An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory (NYU 2022). By now, scientists’ experiments on captive men at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison are well known, thanks to the brave and important testimony of former captive-subjects in books like Allen Hornblum’s Acres of Skin. Building on this documentary work, Visperas turns attention to the prison...
Apr 14, 2023•58 min•Ep. 13
Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production. Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press, 2023) tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face”—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful ...
Apr 12, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 375
Celeste Day Moore is a historian of African American culture, media, and Black internationalism in the twentieth century. Her first book, Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France (Duke University Press, 2021), was awarded the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. Her research has appeared in American Quarterly, the Journal of African American History, and the first edited volume of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS...
Apr 10, 2023•2 hr 34 min•Ep. 105
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....
Apr 08, 2023•54 min•Ep. 374
Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women’s creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect call...
Apr 08, 2023•47 min•Ep. 373
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 Afr...
Apr 07, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 29
Jonathan Brown’s Islam and Blackness (Oneworld Academic, 2022) is a thorough and thoroughly riveting study of the tensions and conceptions of Blackness in Muslim intellectual traditions and social histories, premodern and modern, in a variety of contexts. At once deeply reflective, philologically majestic, and theoretically productive, Islam and Blackness engages and examines a range of texts from a wide expanse of scholarly genres to show that the question of whether Islam is antiblack is immen...
Apr 07, 2023•2 hr 37 min•Ep. 298
Misunderstood, misappropriated, belittled: though the Rastafari feature frequently in media and culture, they have most often been misrepresented, their political and religious significance minimized. But they have not been vanquished. Charles Price’s Rastafari: The Evolution of a People and Their Identity (NYU Press, 2022) reclaims the rich history of this relatively new world religion. Charting its humble and rebellious roots in Jamaica’s backcountry in the late nineteenth century to the prese...
Apr 04, 2023•58 min•Ep. 372
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 ...
Apr 03, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 648
Despite the seeming supremacy of car culture in the United States, the train has long been and continues to be a potent symbol of American exceptionalism, ingenuity, and vastness. For almost two centuries, the train has served as the literal and symbolic vehicle for American national identity, manifest destiny, and imperial ambitions. It’s no surprise, then, that the train continues to endure in depictions across literature, film, ad music. The Racial Railroad (NYU Press, 2022) highlights the su...
Apr 01, 2023•49 min•Ep. 218
99.9% of aspiring rappers never make it in the music industry. So why do we only hear the stories of the ones who do? DVS Mindz might be the greatest rap group you've never heard of. Formed in Topeka, Kansas, in the mid-1990s, they developed a reputation for ferocious rhyming and frenetic live performances. In their heyday, DVS Mindz released a critically acclaimed CD, received nominations for prestigious awards, and opened for legends such as Wu-Tang Clan, Run-DMC, and De La Soul as well as KC ...
Mar 30, 2023•50 min•Ep. 186
The emergence of Haiti as a sovereign Black nation lit a beacon of hope for Black people throughout the African diaspora. Leslie M. Alexander's study reveals the untold story of how free and enslaved Black people in the United States defended the young Caribbean nation from forces intent on maintaining slavery and white supremacy. Concentrating on Haiti's place in the history of Black internationalism, Alexander illuminates the ways Haitian independence influenced Black thought and action in the...
Mar 27, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 360
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 ...
Mar 26, 2023•55 min•Ep. 143
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 an...
Mar 23, 2023•44 min•Ep. 50
The importance of published accounts by African slave ship survivors is well-known but not their existence in large numbers. Fogleman and Hanserd catalog nearly five hundred discrete accounts and more than 2,500 printings of them over four centuries in numerous Atlantic languages. Short biographies of each African, print histories of the complete or partial life story. Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936 (A...
Mar 22, 2023•39 min•Ep. 157
A “deeply researched and bracing retelling” (Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian) of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters. Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution (Simon and Schuster, 2021) is a “spirited account” (Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the Ame...
Mar 21, 2023•53 min•Ep. 141
For countless Americans, the open road has long been a place where dangers lurk. In the era of Jim Crow, Black travelers encountered locked doors, hostile police, and potentially violent encounters almost everywhere, in both the South and the North. From 1936 to 1967, millions relied on The Negro Motorist Green Book, the definitive guide to businesses where they could safely rest, eat, or sleep. Most Americans only know of the guide from the 2018 Green Book movie or the 2020 Lovecraft Country TV...
