Results by title

Traces the little-known story of the bitter contest for the fate of the University of Alabama after the Civil War.

In The Battle for the University of Alabama, William Warren Rogers Jr. gives a fascinating account of the fierce struggle over the nature of the University of Alabama after the Civil War. Union forces reduced the campus to ruins as the war ended, and the university did not reopen until 1869. In the interregnum, powerful forces shifted the trajectory of the school. Alabama Republicans authored an egalitarian state constitution that delivered oversight of the university to the Republican Party. That set the stage for turmoil and confrontation. This book tells the story of that conflict.

In the next few years, Democrats charged Republicans with turning the university into a “radical” institution. They alleged that a handful of unqualified individuals had gained faculty positions because of their political allegiance, which resulted in the university’s academic desecration. Professors were bitterly denounced in the state newspaper press and quite personally in Tuscaloosa. Administration of the university became part of the fratricidal political debate in the state. Political violence and questions concerning race, specifically the possible integration of the university, illuminated the controversies of the Reconstruction years. Many of these questions resonate even today.

This authoritative account sets events at the University of Alabama against the backdrop of what occurred at other state universities in the Reconstruction South. The University of North Carolina experienced controversy similar to Alabama’s. At the University of Georgia, however, calm prevailed. This story of the incendiary events at Alabama’s flagship university charts new ground and provides a revelatory look into the extraordinary partisanship that characterized the South after the Civil War.

At the intersection of rhetorical studies and critical race/ethnic studies, The Benevolent Gaslight analyzes cultural and political discourses that recharacterize acts of racial violence as teaching moments and learning opportunities. Naming this phenomenon “benevolent gaslighting,” Louis M. Maraj and Pritha Prasad explore its application across academic disciplines/epistemologies, educational history, and university race management, while also diving into how popular culture and political figures use benevolent gaslighting to reinscribe normative operations of race, gender, and sexuality.

Although this rhetoric usually presents as progressive, when used for the purposes of advancing “antiracism,” the benevolent gaslight re-centers the very whiteness it supposedly critiques. It prompts peoples of color to question their histories, memories, and realities by suggesting their pain has been necessary for positive social change and by situating racial trauma as opportunities for public learning. Specific examples include antiracist teaching initiatives and the sudden proliferation of apologies for past acts of racism by public figures. Both trends saw an uptick from 2020 onward as a result of publicity crises and public “reckonings” necessitated by Black Lives Matter protests in response to widely reported, hypervisible anti-Black violences like the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.

These discourses deflect blame for past or present racial violence by narrating it as an opportunity for “antiracist” growth and intervention. Utilizing conventional academic and creative/narrative methods to examine examples of the benevolent gaslight across US histories of education during the First Reconstruction, the post–Civil Rights management of student activists in the university, and the progressivist discourses of humanities disciplines and popular culture, this book reveals the insidious ways in which peoples of color are routinely (re)traumatized through mechanisms of “pedagogy.”

A critical analysis of the poetic representations and legacies of five landmark blues artists

The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry focuses on five key blues musicians and singers—Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, and Lead Belly—and traces the ways in which these artists and their personas have been invoked and developed throughout American poetry. This study spans nearly one hundred years of literary and musical history, from the New Negro Renaissance to the present.

Emily Ruth Rutter not only examines blues musicians as literary touchstones or poetic devices, but also investigates the relationship between poetic constructions of blues icons and shifting discourses of race and gender. Rutter’s nuanced analysis is clear, compelling, and rich in critical assessments of these writers’ portraits of the musical artists, attending to their strategies and oversights.
 

A Togolese novel that delivers a rich, intimate portrait of a scholar whose life is inextricably bound to Africa.

For the French ethnologist Maurice Boyer, Africa isn't just a place; it’s a mirage, an enigma, a mirror reflecting his desires and doubts. The fieldwork he undertook in Tèdi, Togo, where he lived for years among the Tem people and tried to understand their customs and rituals, has left him with questions that have lingered: Who was a friend and who was a foe? Which stories were true and which were illusions? As decades pass and the roles of Aurélie, his wife, and Safi, his former student, begin to shift, Boyer finds himself wrestling not only with his own choices but with the legacy of knowledge itself.

