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In Emancipation's Daughters, Riché Richardson examines iconic black women leaders who have contested racial stereotypes and constructed new national narratives of black womanhood in the United States. Drawing on literary texts and cultural representations, Richardson shows how five emblematic black women—Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Obama, and Beyoncé—have challenged white-centered definitions of American identity. By using the rhetoric of motherhood and focusing on families and children, these leaders have defied racist images of black women, such as the mammy or the welfare queen, and rewritten scripts of femininity designed to exclude black women from civic participation. Richardson shows that these women's status as national icons was central to reconstructing black womanhood in ways that moved beyond dominant stereotypes. However, these formulations are often premised on heteronormativity and exclude black queer and trans women. Throughout Emancipation's Daughters, Richardson reveals new possibilities for inclusive models of blackness, national femininity, and democracy.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 made slavery illegal in the territory that would later become Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. However, many Black individuals’ rights were denied by white enslavers who continued to hold them captive in the territory well into the nineteenth century. Set in this period of American history, Enslaved, Indentured, Free shines a light on five extraordinary Black women—Marianne, Mariah, Patsey, Rachel, and Courtney—whose lives intersected in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

Focusing on these five women, Mary Elise Antoine explores the history of slavery in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, relying on legal documents, military records, court transcripts, and personal correspondence. Whether through perseverance, self-purchase, or freedom suits—including one suit that was used as precedent in Dred and Harriet Scott’s freedom suits years later—each of these women ultimately secured her freedom, thanks in part to the bonds they forged with one another.

How a pioneering manuscript librarian and intellectual uncovered buried records that reshaped America’s past 

As the London-based agent of the US Library of Congress, Ruth Anna Fisher (1886–1975) profoundly shaped the field of US history. Working at the British Museum and Public Record Office between the world wars, she was responsible for a vast program of identifying and copying up to a million documents related to American history, with prescient attention to the transatlantic slave trade. This monumental achievement has provided countless scholars access to source materials that might have remained hidden in repositories throughout Britian without Fisher’s brilliant discernment and tireless labor. 

In Envoy to the Archives, William L. Fox offers the first full-length biography of this remarkable American intellectual. Born to a prominent African American family in northern Ohio, Fisher was keenly aware of racial issues throughout her life. She was associated with key thinkers in the Harlem Renaissance and the twentieth century transatlantic world, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Harold Laski, and J. Franklin Jameson. A trailblazer in historical research, Fisher was among a small group of Black women who first joined the ranks of professional library work, and her efforts in London coincided with the creation and consolidation of the US National Archives in the 1930s. She also mastered technologies that were new at the time, including photostat reproduction and microfilm—precursors to the many historical digitization projects of our own era. 

This engrossing biography adds to the growing body of work centered on Black women archivists, librarians, and curators. Fox draws on a wide range of archival sources, including the personal papers of prominent Black thinkers (Fisher’s were destroyed in the bombing of London in 1940), and various institutional records at the Library of Congress and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Fox also knew Fisher personally, adding warmth and insight into this captivating portrait.