The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker: A True Tale of Love, Murder, Treason, and Ordinary Folks Who Saved America - REVIEW

by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

The year, 1851. The place, a Quaker farming community turned Underground Railroad stronghold, where a Maryland enslaver had journeyed in pursuit of four men who’d fled his plantation years before. In a few hours, he’d be dead…and twenty-seven men from the village of Christiana would be rounded up and put on trial. Not for his murder, but for treason—for waging war against the United States, at a time when it was a crime against the government to obstruct an enslaver looking to reclaim his “property.”

This is story of what happened in Christiana that September morning—and in the ensuing “trial of the century,” which saw the president himself advise the prosecution on strategy and a sitting congressman serve as lead attorney for the defense. But The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker is also a much larger tale, one spanning decades, following a whole startlingly diverse community of abolitionists in their fight to convince their fellow Americans of the subversive idea that now found itself on trial: that the nation ought to live up the ideals it was founded on, and respect all men as equals.

It’s a story that whisks readers from the quiet farmlands of Lancaster County—where a self-emancipated man named William Parker, whom legend had it bullets could not kill, rallied his neighbors to ride out each night to battle the slavecatchers who stalked their countryside—to Philadelphia’s genteel Society Hill, where socialite Harriet Forten Purvis had the ear of the mayor (and a cellar filled with fugitives). It’s stylish, propulsive, intimately human tale of bravery, ingenuity, and hope—and of ordinary people with little in common who came together to stand against injustice…and won.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is the New York Times bestselling author of Dr. Mütter’s Marvels, as well as eight collections of poetry. A seventh generation Pennsylvanian, she lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Ernest Cline, and their children.

Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13:‎ 978-1668035931

The Legacy of Lynching - REVIEW

by Rasul A. Mowatt

The Legacy of Lynching provides a critical social theory of the history of lynching as a pedagogy of social and political violence, power, and control (to identify-find-kill-display the body of the racial Other). The theory emphasizes the final stage of display as what truly constitutes a lynching and differentiates it from other forms of violence (race riots, recreational murder, racial hunting, bombings, and disappearances) and challenges other definitions of lynching (hanging, mob violence, extra-judicial, and racial terror). The book examines the socio-historical record of lynching in the United States, with additional attention to lynching activity and imagery of Australia, Britain, France, Germany, and India, to surface the nature of lynching as a public spectacle with important critical social and political dimensions that enact power in visible ways across racialized bodies, peoples, and spaces.

Lynching, in this book, is presented not just as a historical phenomenon or as a set of artifacts (picture postcards, shreds of clothing, pieces of rope, and other ephemeral), but also as a cultural production of State power and control that shapes social and political institutions, public spaces, and social memory. This socio-historical record of lynching, as such, reveals not only the mechanisms of previous instantiations of racialized power schemas (pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and genocide) but also the ongoing encoding of control and colonization of public life. Through a thorough re-reading and reworking of the history of lynching and its ongoing, contemporary afterlife, the book reconceptualizes the nature and ramifications of the phenomenon in various forms of media like film, television, social media platforms, gaming, graphic novels, fictional novellas, and even fashion. As such, it will be an important resource for podcasters, journalists, students, instructors, researchers, and readers in sociology, social theory, political sociology, historical sociology, American history and American studies, cultural studies, Race and ethnicity studies, and geography.

Rasul A. Mowatt is Professor and Researcher who studies State violence and the geographies of Race for the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, USA. Before joining NC State, Rasul served on Indiana University’s faculty in the Departments of American Studies and Geography for 17 years and previously taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence (2021), co-author of Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits (2024) and The City of Hip-Hop: New York, the Bronx, and a Peace Meeting (2025).

Routledge
ISBN-13:‎ 978-1041267577

Who was Jason Arday?

When Scrutiny Becomes a Weapon: The Case Against How Jason Arday Was Treated

by Alvin Blackshear  |  Historian & Researcher  <ablackshear@gmail.com>

Jason Arday spent his career studying inequality. In the final weeks of his life, he became a case study in it.

The 41-year-old sociologist, who in 2023 became the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge, resigned his post in early August 2026 after weeks of intensifying public scrutiny over alleged plagiarism in his 2015 doctoral thesis. Nine days later, he was found dead at his home in Battersea, south London. Police said the death was unexpected but not suspicious. His family later said he had endured a campaign of sustained abuse that had, in their telling, stretched on for more than three years before it finally consumed him. They asked the press to leave them alone.

There is a version of this story that treats it as a simple morality tale about academic fraud finally catching up with someone. That version is too convenient, and it leaves out almost everything that made this case what it became.

The allegations were never just about a thesis

Start with what actually happened once Nathan Cofnas, a self-described "race realist" who had already been dismissed from his own Cambridge affiliation over his writings on race, put his findings on Substack. The Times of London followed with an analysis of Arday's decade-old PhD thesis, and from there the story metastasized. Within a matter of weeks, one count found 289 separate articles about Arday; another tally put the number at 249 pieces across 15 national outlets. That is not the volume of coverage a plagiarism finding typically generates. It is the volume of coverage reserved for a public crucifixion.

