Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground - REVIEW

During the height of the Cold War, passionate idealists across the US and Africa came together to fight for Black self-determination and the antiracist remaking of society. Beginning with the 1957 Ghanaian independence celebration, the optimism and challenges of African independence leaders were publicized to African Americans through community-based newspapers and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Inspired by African independence―and frustrated with the slow pace of civil rights reforms in the US―a new generation of Black Power activists embarked on nonviolent direct action campaigns and built alternative institutions designed as spaces of freedom from racial subjugation.

Featuring interviews with activists, extensive archival research, and media analysis, Robin Hayes reveals how Black Power and African independence activists created a diaspora underground, characterized by collaboration and reciprocal empowerment. Together, they redefined racial discrimination as an international human rights issue requiring education, sustained collective action, and global solidarity―laying the groundwork for future transnational racial justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground
by Robin J. Hayes

University of Washington Press
ISBN: 978-0295749075

Race in Society: The Enduring American Dilemma - REVIEW

 

by Margaret L. Andersen

The second edition of Race in Society analyzes the social dynamics of systemic racism and the persistence of racial inequality in US institutions. The book is informed by contemporary social science research and includes the most recent studies on racial disparities during the COVID pandemic and current racial protests.

Race in Society is intended for courses in the sociology of race and ethnicity and can be used in other social science and interdisciplinary courses. Its accessible writing style, student friendly approach, and brevity make it attractive to instructors who want to pair it with other monographs or anthologies.

Four themes guide the organization of the book:
1. the social construction of race and ethnicity, as they evolve within systems of power and privilege;
2. the social dynamics of prejudice, bias, and racism;
3. the systemic character of racial inequality in US social institutions; and,
4. strategies for social change, especially as the United States becomes increasingly racially and ethnically diverse. A new feature in the second edition, “Taking Action against Racism,” will appeal to students who want to know what they can do to challenge racism

Margaret L. Andersen is Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Delaware, where she was honored with two teaching awards. She is the former vice president of the American Sociological Association and former president of the Eastern Sociological Society.

Race in Society: The Enduring American Dilemma
by Margaret L. Andersen
Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN-13:‎ 978-1538149454
434 pages

Policing Black Bodies: How Black Lives Are Surveilled and How to Work for Change - REVIEW

 

by Angela Hattery and Earl Smith

In this provocative book, the authors connect the regulation of African American people in many settings into a powerful narrative. Completely updated throughout, the book now includes a new chapter on policing black athletes' bodies, and expanded coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement, policing trans bodies, and policing Black women's bodies.

Policing Black Bodies: How Black Lives Are Surveilled and How to Work for Change
by Angela Hattery and Earl Smith
Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN-13:‎ 978-1538142547
326 pages

Slave Nation: An Unflinching Look at the Racism that Inspired the American Revolution - REVIEW

by Alfred Blumrosen

A book all Americans should read, Slave Nation reveals the key role racism played in the American Revolutionary War, so we can see our past more clearly and build a better future.

In 1772, the High Court in London freed a slave from Virginia named Somerset, setting a precedent that would end slavery in England. In America, racist fury over this momentous decision united the Northern and Southern colonies and convinced them to fight for independence. Meticulously researched and accessible, Slave Nation provides a little-known view of the birth of our nation and its earliest steps toward self-governance.

Slave Nation is a fascinating account of the role slavery played in the American Revolution and in the framing of the Constitution, offering a fresh examination of the "fight for freedom" that embedded racism into our national identity, led to the Civil War, and reverberates through Black Lives Matter protests today.

Slave Nation: An Unflinching Look at the Racism that Inspired the American Revolution
by Alfred Blumrosen
Sourcebooks
ISBN-13:‎ 978-1402206979
304 pages

A House Divided: Slavery and American Politics from the Constitution to the Civil War - REVIEW

by Ben McNitt

Slavery is one of the central, most enduringly significant facts of U.S. history. It loomed like a dark cloud over the country’s birth at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and shaped the most important nodes of American history before the Civil War. Even today, the country continues to debate its past as it relates to slavery, and the political and geographic contours of human bondage endure into the twenty-first century.