Through the lens of this profound postcolonial quest, Sami Tchak explores Africa’s rich, complex reality through this intimate story of a scholar reconsidering his own understanding of culture, ethnology, and history. The Continent of Everything and Practically Nothing asks whether assembling more data can truly capture the complexity of a continent, and explores how academic ambition, history, and emotion shape how we understand the world, and how we live in it.

A recurrent and popular setting in American cinema, the dressing room has captured the imaginations of filmmakers and audiences for over a century. In The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film, the only book-length study of the space, author Desirée J. Garcia explores how dressing rooms are dynamic realms in which a diverse cast of performers are made and exposed. Garcia analyzes the backstage film, which spans film history, modes, and genre, to show how dressing rooms have been a useful space for filmmakers to examine the performativity of American life. From the Black maid to the wife and mother to the leading man, dressing rooms navigate, shape, and challenge society’s norms. The stakes are high in dressing rooms, Garcia argues, because they rehearse larger questions about identity and its performance, negotiating who can succeed and who cannot and on what terms. 

Rediscovering an early scientific challenge to racism

This is the first paperback edition of the only English-language translation of the Haitian scholar Anténor Firmin's The Equality of the Human Races, a foundational text in critical anthropology first published in 1885 when anthropology was just emerging as a specialized field of study. Marginalized for its "radical" position that the human races were equal, Firmin's lucid and persuasive treatise was decades ahead of its time. Arguing that the equality of the races could be demonstrated through a positivist scientific approach, Firmin challenged racist writings and the dominant views of the day. Translated by Asselin Charles and framed by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban's substantial introduction, this rediscovered text is an important contribution to contemporary scholarship in anthropology, pan-African studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies.

The roots—and reach—of “Great Replacement” theory in France and beyond​
 

The Eurabia Myth delves into the origins and evolution of far-right anxieties about the future of a Europe that welcomes postcolonial migration, racial and ethnic diversity, and tolerance of Islam. Nationalists deploy the specter of “Eurabia”—an Arabized and Islamized Europe—as a doomsday scenario of demographic replacement that only they can avert. Mehammed Amadeus Mack traces this dark vision to a sociopolitical conspiracy theory that began in France, spread throughout Europe, and has become especially virulent in the United States: Great Replacement Theory.

Examining how the Eurabia narrative gained traction, Mack analyzes dystopian fiction that envisions how this Replacement will take place, the contemporary politicization of medieval history, and ecofascist rhetoric depicting immigrants as an “invasive” species. He also interviews prominent French activists of color about how they subvert being portrayed as Replacers and destroyers of European civilization, and he explores the American echoes of the Great Replacement Theory.

Innovatively deploying gender and sexuality theory to the concept of Eurabia, Mack demonstrates that the demographic and racial anxieties underlying Great Replacement Theory are intertwined with a more fundamental crisis of masculinity, evident in the far right’s accusations that feminists and the LGBT community are responsible for the decline in white birth rates. As it uncovers the deeper roots of this pervasive theory, The Eurabia Myth shows its insidious relevance to a rising tide of nativist fear, hatred, and violence.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

The original book on the renowned Freedom quilters of Gee's Bend - stitching justice, one quilt at a time.

In December of 1965, the year of the Selma-to-Montgomery march, a white Episcopal priest driving through a desperately poor, primarily black section of Wilcox County found himself at a great bend of the Alabama River. He noticed a cabin clothesline from which were hanging three magnificent quilts unlike any he had ever seen. They were of strong, bold colors in original, op-art patterns—the same art style then fashionable in New York City and other cultural centers. An idea was born and within weeks took on life, in the form of the Freedom Quilting Bee, a handcraft cooperative of black women artisans who would become acclaimed throughout the nation.

During the Great Migration, Black Americans sought new lives in midwestern small towns only to confront the pervasive efforts of white residents determined to maintain their area’s preferred cultural and racial identity. Jennifer Sdunzik explores this widespread phenomenon by examining how it played out in one midwestern community. Sdunzik merges state and communal histories, interviews and analyses of population data, and spatial and ethnographic materials to create a rich public history that reclaims Black contributions and history. She also explores the conscious and unconscious white actions that all but erased Black Americans--and the terror and exclusion used against them--from the history of many midwestern communities.

