At five years old, Kristal Brent Zook sat on the steps of a Venice Beach, California, motel trying to make sense of her white father’s abandonment, which left her feeling unworthy of a man’s love and of white protection. Raised by her working-class African American mother and grandmother, Zook was taught not to count on anyone, especially men. Men leave. Men disappoint. In adulthood she became a feminist, activist, and “race woman” journalist in New York City. Despite her professional success, s...
Sep 05, 2023•33 min•Ep. 400
Why Mariah Carey Matters (University of Texas Press, 2023) examines the creative and complicated evolution of the musical artist. In the 1990s, Carey perfected blending pop, hip-hop, and R&B and drew from her turbulent personal life to create introspective, sonically sound masterpieces like “Vision of Love,” “Make it Happen,” and “Butterfly.” There is no doubt about Carey’s star power, as she has sold over 220 million albums globally and has the most Billboard chart-topping singles of any solo a...
Sep 05, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 200
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 t...
Sep 03, 2023•2 hr 30 min•Ep. 399
With the US Supreme Court confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, “it makes sense to revisit the life and work of another Black woman who profoundly shaped the law: Constance Baker Motley” (CNN). Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hairdresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black ...
Aug 30, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 298
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 contri...
Aug 29, 2023•59 min•Ep. 397
Thy Power, O Liberty, make strong the weak, And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak. At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley published the first book in English by a person of African descent and the third book of poetry by a North American Woman. She was a poet but also a political actor and celebrity – the most famous African in North America and Europe during the era of the American Revolution. George Washington wrote to her. Thomas Jefferson ridiculed her. In The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A ...
Aug 28, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 670
Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette's book Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls (Lexington Books, 2022) examines depictions of African-descended women and girls in twentieth and twenty-first century filmmaking. Topics include a discursive analysis of stereotypes; roles garnered by Halle Berry, the only Black woman to receive an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role; the promise of characters, relationships, and scripts found in works ranging from Altered Carbon, Lovecraf...
Aug 27, 2023•2 hr 48 min•Ep. 395
In her concise history Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania (Temple UP, 2021), Beverly Tomek corrects the long-held notion that slavery in the North was “not so bad” as, or somehow “more humane” than, in the South due to the presence of abolitionists. While the Quaker presence focused on moral and practical opposition to bondage, slavery was ubiquitous. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania was the first state to pass an abolition law in the United States. Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania traces this...
Aug 27, 2023•2 hr 30 min•Ep. 396
Vanessa I. Corredera’s book Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America (Edinburgh Univeristy Press, 2022) looks at how that seventeenth-century play and its protagonist was imagined in theatre, television, and other media between 2008 and 2016. Corredera’s analysis ranges from the sketch comedy Key & Peele to Keith Hamilton Cobb’s play American Moor, from ever-persistent tradition of minstrel Othello to the reimagining of Shakespeare’s play by writers of color. Bringing together ex...
Aug 27, 2023•2 hr 51 min•Ep. 242
From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. In Public Workers in Service of America: A Reader (U Illinois Press, 2023), Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin provide an edited collection of new research on this understudied workforce: Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In P...
Aug 26, 2023•30 min•Ep. 161
As I learned from Hollis Robbins’s monograph Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (U Georgia Press, 2020), there has been a long-standing skepticism of the sonnet form among Black writers and literary critics. Langston Hughes wrote that “the Shakespearean sonnet would be no mold to express the life of Beale Street or Lenox Avenue.” Ishmael Reed condemned sonneteering, alongside ode-writing, as “the feeble pluckings of musky gentlemen and slaves of the metronom...
Aug 26, 2023•2 hr 34 min•Ep. 241
First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe, with abilities that allow her to control the weather itself. Yet that power is almost always deployed in the service of White characters, and Storm is rarely treated as an authority figure. Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero (Rutgers UP, 2023) offers an in-depth look at this fascinating...
Aug 25, 2023•58 min•Ep. 394
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 narra...
Aug 25, 2023•49 min•Ep. 312
For the past five years, American public schools have enrolled more students identified as Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Asian than white. At the same time, more than half of US school children now qualify for federally subsidized meals, a marker of poverty. The makeup of schools is rapidly changing, and many districts and school boards are at a loss as to how they can effectively and equitably handle these shifts. Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality (U Chicag...
Aug 25, 2023•45 min•Ep. 212
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 f...