And the coverage did not stay on the thesis. It moved into his childhood, his autism diagnosis, the charitable fundraising he had done, and the broader narrative of his life story. A man whose personal history of not speaking until age eleven and not learning to read until adulthood had once been treated as an inspiring footnote to his achievements was now having that same history picked apart as though it were evidence of a con. That shift, from auditing a document to auditing a person's entire biography and identity, is the tell. Legitimate scholarly accountability does not require re-litigating someone's childhood.

Consider who was doing the accusing, and why it matters

Cofnas did not arrive at this case as a neutral fact-checker. He has built a public career arguing that racial groups differ in intelligence, and he has written explicitly that under what he considers genuine meritocracy, institutions like Harvard and Cambridge would have very few Black professors. That is not incidental biography. It is the lens through which he approached Arday's record in the first place, and it is worth asking whether a white academic with an unremarkable public profile and the same thesis-level irregularities would have faced anything close to this level of exposure, or whether the intensity of the campaign was inseparable from the fact that Arday had become, in the public imagination, a symbol of Black academic advancement and diversity initiatives that Cofnas has spent years arguing against.

Ghent University itself seemed to sense this tension. When it suspended Cofnas as a precautionary measure and opened a preliminary disciplinary investigation, it did not challenge the underlying plagiarism claims. It said, carefully, that academic freedom carries responsibilities and can be limited when necessary to protect the rights of others, and it pointed specifically to its commitment to human dignity and its opposition to discrimination. A university does not open a discrimination investigation into someone for successfully flagging a legitimate citation problem. It opens one when the pattern of conduct surrounding the accusation looks like something else.

The institution that promoted him disappeared from the story

There is also the question of where Cambridge was in all of this. The university appointed Arday, promoted him, and held him up publicly as a landmark hire. If his academic record genuinely contained the problems now alleged, that is at least as much an indictment of Cambridge's own vetting, credentialing, and peer-review processes as it is of Arday personally. Instead, the institution that failed to catch these issues for a decade was allowed to recede into the background while a single Black professor absorbed the entirety of the public reckoning, his resignation treated as the natural end of the story rather than the beginning of a harder question about how he got there in the first place.

Two things can be true

None of this requires pretending Arday's scholarship was beyond reproach. He himself acknowledged that mistakes had occurred, even as he denied deliberately plagiarizing material. Investigating serious allegations against any academic, regardless of race, is legitimate, and being a symbol of diversity should never function as immunity from normal scholarly standards.

But proportionality matters, and proportionality is precisely what collapsed here. A citation problem in a ten-year-old thesis does not, on its own, generate hundreds of articles, a public autopsy of someone's disability and childhood, and a campaign led by a man who has built his reputation arguing that people who look like the accused do not belong in these positions to begin with. When the punishment for an alleged academic lapse becomes an unrelenting, identity-focused public campaign, the campaign itself becomes the story, and a serious institution has an obligation to ask whether race shaped not the fact of the scrutiny, but its ferocity.

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This article makes the case for one interpretation of a genuinely contested and unresolved situation. Others, including Cofnas himself, argue that the plagiarism findings were substantive and long known to Cambridge insiders, that flagging misconduct is not disproportionate simply because the subject is well known, and that treating the accusation as racially motivated risks shielding real academic fraud from scrutiny. Ghent University's investigation into Cofnas has not concluded, and no independent inquiry has yet determined whether race materially affected how the case was pursued. Readers weighing this case should consider both sets of claims as the record develops.

Blackface in History and Contemporary Comedy

by Alvin Blackshear  |  Historian & Researcher  <ablackshear@gmail.com>

Racism in American entertainment rarely announces itself as a single, settled question. It shows up instead as a set of overlapping stories, each one complicating the last. The history of blackface, and its strange half-life in comedy today, is one of the clearest examples of that complexity.

Ted Danson, 1993

On October 8, 1993, Ted Danson appeared at a New York Friars Club roast honoring Whoopi Goldberg, with whom he was then romantically involved. He performed in blackface makeup with exaggerated white lips and repeatedly used a racial slur during a set built around jokes about their relationship. Contemporary reporting from the event describes Danson wearing blackface makeup and large white lips while using the slur several times and joking about his sex life with Goldberg.

The response was immediate and sharply divided. Then-Mayor David Dinkins and other attendees objected to the material, and Montel Williams walked out and resigned from the club, writing in his resignation telegram that he had been confused about whether he was at a Friars event or a rally for the Klan and Aryan Nation. Goldberg, by contrast, defended Danson publicly, telling reporters that the two of them had written the material together and were not trying to be politically correct but to be funny for themselves.

That defense is the complicating detail people tend to forget. It was not simply a white performer testing a racist trope. It was a Black performer with a personal stake in the material and, according to her own account, a hand in creating it. The moral clarity of "blackface is bad" runs into real friction when the collaborator defending it is the person the routine was ostensibly honoring.