An innovative challenge to myth and perceived wisdom, The Geography of Hate reveals the socioeconomic, political, and cultural forces that prevailed in midwestern towns and helps explain the systemic racism and endemic nativism that remain entrenched in American life.

The Home in Hollywood Melodrama considers the home’s narrative, thematic, and visual construction within domestic melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s, exploring the assumptions of gender, class, and race through which the home is visualized on screen. Informed by approaches from genre studies, architectural and urban studies, feminist film theory, critical race theory, and phenomenology, amongst others, the book traces how routine domestic activities and unremarkable stylistic gestures become charged with meaning via melodrama’s emphasis on recurrence and return and its moral elevation of victimhood. Drawing on original archival research and detailed textual analysis, The Home in Hollywood Melodrama offers a series of detailed case studies that explore the onscreen home as a product of both Hollywood production norms and wider cultural conceptions of belonging. Addressing questions of female movement and labor, property relations and class, race, and national identity, the book argues that the generic structures of domestic melodrama are fundamental to understanding how the home within these films takes shape onscreen.

Tracing how resistance to lynching violence generated some of the most innovative writing in American literature

On March 9, 1892, three Black men were murdered in Memphis. The violence moved Ida B. Wells to begin writing against lynching; in doing so, she helped ignite a literary tradition that would transform American literature. The dual presence of lynching violence and activist resistance gave rise to a dynamic body of African American writing that grapples with the contradictions inherent to a democracy whose citizens enslaved others.

In The Human in This Place, Jennifer Ryan-Bryant ties central moments in the history of American lynching to the emergence of new literary genres. Focusing on Jim Crow segregation, anti-lynching activism, the murder of Emmett Till, Civil Rights and Black Power organizing, and modern police brutality, Ryan-Bryant identifies the unique formal elements and themes that  characterize literary responses to sustained social violence and political resistance. The new genres she identifies—including the socialist novel, the Emmett Till poem, and the anti-epic catalogue—reveal art's resistance and response to unchecked mob violence.

The Human in This Place recognizes that lynchings occupy a uniquely disturbing space in American life: simultaneously legal and extralegal, public and private, individual and communal. The literatures of lynching investigate the ethical slippage endemic to American national identity and articulate the joyous expression that resistance makes possible.

How the construction of Muslim boys as proto-terrorists is integral to the story of American racial capitalism

How do we understand an incident where a five-year-old Muslim boy arrives at Dulles airport and is preemptively detained as a “threat”? To answer that question, Shenila Khoja-Moolji examines American public culture, arguing that Muslim boyhood has been invented as a threat within an ideology that seeks to predict future terrorism. Muslim boyhood bridges actual past terrorism and possible future events, justifying preemptive enclosure, surveillance, and punishment. Even in the occasional reframing of individual Muslim boys as innocent, Khoja-Moolji identifies a pattern of commodity antiracism, through which elites buy public goodwill but leave intact the collective anti-Muslim notion that fuels an expanding carceral and security state. Framing Muslim boyhood as a heuristic device, she turns to a discussion of Hindutva ideology in India to show how Muslim boyhood may be resituated in global contexts.

FINALIST FOR THE 2026 GEORGE WASHINGTON PRIZE

Winner of the 2026 Book of the Year Award, George Washington American Revolution Round Table, Washington, DC

The killing of Jane McCrea on July 26, 1777, on the outskirts of a village in the northern Hudson Valley, would unexpectedly rupture the British advance from Canada that was meant to crush the American Revolution in one knockout blow. On that day, twenty-five-year-old McCrea, an unremarkable person preparing for an impending marriage, was assaulted, scalped, and killed by a group of Native Americans in the employ of British general John Burgoyne. Though the murder was but one of many civilian deaths in a fierce war zone, McCrea’s killing had far-reaching consequences for each of the three major parties involved in the Northern Campaign of 1777. In America, she became the great cause célèbre of the Revolution, the sympathetic female victim of the war symbolizing the righteousness of The Cause. In Britain, she was a human-rights tragedy that tarnished the polished surface of British honor and galvanized Whig politicians who shouted out her name in Parliament as an example of how low the nation had fallen. For Native peoples, recruited by both the British and the Americans, and caught in the middle of a war staged on ancestral grounds, McCrea’s killing was the opening salvo in a vicious chain of bloody retribution that led to the disintegration of the venerable Iroquois Confederacy and the obliteration of Native homelands. After the war, the nightmarish image of a young Jane McCrea slaughtered on the New York frontier would obsess white Americans who came to fear Native peoples as irredeemable savages. Her murder would help justify the expulsion of Indigenous tribes and open the doors for an expansionary United States that was fully intent on transforming the American continent into its own image.
            The Killing of Jane McCrea: An American Tragedy on the Revolutionary Frontier by distinguished historian Paul Staiti undertakes for the first time a comprehensive investigation into McCrea’s life, death, and especially her long and strange afterlife. Using both visual arts and written records, the author reassembles the scattered fragments to illuminate a historical terrain long since shrouded in misinformation, mired in controversy, and relegated to mythology. Coming into view is a major portrait of the persons, cultures, actions, and motives that fatally converged on that hot July morning in 1777.

