New Books in African American Studies

At a speech before the unveiling of the Freedman’s Monument in 1876, Fredrick Douglass stated, “You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are only at best his step-children; children by adoption, children of circumstances and necessity.” But who was Douglass referring to when he said "You are the children of Abraham Lincoln" and what did he mean? Dr. William Green investigates this statement in a case-study of four whites from Minnesota who fought hard and won rights for black Americans during and after the Civil War. By evaluating the actions of Morton Wilkinson, Thomas Montgomery, Daniel D. Merrill, and Sarah Burger Stearns, Dr. Green shows how black suffrage was earned in Minnesota, leading the so-called children of Lincoln to say, “We have done our part.” The Children of Lincoln: White Paternalism and the Limits of Black Opportunity in Minnesota, 1860–1876(University of Minnesota Press, 2018) is a fascinating, well-researched book about the limits of black opportunity in Minnesota with remarkable parallels to today’s social and political climate.Dr. William Green is professor of history at Augsburg University and vice president of the Minnesota Historical Society. Dr. Green received his B.A. in History from Gustavus Adolphus College, and his M.A., Ph.D., and J.D. from the University of Minnesota.Colin Mustful has a M.A. in history from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is currently a candidate for a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Augsburg University. You can learn more about his work at his website: www.colinmustful.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the great animating foreign policy issues of the twenty-first century, one that provokes fierce divisions across the world. In the United States, the issue has become increasingly politicized in recent decades. While the conflict is not a strict binary issue, varying degrees and kinds of support for the Palestinians has become increasingly normalized among certain groups in the United States. One group that tends to profess sympathy with and support for Palestinians far more commonly than the average is African Americans. Links between the two groups are strong. For example, in 2016 Black Lives Matter released a statement critical of Israel; perhaps unsurprisingly, its use of the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” triggered a backlash among other progressive and Jewish-American groups.Michael Fischbach’s Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color(Stanford University Press, 2018) examines the history of African American ties to Palestine. Fischbach begins with Malcolm X’s interactions with Palestinians and his criticism of Zionism in the early 1960s. The writing of Frantz Fanon and others drew Black Power activists to Palestine, beginning with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s public statements on Israel. Fischbach uses the furor over that to illuminate the position of moderate groups such as the NAACP, supporters of Israel such as Bayard Rustin, and more radical groups such as the Black Panthers. Fischbach shows that despite pushback from Jewish-American groups, a consensus emerged that drew links between African Americans and Palestinians as people of color facing similar problems.Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Dr. Maurice J. Hobson’s new book The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) delves into the tremendously rich history of Atlanta, a city that has long been associated with African American achievement in a great variety of spheres--cultural, economic, and political. Atlanta is thought by many to be a model of Black progress in the U.S., a sort of standard by which other large American cities are measured. How did it gain this exalted status, and is it deserved? Listen in and find out.Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in History at the University of Delaware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

New York City might have been the epicenter of the twentieth century American art scene, but Los Angeles was no slouch either, writes Kellie Jones in South of Pico: African American Artists in the 1960s and 1970s(Duke University Press, 2017). Dr. Jones, Professor of Art History at Columbia University and 2016 MacArthur Fellow, examines several African American artists and their work including Bettye Saar, Charles White, and John Outterbridge, and emphasizes the importance of migration, space, and interconnectivity in the LA art scene of mid-century. Watts, the site of a 1965 rebellion, was one particularly salient and vibrant part of the city’s African American art community. These artists used diverse media including performance and assemblage to comment on post-war American politics and society. The book appeals to experts and non-experts alike and is a strong example of how understanding art can help us to understand social movements and the interconnectivity of our world.Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

When World War II ended, Americans celebrated a military victory abroad, but the meaning of peace at home was yet to be defined. From roughly 1943 onward, building a postwar society became the new national project, and every interest group involved in the war effort—from business leaders to working-class renters—held different visions for the war's aftermath. In Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Laura McEnaney plumbs the depths of this period to explore exactly what peace meant to a broad swath of civilians, including apartment dwellers, single women and housewives, newly freed Japanese American internees, African American migrants, and returning veterans. In her fine-grained social history of postwar Chicago, McEnaney puts ordinary working-class people at the center of her investigation.What she finds is a working-class war liberalism—a conviction that the wartime state had taken things from people, and that the postwar era was about reclaiming those things with the state's help. McEnaney examines vernacular understandings of the state, exploring how people perceived and experienced government in their lives. For Chicago's working-class residents, the state was not clearly delineated. The local offices of federal agencies, along with organizations such as the Travelers Aid Society and other neighborhood welfare groups, all became what she calls the state in the neighborhood, an extension of government to serve an urban working class recovering from war. Just as they had made war, the urban working class had to make peace, and their requests for help, large and small, constituted early dialogues about the role of the state during peacetime.Postwar examines peace as its own complex historical process, a passage from conflict to post-conflict that contained human struggles and policy dilemmas that would shape later decades as fatefully as had the war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