More than three decades later, Danson revisited the incident himself. In June 2026, he told podcast host W. Kamau Bell that he intended to keep apologizing for the rest of his life, and rejected the idea that his intentions at the time should count for much, saying the impact on people is what matters, not the intent behind it. He also described how the footage resurfaced during the Black Lives Matter movement and cost him work, and credited conversations facilitated by Jane Fonda and author Heather McGhee with helping him understand what he had done. That a public figure would spend over thirty years working through, rather than simply outliving, an old controversy suggests these reckonings are rarely as fast or as final as news cycles imply.

The Kake Walk at the University of Vermont

A very different kind of blackface tradition took shape at the University of Vermont beginning in the early 1890s. The Kake Walk grew out of the American cakewalk and minstrel traditions and eventually became a formal fraternity competition, with pairs of male students performing exaggerated high-stepping dances to a tune called Cotton Babes, often alongside minstrel-style skits. By the mid-twentieth century it had become the centerpiece of UVM's Winter Carnival, drawing crowds that reportedly reached around eight thousand students, alumni, and local residents at its peak in the Patrick Gym.

The instructive part of this history is that opposition did not begin in the 1960s, as is often assumed. Historians James Loewen and Larry McCrorey traced organized dissent back to 1954, when the fraternity Phi Sigma Delta refused to perform in blackface, a decision that drew criticism from the wider campus community. Objections continued to appear in the student newspaper and local press for years afterward.

The university's actual path away from the tradition was gradual and, in retrospect, uncomfortable in its own right. In 1963 the Interfraternity Council voted to replace blackface with light green makeup while keeping the exaggerated dialect intact. After audience complaints that the green was not dark enough, the makeup was changed to a darker green in 1964, a color UVM's own archival materials note is often indistinguishable from blackface in black-and-white photographs. The Kake Walk was not formally eliminated until 1969, following decisions by a student-faculty committee, the Student Association, and the Interfraternity Council, over the strong objections of alumni who considered it a cherished tradition.

There is a further layer worth preserving rather than flattening. The cakewalk itself originated among enslaved African Americans, and was later appropriated by white minstrelsy and used to reinforce racial hierarchy after Reconstruction. UVM's Kake Walk was a specific collegiate distortion of that longer, more complicated Black history, not a synonym for it. Collapsing the two stories loses something real about how appropriation works.

Black comedians and the same imagery, used differently

Blackface's afterlife in comedy has also been shaped by Black performers testing its logic rather than repeating it. Dave Chappelle has used blackface repeatedly as a reference point for thinking about where representation becomes harmful. In his 2021 Netflix special The Closer, he compared identifying as transgender to the act of wearing blackface, a comparison that became one focus of the criticism and employee walkout that followed the special's release. Netflix employees organized a walkout at the company's Los Angeles offices, and executives, including co-CEO Ted Sarandos, later acknowledged mishandling their initial response to staff concerns.

Chappelle's discomfort with his own earlier work followed a related logic. He has described growing uneasy with the racial humor on Chappelle's Show not because of what he intended a sketch to mean, but because he could not control whether audiences were laughing at racism or simply enjoying the stereotype itself.

Key and Peele approached the same territory from the opposite direction. In the 2012 sketch "Das Negros," the pair play two Black men in Nazi-occupied Germany who disguise themselves in whiteface to evade a Nazi officer searching for Black people, a premise built entirely around exaggerating how visibly the disguise fails. The sketch uses racial makeup as a tool of satire aimed outward at the absurdity of racial policing, rather than as a costume worn for its own sake.

What these cases share

Taken together, these episodes resist a single tidy lesson. A white actor's blackface routine was defended, in the moment, by the Black woman it was framed around. A university's opposition to a blackface tradition predates the era most people associate with civil rights activism, and its actual abolition took the form of a compromise, green makeup, that was arguably almost as troubling as what it replaced. And Black comedians today are still testing, from different directions, whether racial imagery can be turned into a critique of racism rather than a restatement of it. The common thread is not a rule but a question that keeps resurfacing: whether an audience is laughing at the target of a joke or at the harm the joke depicts, and how much control a performer actually has over which one happens.

References

Ted Danson and the 1993 Friars Club roast

• Deseret News, "Goldberg Defends Danson, Says Critics Are Out of Line," October 11, 1993. https://www.deseret.com/1993/10/11/19070438/goldberg-defends-danson-says-critics-are-out-of-line/
• The Hollywood Reporter, "Ted Danson Sorry for Blackface at 1993 Whoopi Goldberg Roast," June 2026. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/ted-danson-sorry-blackface-whoopi-goldberg-roast-1236613971/
• Los Angeles Times, coverage of Danson's 2026 apology: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2026-06-03/ted-danson-apologizing-for-blackface-roast-of-whoopi-goldberg
• NPR Code Switch, "Critics Find Little Humor In 'SNL' Writer's Jokes About Slavery" (background on the roast): https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/05/06/310096073/critics-find-little-humor-in-snl-writers-jokes-about-slavery