In a deeply researched, wide-ranging book, retired journalist Ben McNitt tells the story of how slavery shaped American politics—and indeed the American story—from the Founding until the Civil War. McNitt’s sharp narrative covers people and events that still resonate: Thomas Jefferson, John Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, the slave revolts of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Brown and Harpers Ferry, fire-eating secessionists, and the rise of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. No other single work covers this topic as comprehensively and accessibly.

A House Divided: Slavery and American Politics from the Constitution to the Civil War
by Ben McNitt
Stackpole Books
ISBN-13:‎ 978-0811739771
504 pages

Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times - REVIEW

 

by Michael Beschloss

Widely acclaimed and ten years in the making, Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War is an intimate and irresistibly readable chronicle of the Chief Executives who took the United States into conflict and mobilized it for victory. From the War of 1812 to Vietnam, we see these leaders considering the difficult decision to send hundreds of thousands of Americans to their deaths; struggling with Congress, the courts, the press, and antiwar protesters; seeking comfort from their spouses and friends; and dropping to their knees in prayer. Through Beschloss’s interviews with surviving participants and findings in original letters and once-classified national security documents, we come to understand how these Presidents were able to withstand the pressures of war—or were broken by them.

Presidents of War combines this sense of immediacy with the overarching context of two centuries of American history, traveling from the time of our Founders, who tried to constrain presidential power, to our modern day, when a single leader has the potential to launch nuclear weapons that can destroy much of the human race.

Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times
by Michael Beschloss
Crown
ISBN-13:‎ 978-0307409614
752 pages

America's Forgotten Colonial History - REVIEW

by Dana Huntley

This is what we all learned in school: Pilgrims on the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. They had a rough start, but ultimately made a go of it, made friends with the Indians, and celebrated with a big Thanksgiving dinner. Other uptight religious Puritans followed them and the whole place became New England. There were some Dutch down in New York, and sooner or later William Penn and the Quakers came to build the City of Brotherly Love in Pennsylvania, and finally it was 1776 and time to revolt against King George III and become America.

That’s it. That’s the narrative of American colonial history known to one and all. Yet there are 150 years – six or seven generations between Plymouth Plantation and the 1770s – that are virtually unknown in our national consciousness and unaccounted for in our American narrative.

Who, what, when, where and why people were motivated to make a two-month crossing on the North Atlantic to carve a life in a largely uncharted, inhospitable wilderness? How and why did they build the varied societies that they did here in the New World colonies? How and why did we become America?

America’s Forgotten Colonial History tells that story.

America's Forgotten Colonial History
Dana Huntley
Lyons Press
ISBN-13‏:‎ 978-1493038473
240 pages

The Forgotten History of America: Little-Known Conflicts of Lasting Importance From the Earliest Colonists to the Eve of the Revolution - REVIEW

by Cormac O'Brien

From the founding of the first permanent European settlement in North America (1565) to the bloody chaos of the British frontier in Pontiac’s War (1763), the vividly written narrative of The Forgotten History of America spans the two centuries of American history before the Revolutionary War. 

Today, Americans think of 1776 as the beginning of an era. A nation was born, commencing a story that continues to this day with our own lives. But the War of Independence also marked the end of another era—one in which many nations, Native American and European, had struggled for control of a vast and formidable wilderness. That saga—though separated from us now by a gulf of time that makes it strange, and even alien—was the history out of which our own emerged.

This book returns to the time before our nation was formed, when the clash between America's first peoples and the newcomers from Europe was still new. Focusing on events that are all but forgotten today, author Cormac O’Brien’s masterful storytelling reveals how actors as diverse as Spanish conquistadores, Puritan ministers, Amerindian sachems, mercenary soldiers, and ordinary farmers traded and clashed across a landscape of constant, often violent, change. He tells how these dramatic moments helped to shape the very world around us.

These lesser-known conflicts of the pre-Revolutionary past unveil a world of heroism, brutality, and tenacity. Brought brilliantly to life through O'Brien's expressive narrative and more than 100 archival images, The Forgotten History of America shows us how deep the roots of our own time truly run. 

The Forgotten History of America: Little-Known Conflicts of Lasting Importance From the Earliest Colonists to the Eve of the Revolution
Cormac O'Brien
Crestline Books
ISBN-13: 978-0785836544
304 pages