Mar 21, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 371
Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-depth exploration of Baldwin’s “Turkish decade,” Magdalena J. Zaborowska reveals the significant role that Turkish locales, cultures, and friends played in Baldwin’s life and thought. Turkey was a nurturing space for the author, who by 1961 had spent nearly ten years in France and Western Europe and failed to reestablish permanent residency in the Un...
Mar 18, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 210
In It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women's Bodies (Hachette Go, 2023) eating disorder specialist and storyteller Jessica Wilson challenges us to rethink what having a "good" body means in contemporary society. By centering the bodies of Black women in her cultural discussions of body image, food, health, and wellness, Wilson argues that we can interrogate white supremacy's hold on us and reimagine the ways we think about, discuss, and tend to our bodies. A narrative that span...
Mar 17, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 370
Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817–c. 1869) escaped enslavement and would become a leading figure in the struggle for Black freedom, citizenship, and equality. He was extolled by his contemporary Frederick Douglass for his “depth of thought, fluency of speech, readiness of wit, logical exactness.” Until now, his story has been largely untold. Ward, a newspaper editor, Congregational minister, and advocate for the temperance movement, was considered one of the leadi...
Mar 15, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 369
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 ...
Mar 13, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 367
Mia Bay, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about her book Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2023), with Peoples & Things, Lee Vinsel. From stagecoaches and trains to buses, cars, and planes, Traveling Black explores when, how, and why racial restrictions took shape and brilliantly portrays what it was like to live with them. Bay unearths troves of supporting evidence, rescuing forgotten ...
Mar 13, 2023•52 min•Ep. 44
Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (U Georgia Press, 2022) provides an interdisciplinary approach to antebellum citizenship. Interpreting citizenship, particularly how citizenship intersects with race and gender, is fundamental to understanding the era and directly challenges the idea of Jacksonian Democracy. Susan J. Stanfield uses an analysis of novels, domestic advice, essays, and poetry, as well as more traditional archival sources, to provide an underst...
Mar 12, 2023•2 hr 7 min•Ep. 368
Against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation’s imagined descent into disorder. A new generation of Black players entered the league then, among them Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Spencer Haywood, and the press and public were quick to blame this cohort for the supposed decline of pro basketball, citing drugs, violence, and greed. Basketball became a symbol for post-civil rights America: the rules had chang...
Mar 11, 2023•57 min•Ep. 243
John W. Bubbles was an actor, singer, comedian, and most importantly, a dancer. Born in 1902, Bubbles was an innovator in the jazz tap style and half of the great vaudeville act, "Buck and Bubbles," with his partner pianist Buck Washington. Brian Harker tells Bubbles' story in Sportin’ Life: John W. Bubbles, An American Classic (Oxford University Press, 2022). Bubbles’ long career, which largely ended after a stroke in 1967, spanned several significant shifts in American popular entertainment. H...
Mar 11, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 182
US Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is well-known as an interpreter and defender of the Constitution, particularly through her landmark speech during Richard Nixon's 1974 impeachment hearings. However, before she developed faith in the Constitution, Jordan had faith in Christianity. In "My Faith in the Constitution is Whole" Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scripture (Georgetown UP, 2022), Robin L. Owens shows how Jordan turned her religious faith and her faith in the Constitution into a powerful ...
Mar 11, 2023•33 min•Ep. 366
Beginning in the 1920s, Barbadians and other British West Indians began organizing politically in an international environment that was marked by a severe capitalist economic and financial crisis that intensified in the 1930s. The response in the British Caribbean during the 1930s was in the form of rebellions that demanded colonial reform. The ensuing struggles resulted in constitutional and political changes that led to decolonization and independence. In Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Tr...
Mar 09, 2023•2 hr 5 min•Ep. 100
In The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black wor...
Mar 06, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 99
Why do racial inequalities persist? In The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival (Penguin, 2023), Nicola Rollock, a Professor of Social Policy & Race at King’s College London, examines the often hidden and subtle rules that underpin the long-term existence of racism. The book draws on a huge range of qualitative and quantitative data to craft individual narratives that illustrate the operation of the racial code. In doing so, the book offers an clear overview of the lived experience of r...
Mar 05, 2023•44 min•Ep. 361
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, Lewi...
Mar 05, 2023•56 min•Ep. 365