The Kake Walk at the University of Vermont

• University of Vermont Libraries, "Kake Walk at UVM" digital collection: https://cdi.uvm.edu/collection/uvmcdi-uvmcdikakewalk
• UVM Digital Collections, browse page with archival records: https://digitalcollections.uvm.edu/browse/collection/43046
• James W. Loewen, "Black Image in White Vermont: The Origin, Meaning, and Abolition of Kake Walk," in The University of Vermont: The First Two Hundred Years, ed. Robert V. Daniels (University Press of New England/UVM, 1991): https://digitalcollections.uvm.edu/view/kwsecondaryLoewen/black-image-in-white-vermont-the-origin-meaning-and-abolition-of-kake-walk
• Seven Days, "UVM's Kake Walk Featured Blackface Performers for Decades," updated 2025: https://www.sevendaysvt.com/OffMessage/archives/2019/02/10/uvms-kake-walk-featured-blackface-performances-for-decades
• The Vermont Cynic, "Kake Walk: Alumni, faculty and students reflect on 73-year tradition," February 2016: https://vtcynic.com/enterprise/kake-walk-a-look-back/

Dave Chappelle, The Closer, and the Netflix walkout

• Time, "Breaking Down the Controversy Around Dave Chappelle's Netflix Special 'The Closer'": https://time.com/6105951/dave-chappelle-netflix-controversy/
• Georgetown Free Speech Project, "Dave Chappelle comedy special spurs backlash for including transphobic commentary": https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/dave-chappelle-comedy-special-spurs-backlash-for-including-transphobic-commentary/
• PBS NewsHour, "Chappelle Netflix special is 'hate speech disguised as jokes,' advocate says," October 2021: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/chappelle-netflix-special-is-hate-speech-disguised-as-jokes-advocate-says
• NPR, review and transcript of "The Closer": https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1043435919

Key & Peele, "Das Negros"

• Key & Peele Wiki, episode summary: https://keyandpeele.fandom.com/wiki/Das_Negros
• List of Key & Peele episodes, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Key_%26_Peele_episodes

Suggestions for Further Reading and Research

For readers who want to go deeper than a single article can, a few directions are worth pursuing:

On the history and mechanics of blackface minstrelsy. Eric Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class remains a standard scholarly starting point for understanding how minstrelsy functioned as both racist spectacle and, paradoxically, a form of cross-racial cultural exchange. Spike Lee's 2000 film Bamboozled is a useful fictional companion piece, dramatizing many of the same tensions around audience reception that appear in the Chappelle discussion above.

On the Kake Walk specifically. The essay collection Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment (Liveright) includes a chapter, "Sugarcoating Slavery: How the University of Vermont's Kake Walk Made Blackface a Collegiate Sport," that goes well beyond what a short article can cover. UVM's own digital collections are unusually rich for a case study like this, including alumni correspondence objecting to the tradition's end, which is worth reading directly rather than through summary.

On the cakewalk's origins before appropriation. Because this article treats the Kake Walk and the original cakewalk as related but distinct, readers interested in the earlier, African American history of the cakewalk itself may want to look into its documented origins on plantations in the antebellum South and its subsequent life in Black vaudeville, which is a separate and much larger story than the UVM adaptation.

On satire, intent, and audience reception in comedy. The recurring question in this article, whether a joke critiques a stereotype or simply reproduces it for an audience that enjoys the stereotype, is a long-running debate in comedy criticism. Readers might compare how this question has been raised around other satirists who use identity-based material, including Norman Lear's All in the Family and its handling of Archie Bunker's bigotry, as an earlier television-era version of the same argument.

On contemporary accountability and apology. Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, cited by Danson himself as influential in his own reflection, offers a broader economic and social argument about the costs of racism that extends well past entertainment and into policy.

The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy - REVIEW

by Steven J. Ross

Americans today like to believe that the end of World War II brought a new era of tolerance in the United States. But antisemitism and racism went up-not down-after the war's end. Violence broke out in cities across the country, and the number of organized hate groups more than doubled from 1940 to 1946. In this shocking account of a resurgence of White Supremacy in America, celebrated historian Steven J. Ross reveals how four key leaders-Emory Burke, J. B. Stoner, James Madole, and George Lincoln Rockwell-worked together to “finish the job Hitler had begun,” launching deadly attacks on Jews and African Americans and building a network of terrorists across the U.S. In response to this “war of hate,” three men-Arnold Forster of the Anti-­Defamation League, George Mintzer of the American Jewish Committee, and James Sheldon of the Non-­Sectarian Anti­-Nazi League-along with dozens of men and women, launched a multipronged effort: They infiltrated, monitored, and undermined these hate groups, putting their own safety on the line and scoring important victories that, today, have been all but forgotten.

Tracing the extraordinary work of these unsung heroes, The Secret War Against Hate provides a groundbreaking reconsideration of the legacy of the “Good War,” and essential reading on how America today can beat hate once again and build a just and united nation.

Steven J. Ross is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. He is the author of Hitler in Los Angeles, a Los Angeles Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Hollywood Left and Right, which received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Film Scholars Award, and Working-Class Hollywood, named a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Southern California.

Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1635578003

Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York's Explosive '80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation - REVIEW

by Elliot Williams

On a dirty New York subway car on December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, four teenagers from the Bronx, at point blank range. Goetz claimed they were going to mug him; the teens claim that one of them had simply asked for five dollars.