Early in the morning on June 1, 1953, five African American men boarded a van to make the 200-mile trip from Nashville to Memphis for a daylong recording session at the legendary Sun Studios, to be overseen by Sun founder Sam Phillips. One of the two tracks cut that day, “Just Walkin' in the Rain,” would go on to become a regional R&B hit, Sun Records' biggest record of the pre-Elvis era. It would, however, be the group's only hit. They were the Prisonaires, a vocal quintet who had honed their skills while inmates at the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. 

In this book, John Dougan tells the story of the Prisonaires, their hit single, and the afterlife of this one remarkable song. The group and the song itself represent a compelling concept: imprisoned men using music as a means of cultural and personal survival. The song was re-recorded by white singer Johnnie Ray, who made it a huge hit in 1956. Over the years, other singers and groups would move the song further away from its origins, recasting the deep emotions that came from creating music in a hostile, controlled environment. 

The story of the Prisonaires, for all of its triumphs, reflects the disappointment of men caught in a paradoxical search for personal independence while fully cognizant of a future consigned to prison. Their brief career and the unusual circumstances under which it flourished sheds light on the harsh realities of race relations in the pre–Civil Rights South. The book also provides a portrait of Nashville just as it was gaining traction as a nationally recognized music center.

When inclusion into the fold of citizenship is conditioned by a social group’s conceit to ritual violence, humiliation, and exploitation, what can anti-citizenship offer us?
 

The Promise of Youth Anti-citizenship argues that Black youth and youth of color have been cast as anti-citizens, disenfranchised from the social, political, and economic mainstream of American life. Instead of asking youth to conform to a larger societal structure undergirded by racial capitalism and antiblackness, the volume’s contributors propose that the collective practice of anti-citizenship opens up a liberatory space for youth to challenge the social order.

The chapters cover an array of topics, including Black youth in the charter school experiment in post-Katrina New Orleans; racial capitalism, the queering of ethnicity, and the 1980s Salvadoran migration to South Central Los Angeles; the notion of decolonizing classrooms through Palestinian liberation narratives; and more. Through a range of methodological approaches and conceptual interventions, this collection illuminates how youth negotiate and exercise anti-citizenship as forms of either resistance or refusal in response to coercive patriotism, cultural imperialism, and predatory capitalism.

Contributors: Karlyn Adams-Wiggins, Portland State U; Ariana Brazier; Julio Cammarota, U of Arizona; Michael Davis, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Damaris C. Dunn, U of Georgia; Diana Gamez, U of California, Irvine; Rachel F. Gómez, Virginia Commonwealth U; Luma Hasan; Gabriel Rodriguez, Iowa State U; Christopher R. Rogers, U of Pennsylvania; Damien M. Sojoyner, U of California, Irvine.

The potential of biohumanities as a foundation for antiracist critique of the human

The Racial Cage delivers a spirited and polyvocal analysis of how race is materialized through both metaphorical and literal cages. It theorizes the cage, fence, dragnet, and tube as material–semiotic sites for racialization and for iteratively redefining the human–animal boundary. A collaborative conversation across continents, this work examines the racial cage as an important part of the practice of social division and bodily containment. The deeply considered result is an empirical and theoretical approach to biohumanities that productively interrogates its linkages to critical theories of race and racism.

