal School who were formerly enslaved. He became a teacher in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction. His life in the South of those years, the issue of race, and how he himself identified as Black informed much of his later writing. He went on to become the first Black writer whose stories appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and whose books were published by Houghton Mifflin.  Through his literary work, as a writer, critic, and speaker, Chesnutt transformed the publishing world by crossing racial barriers that divided black writers from white and seamlessly including both Black and white characters in his writing. In A Matter of Complexion, Chakkalakal pens the biography of a poor teacher raised in rural North Carolina during Reconstruction who became the first professional African American writer to break into the all-white literary establishment and win admirers as diverse as William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Lorraine Hansberry. Tess Chakkalakal, PhD, teaches African-American and American Literature at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America and co-editor of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs and Imperium in Imperio: A Critical Edition.  Hosted by: Raymond Williams, PhD, is a political scientist, blogger, and book club administrator with an interest in American history, biographies, and politics. You can find Raymond at Ballasts for the Mind, Instagram, and Threads.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Celebrated poet, essayist, playwright, and American artist Langston Hughes is one of the few American writers who consistently wrote about democracy from a joyous perspective, and My America explores how his work speaks to the political anxieties and crises we face today. Randal M. Jelks deftly examines the themes in Hughes’s work, including creative expression, communal dignity, class struggle, and human suffering, and what they mean for our inner well-being as democratic persons and political participants. With care and no-holds-barred insight, My America: Langston Hughes on Democracy (Broadleaf Books, 2026) removes the veneer of respectability often placed on Hughes’s work and life to reveal his political adeptness. In a world threatened by fascism, Hughes’s writing wasn’t afforded the luxury of subtlety. He made a spiritual and political decision to stand on the side of the oppressed. He believed art should be practiced for the sake of justice. And democracy can be practiced with joy. Dr. Randal Maurice Jelks is an award-winning author, documentary film producer, and professor. He is the author of four books. His writings have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, blogs, journals, and periodicals. You can learn more about him and his work at his website. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies.  For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2026) is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a fascinating story characterized by persistent discrimination, squeamishness about unknown bodies, and disinvestment in public amenities. Acclaimed writer and historian Dr. Bryant Simon argues that restrooms aren’t only an architectural feature, but an emblem of control and inequality. In the late nineteenth century, cities vied for the newest and biggest comfort stations to meet the demands of their bustling economies and accommodate a broad and growing public. They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order.  But officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about—provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. Meanwhile, some municipalities are again calling for widely available public toilets, but as a tool for economic revitalization, not a public necessity.  The political and cultural history of a squirm-inducing subject, For Customers Only reveals the real and symbolic power of the most ordinary of things. Bathrooms, Dr. Simon shows, have always reflected our fragmented national values. Whether these spaces will ever become more accessible and inclusive is ultimately up to us.   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.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In Afroindigenization: A Theory of Grassroots Cultural Practice (Duke University Press, 2026), Catherine A. John addresses the underbelly of spiritual resilience shaping a range of African diasporic institutions, traditions, and practices. John argues that repressed forms of indigenous African knowledge systems manifest in a myriad of culturally embodied ways in African diaspora spaces and places. From mermaid lore in rural Jamaica to hip-hop trance-induced dance in Los Angeles to the stories of two debaters-turned-social-media-influencers, John shows how the descendants of enslaved Africans express the signs and substance of their afroindigenous power through collective creativity. Drawing from scholars such as Vèvè Clark, Hortense Spillers, Dianne M. Stewart, and Sylvia Wynter, Afroindigenization exposes the cultural and spiritual ancestries that lie at the heart of modern Black identities and practices. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The United States has no hate speech laws; hate speech is generally considered to be free speech under the First Amendment. In Hate Speech: The Legal and Cultural History of an American Dilemma (U California Press, 2026), acclaimed legal historian Samantha Barbas chronicles the country’s legal and cultural battles over the regulation of hate speech in the last hundred years. Charting the historical context for current debates, she ultimately argues that, however emotionally appealing they may seem, hate speech laws undermine civil rights and democracy. The American policy on hate speech evolved from influences such as the civil rights movement, which contended that the most effective way to combat hate speech wasn’t through proposed laws. Rather than imposing restrictions, the US has developed an array of mechanisms other than law, including counterspeech and public education, that have been relatively effective at dealing with hate speakers and hate groups. Though not perfect, our method of addressing hate is less dangerous than government censorship and less likely to be weaponized against the powerless. 