Crime was at an all-time high. So was racial tension. Was Goetz, who was white, a hero who finally fought back? Or a bigot whose itchy trigger finger seriously wounded three unarmed black kids and condemned a fourth to irreversible brain damage? By the time Goetz went on trial for quadruple attempted murder, the “Subway Vigilante” saga had become a global sensation, and New Yorkers across race and class were split over whether he deserved decades in prison…or a medal.

In Five Bullets, Elliot Williams vaults back to gritty 1980s Manhattan and reexamines the first major true-crime story of the cable news era. Drawing on archives and interviews with many main characters, including Goetz, Williams presents a masterful and vivid tale that also tells the origin stories of larger-than-life figures: Al Sharpton, a polarizing young local activist rocketing to national prominence; Rudy Giuliani, a rising-star prosecutor with an important decision to make; the NRA, which needed a poster boy for its transition from hunting club to political juggernaut; and Rupert Murdoch, whose new purchase, the New York Post, grew his empire by keeping a scary story in the headlines.

A shocking account of a pivotal moment in our history, Five Bullets demonstrates why, in order to understand today’s debates about race, crime, safety, and the media, it’s imperative to reflect on what went down in the subway four decades ago. As Williams’s powerful narrative reveals, it was not just Goetz on trial, but the conscience of a nation.

Elliot Williams is a CNN legal analyst and regular guest host on SiriusXM and WAMU, NPR’s Washington, DC, station. He has spent his career thinking about law, crime, and politics, serving as a federal prosecutor and later as a senior official at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. A Brooklyn-born son of Jamaican immigrants, he grew up in New Jersey and vividly recalls the powder keg that was 1980s New York. He now lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and two children.

Penguin Press
ISBN-13: 978-0593833704

The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America - REVIEW

by Michael Eric Dyson

Michael Eric Dyson explores the powerful, surprising way the politics of race have shaped Barack Obama’s identity and groundbreaking presidency. How has President Obama dealt publicly with race—as the national traumas of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott have played out during his tenure? What can we learn from Obama's major race speeches about his approach to racial conflict and the black criticism it provokes? 

Dyson explores whether Obama’s use of his own biracialism as a radiant symbol has been driven by the president’s desire to avoid a painful moral reckoning on race. And he sheds light on identity issues within the black power structure, telling the fascinating story of how Obama has spurned traditional black power brokers, significantly reducing their leverage. 

President Obama’s own voice—from an Oval Office interview granted to Dyson for this book—along with those of Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, and Maxine Waters, among others, add unique depth to this profound tour of the nation’s first black presidency.

Michael Eric Dyson is a New York Times op-ed contributor, a Georgetown University professor, an MSNBC political analyst, and best-selling author of seventeen books, including the American Book Award-winning Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN-13: 978-0544387669

One Man’s Freedom: Goldwater, King, and the Struggle over an American Ideal - REVIEW

by Nicholas Buccola

From the acclaimed author of The Fire Is Upon Us, the dramatic untold story of Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr.’s decade-long clash over the meaning of freedom—and how their conflicting visions still divide American politics

In the mid-1950s, Barry Goldwater and Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the leaders of two diametrically opposed freedom movements that changed the course of American history—and still divide American politics. King mobilized civil rights activists under the banner of “freedom now,” insisting that true freedom would not be realized until all people—regardless of race—were empowered politically, economically, and socially. Goldwater rallied conservatives to the cause of “extremism in defense of liberty,” advocating radical individualism. In One Man’s Freedom, Nicholas Buccola tells the compelling story of Goldwater and King’s dramatic decade-long debate over the meaning of an all-important American ideal.

Part dual biography, part history, One Man’s Freedom traces the actions and words of Goldwater and King over a crucial and eventful decade, from their dizzying rise through 1964, which ended with Goldwater’s landslide defeat in the presidential election and King’s Nobel Peace Prize. The book chronicles why Goldwater and King, who never met in person, came to view each other as perhaps the greatest threat to freedom in America. It explains how their ideas of freedom could be so vastly different, yet both so deeply rooted in American history and their times. And it shows how their disagreement continues to shape and explain politics today, when the bitter divisions between Republicans and Democrats often come down to the question of what kind of freedom Americans want—the one defined by Goldwater or by King?

Nicholas Buccola is professor of government and the Jules L. Whitehill Professor of Humanism and Ethics at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton), which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass.

Princeton University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0691230306

Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation - REVIEW

by Bennett Parten

A groundbreaking account of Sherman’s March to the Sea—the critical Civil War campaign that destroyed the Confederacy—told for the first time from the perspective of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who fled to the Union lines and transformed Sherman’s march into the biggest liberation event in American history.

In the fall of 1864, Gen. William T. Sherman led his army through Atlanta, Georgia, burning buildings of military significance—and ultimately most of the city—along the way. From Atlanta, they marched across the state to the most important city at the time: Savannah.