Tracing how the “Great Replacement” narrative has shaped far-right extremism and propelled its dangerous political projects and acts of violence

The “Great Replacement” narrative, which imagines that historic white majorities are being intentionally replaced through immigration policies crafted by global elites, has effectively mobilized racist, nationalist, and nativist movements in the United States and Europe. The Rage of Replacement tracks how this narrative has shaped the politics and worldview of the far right, binding its various camps into a community of rage obsessed with nostalgia for a white-supremacist past.

Showing how the replacement narrative has found significant purchase in recent mainstream discourse through the rise of Trumpism, right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson, and events such as 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Michael Feola diagnoses the dangers this racist theory poses as it shapes the far-right imagination, expands through civil society, and deforms political culture. In particular, he tracks how the replacement narrative has given rise to malignant political strategies designed to “take back” the nation from its perceived enemies—by force if deemed necessary.

Identifying the Great Replacement narrative as a central force behind the rise and expansion of far-right extremism, Feola shows how it has motivated a variety of dangerous political projects in pursuit of illiberal, antidemocratic futures. From calls for the creation of segregated white ethnostates to extremist violence such as the mass shootings in Christchurch, El Paso, and Buffalo, The Rage of Replacement makes clear that replacement theory poses a dire threat to democracy and safety.

Revisits the inspiring and heroic stories of the Freedom Riders, through their own words.
 
In May 1961, despite multiple Supreme Court rulings, segregation remained alive and well within the system of interstate travel. All across the American South, interstate buses as well as their travel facilities were divided racially. This blatant disregard for law and morality spurred the Congress of Racial Equality to send thirteen individuals—seven black, six white—on a harrowing bus trip throughout the South as a sign of protest.
 
These original riders were met with disapproval, arrests and violence along the way, but that did not stop the movement. That summer, more than four hundred Freedom Riders continued their journey—many of them concluding their ride at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm, where they endured further abuses and indignities. As a result of the riders sacrifice, by November of 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission finally put an end to interstate commerce segregation, and in the process, elevated the riders to become a source of inspiration for other civil rights campaigns such as voter registration rights and school desegregation.
 
While much has been written on the Freedom Rides, far less has been published about the individual riders. Join award-winning author B. J. Hollars as he sets out on his own journey to meet them, retracing the historic route and learning the stories of as many surviving riders as he could. The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders offers an intimate look into the lives and legacies of the riders. Throughout the book these civil rights veterans’ poignant, personal stories offer timely insights into America’s racial past and hopeful future.
 
Weaving the past with the present, Hollars aims to demystify the legendary journey, while also confronting more modern concerns related to race in America. The Road South is part memoir and part research-based journalism. It transcends the traditional textbook version of this historical journey to highlight the fascinating stories of the many riders—both black and white—who risked their lives to move the country forward.

Uncovering the pernicious narratives white people create to justify white supremacy and sustain racist oppression

The police murders of two Black men, Philando Castile and George Floyd, frame this searing exploration of the historical and fictional narratives that white America tells itself to justify and maintain white supremacy. From the country’s founding through the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020, David Mura unmasks how white stories about race attempt to erase the brutality of the past and underpin systemic racism in the present.

Intertwining history, literature, ethics, and the deeply personal, Mura looks back to foundational narratives of white supremacy (Jefferson’s defense of slavery, Lincoln’s frequently minimized racism, and the establishment of Jim Crow) to show how white identity is based on shared belief in the pernicious myths, false histories, and racially segregated fictions that allow whites to deny their culpability in past atrocities and current inequities. White supremacy always insists white knowledge is superior to Black knowledge, Mura argues, and this belief dismisses the truths embodied in Black narratives.

Mura turns to literature, comparing the white savior portrayal of the film Amistad to the novelization of its script by the Black novelist Alexs Pate, which focuses on its African protagonists; depictions of slavery in Faulkner and Morrison; and race’s absence in the fiction of Jonathan Franzen and its inescapable presence in works by ZZ Packer, tracing the construction of Whiteness to willfully distorted portraits of race in America. In James Baldwin’s essays, Mura finds a response to this racial distortion and a way for Blacks and other BIPOC people to heal from the wounds of racism.

Taking readers beyond apology, contrition, or sadness, Mura attends to the persistent trauma racism has exacted and lays bare how deeply we need to change our racial narratives—what white people must do—to dissolve the myth of Whiteness and fully acknowledge the stories and experiences of Black Americans.