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. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We all love the desserts we grew up with-the ones tied to family, tradition, and the moments we remember most. But as much as we love those recipes, they don't always turn out the way we'd want. That's where this book comes in. From cakes and cookies to pies, breads, and more, each recipe in Better than Grandma's (Rolling Pin Press, 2026) takes a nostalgic classic and reworks it to be more flavorful, more reliable, and easier to make at home. With better (proven) techniques, small changes that make big improvements, and a deep understanding of what actually makes a difference, celebrity baker Justin Ellen offers up recipes that turn out desserts the way you always hoped they would be. And while the title may be Better than Grandma's, the book is also a love letter to the grandmothers who taught Justin to find joy in every moment, to fill every room with confidence and laughter, and how to bake in the first place. It's about honoring the women, along with the recipes, then building on them to make them even better. Because it is never just about the dessert. It's about who you make it with, who you make it for, and the kitchens and women who shaped you. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Although historians have given considerable attention to the American Revolution, the agricultural history of the American War for Independence exists only in pieces found in scattered articles and passing references in various books dealing with the war. Nonagricultural historians have ignored it or treated it almost as an aside and unworthy of analysis, even when it is related to other war topics. Yet, the revolution had profound effects on American agriculture during the war and after. The Country People: An Agricultural History of the American Revolution (U Georgia Press, 2026) by Dr. R. Douglas Hurt brings the many pieces of this story together in a synthesis that provides an overview of agriculture during the American Revolution—from 1774 until signing of the Peace of Paris on September 3, 1783. In so doing, Dr. Hurt asks (and answers) three essential questions: What did farmers do in their daily lives during the revolutionary years from 1774 to 1783? How did the war affect farmers and planters, and how did they influence the war? And what were the consequences of the war on American agriculture? 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. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Today’s guest, Christopher Freeburg, is the author of Soul: A Brief History of Black Cultural Life (Yale University Press, 2026). This book explores the US history of black cultural life as a history of soul – a spiritual lived practice rooted in communally fostered music, religion, and politics. It makes the case that soul is forged through black community connections and that it’s sustained by moral principles, or pillars, which define how it is lived. The book’s four chapters are organized around four of these pillars: resonance, revelation, resilience, and transcendence. A number of black individuals are foregrounded in these discussions: they include Phillis Wheatley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nina Simone, Jewel Thais-Williams, Barack Obama, and others. By telling their stories, and by honoring the weight of the trauma and violence that has long befallen the black community, Christopher Freeburg’s Soul invites its readers to commune with the soul power of people who brought about transformation in the face of seeming impossibility. Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Gellman interviews Patrick Griffin on The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World The Age of Atlantic Revolution was a defining moment in western history. Our understanding of rights, of what makes the individual an individual, of how to define a citizen versus a subject, of what states should or should not do, of how labor, politics, and trade would be organized, of the relationship between the church and the state, and of our attachment to the nation all derive from this period (c. 1750–1850). Historian Patrick Griffin shows that the Age of Atlantic Revolution was rooted in how people in an interconnected world struggled through violence, liberation, and war to reimagine themselves and sovereignty. Tying together the revolutions, crises, and conflicts that undid British North America, transformed France, created Haiti, overturned Latin America, challenged Britain and Europe, vexed Ireland, and marginalized West Africa, Griffin tells a transnational tale of how empires became nations and how our world came into being. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award Winner of the 2025 Avern Cohn Award A New York Times Notable Book of 2025, A New Yorker Best Book of 2025 selection A Christian Science Monitor 25 Best Books of 2025 The epic story of Detroit’s struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs—and the defeat of desegregation in the North. In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why? In The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North (FSG, 2025), the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight—and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate—and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today. Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures—including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country’s promise. My guest today is Michelle Adams. Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. The former codirector of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, she served on the Biden administration’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court and as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America and the Showtime series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and elsewhere. She was born and grew up in Detroit. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.