Mired in the deep of the South with no reliable supply lines, Sherman’s army had to live off the land and the provisions on the plantations they seized along the way. As the army marched to the east, plantation owners fled, but even before they did so, slaves self-emancipated to Union lines. By the time the army seized Savannah in December, as many as 20,000 enslaved people had attached themselves to Sherman’s army. They endured hardships, marching as much as twenty miles a day—often without food or shelter from the winter weather—and at times Union commanders discouraged and even prevented the self-emancipated from staying with the army. Racism was not confined to the Confederacy.

In Somewhere Toward Freedom, historian Bennett Parten brilliantly reframes this seminal episode in Civil War history. He not only helps us understand how Sherman’s March impacted the war, and what it meant to the enslaved, but also reveals how it laid the foundation for the fledging efforts of Reconstruction. When the war ended, Sherman and various government and private aid agencies seized plantation lands—particularly in the sea islands off the Georgia and South Carolina coasts—in order to resettle the newly emancipated. They were fed, housed, and in some instances, taught to read and write. This first real effort at Reconstruction was short-lived, however. As federal troops withdrew to the north, Confederate sympathizers and Southern landowners eventually brought about the downfall of this program.

Sherman’s march has remained controversial to this day. But as Parten reveals, it played a significant role in ending the Civil War, due in no small part to the efforts of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who became a part of it. In Somewhere Toward Freedom, this critical moment in American history has finally been given the attention it deserves.

Bennett Parten is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University whose area of expertise is the Civil War period. He is a native of Royston, Georgia, and completed his PhD in history at Yale University. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Zocalo Public Square, and The Civil War Monitor, among others. He currently lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13: 978-1668034682

NORVEL: An American Hero – REVIEW

by Kenneth F. Conklin

NORVEL: An American Hero tells the incredible story of Virginia's first Black Olympic gold medalist at the Helsinki Olympic Games in 1952.

Norvel Lee is a man whose unwavering determination and courage allowed him to overcome obstacles and achieve greatness. Born in a time of racial discrimination. Norvel faced numerous challenges early in life. However, he refused to be defeated and used his intelligence and athletic abilities to propel himself towards success. As he grew into a young man, Norvel continued to face adversity but his commitment to his community, country, and family never waivered. His unprecedented achievements in business, sports, and military service makes him a true representation of the American dream. This inspiring and uplifting story of perseverance is a must-read for anyone in need of motivation and a reminder of the power of the human spirit.

Kenneth F. Conklin LLC
ISBN-13  978-1734480726

Racial Domination - REVIEW

by Loïc Wacquant

Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loïc Wacquant pours cold analytical water on this hot topic and infuses it with epistemological clarity, conceptual precision, and empirical breadth.

Drawing on Gaston Bachelard, Max Weber, and Pierre Bourdieu, Wacquant first articulates a series of reframings, starting with dislodging the United States from its Archimedean position, in order to capture race-making as a form of symbolic violence. He then forges a set of novel concepts to rethink the nexus of racial classification and stratification: the continuum of ethnicity and race as disguised ethnicity, the diagonal of racialization and the pentad of ethnoracial domination, the checkerboard of violence and the dialectic of salience and consequentiality. This enables him to elaborate a meticulous critique of such fashionable notions as “structural racism” and “racial capitalism” that promise much but deliver little due to their semantic ambiguity and rhetorical malleability-notions that may even hamper the urgent fight against racial inequality.

Wacquant turns to deploying this conceptual framework to dissect two formidable institutions of ethnoracial rule in America: Jim Crow and the prison. He draws on ethnographies and historiographies of white domination in the postbellum South to construct a robust analytical concept of Jim Crow as caste terrorism erected in the late 19th century. He unravels the deadly symbiosis between the black hyperghetto and the carceral archipelago that has coproduced and entrenched the material and symbolic marginality of the African-American precariat in the metropolis of the late 20th century. Wacquant concludes with reflections on the politics of knowledge and pointers on the vexed question of the relationship between social epistemology and racial justice.

Both sharply focused and wide ranging, synthetic yet controversial, Racial Domination will be of interest to students and scholars of race and ethnicity, power and inequality, and epistemology and theory across the social sciences and humanities.

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research Associate at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris.

Polity
ISBN-13: 978-1509563029

Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation - REVIEW

by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

The first collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.

Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.

Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Honors include the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (2012); the Association of American Geographers' Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice (2014); the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); and the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017).

Verso
ISBN-13 978-1839761706

Circulating Jim Crow: The Saturday Evening Post and the War Against Black Modernity - REVIEW

by Adam McKible

In the early twentieth century, the Saturday Evening Post was perhaps the most popular and influential magazine in the United States, establishing literary reputations and shaping American culture. In the popular imagination, it is best remembered for Norman Rockwell’s covers, which nostalgically depicted a wholesome and idyllic American way of life. But beneath those covers lurked a more troubling reality. Under the direction of its longtime editor, George Horace Lorimer, the magazine helped justify racism and white supremacy. It published works by white authors that made heavy use of paternalistic tropes and demeaning humor, portraying Jim Crow segregation and violence as simple common sense.