Utilizing works of art as a primary source, Lisa Farrington's research in The World Before Racism conclusively answers the questions: Who invented racism? When? And why?

The term racism is understood to mean that race is the principal determinant of specific human traits and capacities and that due to racial differences, one race is inherently superior to all others. Over time, racism has commonly referenced the notion that the White race is superior to all others, fostering prejudice and discrimination. In The World Before Racism: An Art Story, author and art historian Lisa Farrington meticulously examines the intersection of art, history, and race, using original works of art as primary source materials to support her premise that racism is a construct, invented in the mid-1700s, to support the financial, political, and religious structures of European colonialism.

Using art from ancient Egypt, classical Greece, and the Roman Empire, through Medieval Europe and the colonization of the New World, to the art of the present day—sources that cannot be easily altered, edited, or selectively translated—Farrington expertly examines the intricate interplay between the Black and White races, how they saw and understood each other over the centuries. The artworks serve as powerful voices, precisely conveying the artist’s intended messages. The goal of The World Before Racism is to present irrefutable evidence that the ideology of racism is unfounded, unsupported, unjustified, and destined to fade away like so many other archaic and erroneous ideas.

How did racial prejudice originate and why has it been so deeply rooted in American culture? What have been the long-term effects of prejudice on the intellectual, communal, and psychological resources of African Americans? How might the nightmare of racial domination be truly brought to an end? Still pertinent today, these were among the key questions addressed more than a century and a half ago by Hosea Easton (1799–1837), an important yet long neglected activist and intellectual. 

A black minister from New England, Easton rose to prominence during the 1820s and 1830s by joining in the struggle of free African Americans to resist southern slavery and secure racial equality. From this experience he developed a deep understanding of the problem of "race" in the United States and became a trenchant critic of white supremacy and its devastating consequences. This volume brings back into print the only extended writings of Easton that have survived into our time: his insightful, almost prescient A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and the Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States, first published in 1837; and his passionate 1828 Thanksgiving Day “Address.” The book also provides a biographical portrait of Easton and his family, drawn from primary documents as well as secondary sources in the areas of biography, genealogy, and social history.

A poet’s debut essay collection exploring American faults through the eyes of a Dominican American

In Traveling Freely: Essays, Roberto Carlos Garcia explores intersecting topics such as race, identity, American socioeconomic inequality, police violence, our inability to partake in our culture as innocents, and our complicity as Americans in all that’s wrong with the United States from the author’s specific vantage point as a Black Dominican American man. The voice in these essays is both clear and nuanced, and as readers move through the collection, the various themes cohere into a multilayered investigation of institutional racism and the inherent exploitations of capitalism.

In essays that are uniquely straightforward and accessible, Garcia insists that in order to resist state-sanctioned violence against marginalized bodies and populations, we must understand our shared history of oppression—so that we can rise against it effectively and find new paths forward.

A stunning lyrical commentary on the constructions of race, gender, and class in the fraught nexus of a Black woman’s personal experience and cultural history

The Fair Housing Act passed in 1968, and more than fifty years later, yours seems to be the only Black family on your block in Minneapolis. You and your Black African husband, both college graduates, make less money than some White people with a felony record and no high school diploma. You’re the only Black student in your graduate program. You just aren’t working hard enough. You’re too sensitive. Sandra Bland? George Floyd? Don't take everything so personally. Amid the White smiles of Minnesota Nice and the Minnesota Paradox—the insidious racism of an ostensibly inclusive place to live—what do you do? If you’re Taiyon J. Coleman, you write.

In Traveling without Moving, Coleman shares intimate essays from her life: her childhood in Chicago—growing up in poverty with four siblings and a single mother—and the empowering decision to leave her first marriage. She writes about being the only Black student in a prestigious and predominantly White creative writing program, about institutional racism and implicit bias in writing instruction, about the violent legacies of racism in the U.S. housing market, about the maternal health disparities seen across the country and their implication in her own miscarriage. She explores what it means to write her story and that of her family—an act at once a responsibility and a privilege—bringing forth the inherent contradictions between American ideals and Black reality.

Using a powerful blend of perspectives that move between a first-person lens of lived experience and a wider-ranging critique of U.S. culture, policy, and academia, Coleman’s writing evinces how a Black woman in America is always on the run, always Harriet Tubman, traveling with her babies in tow, seeking safety, desperate to survive, thrive, and finally find freedom.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

A troubling account of the unexpected impacts of treatment-based alternatives to criminal punishment.