Aug 21, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 167
On today’s podcast, we are changing things up a bit. Instead of interviewing the author of a recent book, I am interviewing another podcaster about their recent narrative podcast season. So, today, I’m interviewing Joel Anderson, staff writer at Slate, co-host of Hang Up and Listen, and the host of Seasons 3, 6, and, most recently, 8 of Slow Burn. On this episode, I chop it up with Joel about Season 8 of Slow Burn, titled, Becoming Justice Thomas. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at R...
Aug 20, 2023•57 min•Ep. 393
Early childhood can be a time of rich discovery, a period when educators have an opportunity to harness their students’ fascination to create unique learning opportunities. Some teachers engage with their students’ ideas in ways that make learning collaborative--but not all students have access to these kinds of learning environments. In Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades (U Chicago Press, 2021), the authors filmed and studied a a first-grade classroom le...
Aug 18, 2023•35 min•Ep. 207
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 a...
Aug 16, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 56
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 a...
Aug 16, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 127
Diversity in higher education is under attack as the Supreme Court limits the use of race-conscious admissions practices at American colleges and universities. In On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies (NYU Press, 2023), Lauren S. Foley sheds light on our current crisis, exploring the past, present, and future of this contentious policy. From Brown v. Board of Education in the mid-twentieth century to the current Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard a...
Aug 16, 2023•35 min•Ep. 158
Today I talked to Earl Careton about his new book (co-authored with Jake Uitti), Earl the Twirl: My Life in Basketball (McFarland, 2023) Earl "The Twirl" Cureton was never a star player in the NBA, but then again, few people will ever be a celebrity athlete. Earl's story, instead, is about a life on the fringes of the league during its "Golden Era" of the '80s and '90s. A teammate of Julius Erving, Moses Malone, Michael Jordan, Charles Oakley, Muggsy Bogues, Hakeem Olajuwon, and more, Earl was a...
Aug 16, 2023•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 252
The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education (U Minnesota Press, 2023) examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how th...
Aug 13, 2023•58 min•Ep. 207
Drawing from stratification economics, intersectionality, and respectability politics, Kris Marsh's The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class (Cambridge UP, 2023) centers on the voices and lifestyles of members of the Black middle class who are single and living alone (SALA). While much has been written about both the Black middle class and the rise of singlehood, this book represents a first foray into bridging these two concepts. In studying these intersections, ...
Aug 12, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 303
The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan's war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey's exacting analysis traces the path from the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement to the devastating realities we live with today: a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality. When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood...
Aug 12, 2023•25 min•Ep. 55
This book examines the Pan-Africanism of Mary McLeod Bethune through her work, which internationalized the scope of Black women's organizations to create solidarity among Africans throughout the diaspora. Broadening the familiar view of Bethune as an advocate for racial and gender equality within the United States, Ashley Preston argues that Bethune consistently sought to unify African descendants around the world with her writings, through travel, and as an advisor. Preston shows how Bethune's ...
Aug 12, 2023•28 min•Ep. 62
Zahi Zalloua provides the first examination of Palestinian identity from the perspective of Indigeneity and Critical Black Studies. Examining the Palestinian question through the lens of settler colonialism and Indigeneity, this timely book warns against the liberal approach to Palestinian Indigeneity, which reinforces cultural domination, and urgently argues for the universal nature of the Palestinian struggle. Foregrounding Palestinian Indigeneity reframes the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a...
Aug 11, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 406
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 a...
Aug 07, 2023•40 min•Ep. 56
Twentieth-century African American history cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of U.S. policy from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses. After World...
Aug 04, 2023•57 min•Ep. 190
Part historical exploration, part travel memoir, Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad (Crown, 2023) reveals poignant histories of a diverse group of African Americans who have left the United States over the course of the past century. Together, the interwoven stories highlight African Americans’ complicated relationship to the United States and the world at large. Beyond the Shores is not just about where African Americans stayed or where they ate when they traveled but also...
Aug 04, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 247
In examining how the veterans' movement inscribed martial citizenship onto American law, politics, and culture, A Nation of Veterans: War, Citizenship, and the Welfare State in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) offers a new history of the U.S. welfare state that highlights its longstanding connection with warfare. It shows how a predominantly white and male group such as military veterans was at the center of social policy debates in the interwar and postwar period and how ...
Aug 03, 2023•41 min•Ep. 230