Circulating Jim Crow demonstrates how the Post used stereotypical dialect fiction to promulgate white supremacist ideology and dismiss Black achievements, citizenship, and humanity. Adam McKible tells the story of Lorimer’s rise to prominence and examines the white authors who provided the editor and his readers with the caricatures they craved. He also explores how Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance pushed back against the Post and its commodified racism. McKible places the erstwhile household names who wrote for the magazine in conversation with figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ann Petry, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Faulkner. Revealing the role of the Saturday Evening Post in normalizing racism for millions of readers, this book also offers a new understanding of how Black writers challenged Jim Crow ideology.

Columbia University Press
ISBN-13 978-0231212649

Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America - REVIEW

by Steven J. Ross

No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. The Nazis plotted to kill the city's Jews and to sabotage the nation's military installations: Plans existed for murdering twenty-four prominent Hollywood figures, such as Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, and Louis B. Mayer; for driving through Boyle Heights and machine-gunning as many Jews as possible; and for blowing up defense installations and seizing munitions from National Guard armories along the Pacific Coast.

U.S. law enforcement agencies were not paying close attention--preferring to monitor Reds rather than Nazis--and only attorney Leon Lewis and his daring ring of spies stood in the way. From 1933 until the end of World War II, Lewis, the man Nazis would come to call “the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles,” ran a spy operation comprised of military veterans and their wives who infiltrated every Nazi and fascist group in Los Angeles. Often rising to leadership positions, they uncovered and foiled the Nazi's disturbing plans for death and destruction.

Featuring a large cast of Nazis, undercover agents, and colorful supporting players, the Los Angeles Times­ bestselling Hitler in Los Angeles, by acclaimed historian Steven J. Ross, tells the story of Lewis's daring spy network in a time when hate groups had moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Steven J. Ross is professor of history at the University of Southern California and director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. He is the author of Hollywood Left and Right, recipient of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Film Scholars Award and nominated for a Pulitzer; Working-Class Hollywood, nominated for a Pulitzer and the National Book Award; Movies and American Society; and Workers on the Edge. He lives in Southern California. http://scalar.usc.edu/works/hitler-in-los-angeles/index

Bloomsbury
ISBN-13 978-1620405628

See Justice Done: The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition - REVIEW

by Christopher Michael Brown

In See Justice Done: The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition, author Christopher Michael Brown argues that African American literature has profound and deliberate legal roots. Tracing this throughline from the eighteenth century to the present, Brown demonstrates that engaging with legal culture in its many forms—including its conventions, paradoxes, and contradictions—is paramount to understanding Black writing.

Brown begins by examining petitions submitted by free and enslaved Blacks to colonial and early republic legislatures. A virtually unexplored archive, these petitions aimed to demonstrate the autonomy and competence of their authors. Brown also examines early slave autobiographies such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Mary Prince’s History, which were both written in the form of legal petitions. These works invoke scenes of Black competence and of Black madness, repeatedly and simultaneously.

Early Black writings reflect how a Black Atlantic world, organized by slavery, refused to acknowledge Black competence. By including scenes of Black madness, these narratives critique the violence of the law and predict the failure of future legal counterparts, such as Plessy v. Ferguson, to remedy injustice. Later chapters examine the works of more contemporary writers, such as Sutton E. Griggs, George Schuyler, Toni Morrison, and Edward P. Jones, and explore varied topics from American exceptionalism to the legal trope of "colorblindness." In chronicling these interactions with jurisprudential logics, See Justice Done reveals the tensions between US law and Black experiences of both its possibilities and its perils.

Christopher Michael Brown is assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University, where he teaches courses on African American literature and legal culture. His research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Ford Foundation.

University Press of Mississippi
ISBN-13 978-1496848192

Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight - REVIEW

by Richard Frishman and B. Brian Foster

From award-winning photojournalist Richard Frishman comes a collection of photographs documenting America’s history of segregation, slavery, and institutional racism hidden in plain sight, accompanied by hard-hitting personal essays from University of Virginia professor of sociology and Black culture B. Brian Foster and with a foreword by National Book Award winner Imani Perry.

Beginning in 2018, Richard Frishman embarked on a 35,000-mile journey, crossing the United States several times, traveling from his home state of Washington to Maine, from Mississippi to Michigan, and everywhere in between. Frishman was driven by a deep concern for capturing traces of the nation’s history of segregation, slavery, and institutional racism embedded in everyday American architecture. Frishman spent the next five years capturing photographs of structures like the New Orleans Slave Exchange, old “colored entrances” at movie theaters in Seattle and Texas, formerly segregated beaches in Los Angeles, and the former site of New York City’s slave market.

As Frishman was traveling the country, his collaborator, noted sociologist Dr. B. Brian Foster, was writing about economic development, Black community life, and the blues in his home state of Mississippi. Foster adds to this collection seven essays of stirring prose and intimate storytelling. Whether reflecting on his relationship to his grandmother and her archive of family photos or chronicling his experiences working as a professor at the University of Mississippi and the University of Virginia, Foster adds layers of emotional resonance and sharp insight to the photographic collection with his essays, speaking to the shared memories, living histories, rippling beauty, and ongoing struggles of Black life in the United States.