Every year, courts send hundreds of thousands of people to treatment-based programs as alternatives to traditional punishment. These alternatives—known as ‘diversion programs’—are widely celebrated as reforms that reduce the punishment of the mentally ill. But in Trial by Treatment, Mary Ellen Stitt shows that they have, in fact, expanded the reach of the criminal legal system and its power over the lives of the most vulnerable.

The inner workings of diversion programs are obscure, partially by design, and data on outcomes is hard to come by. Stitt draws on two years of fieldwork in criminal courtrooms and court-mandated treatment sessions, as well as an original national dataset, in-depth interviews, and experimental survey data, to document the hidden impacts of diversion. She shows that placing mental healthcare under the control of the courts has helped to legitimize the criminalization of illness, warped treatment environments, and amplified inequalities in punishment. In vivid and humanizing detail, Trial by Treatment shows how reforms that keep power and discretion in the same hands can entrench the very problems they promised to solve.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

A troubling account of the unexpected impacts of treatment-based alternatives to criminal punishment.

Every year, courts send hundreds of thousands of people to treatment-based programs as alternatives to traditional punishment. These alternatives—known as ‘diversion programs’—are widely celebrated as reforms that reduce the punishment of the mentally ill. But in Trial by Treatment, Mary Ellen Stitt shows that they have, in fact, expanded the reach of the criminal legal system and its power over the lives of the most vulnerable.

The inner workings of diversion programs are obscure, partially by design, and data on outcomes is hard to come by. Stitt draws on two years of fieldwork in criminal courtrooms and court-mandated treatment sessions, as well as an original national dataset, in-depth interviews, and experimental survey data, to document the hidden impacts of diversion. She shows that placing mental healthcare under the control of the courts has helped to legitimize the criminalization of illness, warped treatment environments, and amplified inequalities in punishment. In vivid and humanizing detail, Trial by Treatment shows how reforms that keep power and discretion in the same hands can entrench the very problems they promised to solve.

A haunting and poetic journey of memory, identity, and reconciliation in the heart of the Black South.

Winner of the Excellence in Minority Fiction Award

Trouble the Water moves among finely woven layers of time and place as it takes on a new and controversial theme in contemporary black writing, the search for family reconciliation. Twenty years after running away from home in Pee Dee, North Carolina, Jordan Henry believed he had found success, as a young college professor of history, a married man, and a resident of New England, whose colonial past he knew so well. When Jordan finds his career stymied by local prejudices, his world crumbles. Word of his grandmother's death reaches him, and he returns home to claim the ambiguous legacy of her farmland and face the consequences of his long absence.

Jordan's estranged father also returns to Pee Dee on a quest of his own restoring his good name in a community which blames him for Chloe Henry's death in childbirth. Chloe was Jordan's mother and his grandmother's only child. Unresolved hostility in the family and in the community breaks out, making Jordan the unsuspecting pawn in a plot of revenge against his father. Jordan may be the only one who can free his family from the past and the equally troubled present.

Trouble the Water gains resonance from its unflinching confrontation with dualities common in the Afro-American experience: reality and myth, folklore and sophistication, North and South, rural and cosmopolitan. While sacrificing none of its complexities for the sake of simplicity, it has the relentless movement of a fairy tale that reaches deep into the unconscious roots of behavior. It is intensely lyrical and dense in realism. Trouble the Water is magical in the way it reveals the Afro-American psyche and symbolizes fundamental truths about American life.

In 2021, the international media descended upon Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the centennial commemoration of the May 31–June 1, 1921, massacre in which a white mob killed more than three hundred African American residents, burned homes and businesses, and decimated a thriving town once referred to as “Black Wall Street.” 

Tulsa Speaks is about the ongoing work of the Tulsa City Council, both before the Centennial and afterward, when the cameras were no longer trained on the city. It dives deep into the interpersonal dynamics among the nine councilors, exploring the continuing fight for reparations and racial justice and the long-running efforts of councilor, Vanessa Hall-Harper of District 1, to bring repair to Greenwood.

Tulsa, like many municipal bodies across the country, serves as a hopeful sign of what we might become, as Americans and as a microcosm of race relations in America today.