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A fascinating cultural history, Races of Mankind examines how we continually re-negotiate the veracity of race through collaborative processes involved in the production, display, and circulation of visual representations.

In Radiant Daughter, award-winning novelist Patricia Grossman follows a Czech-American family for twenty-seven years, beginning in suburban Chicago in 1969 and ending in Brooklyn, in seaside “Little Odessa,” in 1996. Though the novel begins as a traditional assimilation story—immigrant parents, “native” children, and the conflicts one might expect—it evolves into a highly particular and harrowing tale surrounding the descent of Elise Blazek, the family’s brightest star. Radiant Daughter is also a story of translation—between generations, from the Czech of Irena and Stepan, to the “American” of the children, and finally to the Russian that is Elise’s academic specialty.

 Radiant Daughter explores all that is human, from the most self-destructive behavior to the highest forms of commitment and self-sacrifice. Even at her lowest moments, Irena never loses her fierce love for the daughter who has traveled so utterly beyond her reach. For Elise, the future will always be complicated: a precarious balance between periods of insight, bursts of accomplishment, and the abyss of her illness.

Reminiscent, on the one hand, of the meticulously constructed mother-daughter dynamic in Carol Shields’s Unless and, on the other, of the anarchic real-life experience of Big and Little Edie Beale in Grey Gardens, Grossman’s moving narrative breaks new ground in exploring a dangerous turn in the complex bond between a mother and her adult child.

Positioning the events in the context of their time, Michael V. Metz delves into the lives and actions of activists at the center of the drama. A participant himself, Metz draws on interviews, archives, and newspaper records to show a movement born in demands for free speech, inspired by a movement for civil rights, and driven to the edge by a seemingly never-ending war. If the sudden burst of irrational violence baffled parents, administrators, and legislators, it seemed inevitable to students after years of official intransigence and disregard. Metz portrays campus protesters not as angry, militant extremists but as youthful citizens deeply engaged with grave moral issues, embodying the idealism, naiveté, and courage of a minority of a generation.

From 1932 to 1953, during the Black Chicago Renaissance, numerous literary events were held within and for the city’s Black community. In book clubs, public forums, print reviews, little magazines, local programming, and other public venues, Black women in particular debated the role of literature in racial uplift efforts, set literary standards, and acted as community gatekeepers for cultural production during a time known as the Black Chicago Renaissance. Through these inspiring efforts, a mix of publishers, well-known authors, and everyday readers significantly fostered a robust literary culture in the Windy City.

Reading the Renaissance constructs a reception history of the Black women who read and reviewed, published and promoted, and collected and curated literature of the era. Mary Unger interprets how local figures such as Vivian G. Harsh, Ora Morrow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Browning, Fern Gayden, and Margaret Walker cultivated particular literary tastes through collective acts of reading and reception. She does so by recovering a network of readers, book clubs, literary magazines, civic programs, and book businesses that Black women created, led, and transformed during the early 1930s through the early 1950s in Bronzeville, Chicago’s predominantly Black South Side neighborhood.

This illuminating work includes close readings of texts alongside letters, scrapbooks, meeting minutes, reviews, and other ephemera of local reading practices to show how Black women facilitated diverse strategies of reading while instructing community members how to engage a variety of print cultures at the time. Unger demonstrates how Black women readers influenced individual authors as well as the norms and expectations of African American literature more broadly, becoming important (yet too often overlooked) players in American literary history.

Riot Zone presents a compelling forensic microhistory of the racial violence that exploded in Chicago starting on July 27, 1919, when a Black teenager named Eugene Williams drowned in Lake Michigan after white beachgoers attacked him as he swam with friends. In the days that followed, white gang members terrorized African Americans on the city’s South Side and Black Chicagoans armed and defended themselves in response. By the end of the first week of August, when the rioting finally ended, thirty-eight Chicagoans lay dead and hundreds nursed injuries as a result of what became known as America’s “Red Summer.”

The late Christopher Lamberti, with the help of editor Sean Dinces, recounts this sobering history using GIS software to map what occurred. The authors revisit and debunk ideas about the role race and ethnicity played in the riot and its aftermath, showing how the politics of housing and racial conflicts over residential space set the stage for the riots that ensued.

With insights that echo in today’s conflicts, Riot Zone proves that there is still plenty to learn about the history of America’s ongoing struggle with urban and racial violence.