Within this immersive collection, readers will witness and learn of histories startling, stirring, and thought-provoking: Histories of white supremacist violence and systemic racism. Histories of segregated bathrooms, beaches, churches, dining areas, doors, hospitals, hotels, waiting rooms, and water. Histories of Black aliveness and aspiration. Histories of Black migration, Black entrepreneurship, Black protest and organizing, Black singing and dancing, and Black placemaking.

This remarkable book brings home a powerful truth: these ghosts of segregation haunt us because they are very much alive. It also reveals how our surroundings bear witness to history, reminding us where we have been, where we are now, and crucially asking, Where do we go from here?

Celadon Books
ISBN-13 978-1250831682

Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism - REVIEW

by Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis.

“A ripping read—well rendered, fast-paced and delivered with the same punch and assurance that she brings to a broadcast. . . . The parallels to the present day are strong, even startling.”— The New York Times

Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens’ confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule.

That effort worked—tongue and groove—alongside an ultra-right paramilitary movement that stockpiled bombs and weapons and trained for mass murder and violent insurrection.

At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court.

None of it went as planned.

While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality it involved a large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation.

That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times.

Crown
ISBN-13 978-0593444511

The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought - REVIEW

by Melvin L. Rogers

Could the African American political tradition save American democracy? African Americans have had every reason to reject America’s democratic experiment. Yet African American activists, intellectuals, and artists who have sought to transform the United States into a racially just society have put forward some of the most original and powerful ideas about how to make America live up to its democratic ideals. In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition-a tradition that is urgently needed today.

The book reexamines how figures as diverse as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin thought about the politics, people, character, and culture of a society that so often dominated them. Sharing a light of faith darkened but not extinguished by the tragic legacy of slavery, they resisted the conclusion that America would always be committed to white supremacy. They believed that democracy is always in the process of becoming and that they could use it to reimagine society. But they also saw that achieving racial justice wouldn’t absolve us of the darkest features of our shared past, and that democracy must be measured by how skillfully we confront a history that will forever remain with us.

An ambitious account of the profound ways African Americans have reimagined democracy, The Darkened Light of Faith offers invaluable lessons about how to grapple with racial injustice and make democracy work.

Is democracy beyond repair in the United States? As Melvin L. Rogers writes in the opening pages of The Darkened Light of Faith: "Given how frequently the police kill African Americans, the ongoing structural inequality they experience, and housing and food insecurity suffered by so many. . . it may seem more appropriate to interpret the United States as working according to plan." The reality of institutional racism is undeniable, and it "often undercuts moments of hope."

In this urgent account of the African American political tradition of the 19th and 20th centuries, Rogers draws on the life and work of Black abolitionists (David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Maria Stewart) political activists (W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells), and artists (Billie Holiday, James Baldwin) who put their faith in the elements of democracy that work: a capacity for improvement; an openness to the future. Even though the terrible legacy of slavery challenged their resolve, this cohort of Black intellectuals dared to imagine ways in which America could live up to its democratic ideals.

From the abolitionist David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World that called upon enslaved men and women to resist subjugation and claim their right to American citizenship to James Baldwin's insistence on a full reckoning with the lingering trauma of slavery, Rogers skillfully illustrates a strand of African American political thought: one that turns towards the horrors of the past instead of shrinking away from it.

Though the path to racial justice is long and winding, it is, in The Darkened Light of Faith, a cause well worth fighting for, even if all we can hope for is an uneasy peace with the past and ourselves.

Melvin L. Rogers is professor of political science and associate director of the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Brown University. He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy, coeditor of African American Political Thought: A Collected History, and editor of John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems.

Princeton University Press
ISBN-13 978-0691219134

‘Race Is Everything’ Art and Human Difference - REVIEW

by David Bindman

A timely and revealing look at the intertwined histories of science, art, and racism.

‘Race Is Everything’ explores the spurious but influential ideas of so-called racial science in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, and how art was affected by it. David Bindman looks at race in general, but with particular concentration on attitudes toward and representations of people of African and Jewish descent. He argues that behind all racial ideas of the period lies the belief that outward appearance—and especially skull shape, as studied in the pseudoscience of phrenology—can be correlated with inner character and intelligence, and that these could be used to create a seemingly scientific hierarchy of races. The book considers many aspects of these beliefs, including the skull as a racial marker; ancient Egypt as a precedent for Southern slavery; Darwin, race, and aesthetics; the purported “Mediterranean race”; the visual aspects of eugenics; and the racial politics of Emil Nolde.

Reaktion Books
ISBN-13 978-1789146967

Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik by Winston James - REVIEW

 One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of the Black condition throughout the African diaspora and became a committed Bolshevik.

 Winston James offers a revelatory account of McKay’s political and intellectual trajectory from his upbringing in Jamaica through the early years of his literary career and radical activism. In 1912, McKay left Jamaica to study in the United States, never to return. James follows McKay’s time at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, as he discovered the harshness of American racism, and his move to Harlem, where he encountered the ferment of Black cultural and political movements and figures such as Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey. McKay left New York for London, where his commitment to revolutionary socialism deepened, culminating in his transformation from Fabian socialist to Bolshevik.

 Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay’s life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him.

Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik
by Winston James
ISBN: 978-0231135931