This 2018 reprint of Little Man, Little Man exemplifies communal and collaborative textual production. The story was written by James Baldwin and illustrated by French artist Yoran Cazac. It was published in 1976 and then went out of print. In this new edition, scholars Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody write the introduction, while Baldwin’s nephew and niece, Tejan Karefa-Smart and Aisha Karefa-Smart write the foreword and afterword respectively. In Little Man, Little Man, which Baldwin alternately described as a children’s book for adults and an adults’ book for children, we see a slice of a Harlem neighborhood through the eyes of young TJ. The story presents a complex and multifaceted vision of black childhood in America and nudges the contemporary reader to think critically about what it means to see through the eyes of a child and to be seen by those in one’s world.Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate at Yale when he discovered James Baldwin's out-of-print "children's book for adults," Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The senior thesis he wrote about it was published in the anthology James Baldwin Now (NYU, 1999). A subsequent essay on Little Man Little Man that draws on his interviews in Paris with the book's illustrator, French artist Yoran Cazac, appears in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (2015). This research led him to co-edit and write the introduction to a new edition of Little Man, Little Man (Duke UP, 2018), which the New York Times wrote "couldn't be more timely" and Entertainment Weekly hailed as "brilliant, essential." He was interviewed by the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly for their feature articles on Little Man, Little Man and he appeared on Madeleine Brand's Press Play on KCRW , on Black America TV , and on a panel at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture moderated by Jacqueline Woodson, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.  The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Camargo Foundation, he is currently at work on a literary biography of Baldwin, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Reimagined Belongings: Black Women’s Decolonial Citizenship in the French Empire examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

2018 has been a great year for books about sub-national government in the United States. The year ends with another to add to the list. Jessica Trounstine has written Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities(Cambridge University Press, 2018). Trounstine is associate professor of political science at the University of California, Merced.Segregation by Design draws on a century of data from thousands of American cities to explore how local governments design policies that create race and class segregation. Trounstine maps the historical development of segregation and the ways that suburbanization has fit with patterns of residential segregation. Zoning laws and public goods have been used to advance the goal of some residents for racially segregated neighborhoods. She argues that local governments have pursued these policies to enhance the wealth and resources of white property owners at the expense of people of color and the poor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Criminal justice, policing, and mass incarceration have gained significant political attention recently, and the problems of these systems have drawn increasingly frequent calls for reform from the right and left. Historians have turned their attention to illuminating the roots of these institutions. While many historians have focused on the 20th century, others have examined the emergence of urban professional police departments in the 19th century. Adam Malka, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma, takes these questions to the antebellum period to illuminate how these new police forces emerged in an age of liberal ideals and emancipation. In The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Malka examines the development of the Baltimore police department in the years leading up to and following the Civil War. Malka highlights several unexpected features of this development. He shows the continuity and connections between antebellum vigilante justice and the professional police force. Further, he shows the emerging image of black criminality in the post-Civil War era was not opposed to the liberal ideals that came with the war, but rather was integral to them.In this episode of the podcast, Malka discusses the insights of the book. He explains why Baltimore is a particularly apt city for studying the rise of professional policing and how those new law enforcement institutions built on and worked in tandem with the vigilante policing that came before. He also discusses how ideas of property shaped policing, the ideals of liberalism, and the image of black criminality. We also discuss the challenges of researching this topic and, finally, conclude by considering how this more nuanced history might inform our understanding of current controversies surrounding policing.Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Most people will know that Memphis, Tennessee is where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. That's too bad, because Memphis played an important role in the struggle for civil rights both before and after King was murdered.  Drs. Aram Goudsouzian and Charles McKinney’s reclaim this history in their excellent edited volume An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee (University Press of Kentucky, 2018). Listen in.Adam McNeil is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies