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The outpouring of creative expression known as the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s spawned a burgeoning number of black-owned cultural outlets, including publishing houses, performance spaces, and galleries. Central to the movement were its poets, who in concert with editors, visual artists, critics, and fellow writers published a wide range of black verse and advanced new theories and critical approaches for understanding African American literary art. 

The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry offers a close examination of the literary culture in which BAM's poets (including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, and others) operated and of the small presses and literary anthologies that first published the movement's authors. The book also describes the role of the Black Arts Movement in reintroducing readers to poets such as Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Phillis Wheatley.

Focusing on the material production of Black Arts poetry, the book combines genetic criticism with cultural history to shed new light on the period, its publishing culture, and the writing and editing practices of its participants. Howard Rambsy II demonstrates how significant circulation and format of black poetic texts—not simply their content—were to the formation of an artistic movement. The book goes on to examine other significant influences on the formation of Black Arts discourse, including such factors as an emerging nationalist ideology and figures such as John Coltrane and Malcolm X.

At once an inspiring story about the shifting boundaries of race, citizenship, and democracy in America and a crucial look at the nature of racial inequality, The Black Child Savers is a stirring account of the stakes and meaning of social justice.

Throughout the fourteenth century AD/eighth century H, waves of plague swept out of Central Asia and decimated populations from China to Iceland. So devastating was the Black Death across the Old World that some historians have compared its effects to those of a nuclear holocaust. As countries began to recover from the plague during the following century, sharp contrasts arose between the East, where societies slumped into long-term economic and social decline, and the West, where technological and social innovation set the stage for Europe's dominance into the twentieth century. Why were there such opposite outcomes from the same catastrophic event?

In contrast to previous studies that have looked to differences between Islam and Christianity for the solution to the puzzle, this pioneering work proposes that a country's system of landholding primarily determined how successfully it recovered from the calamity of the Black Death. Stuart Borsch compares the specific cases of Egypt and England, countries whose economies were based in agriculture and whose pre-plague levels of total and agrarian gross domestic product were roughly equivalent. Undertaking a thorough analysis of medieval economic data, he cogently explains why Egypt's centralized and urban landholding system was unable to adapt to massive depopulation, while England's localized and rural landholding system had fully recovered by the year 1500.

In the fall of 1968, the University of Texas at Austin sponsored a series of public lectures delivered by outstanding students of the black past in an effort to clarify the role of the African American in America’s history. This volume of essays by eight of the ten participants makes the lectures available to a broader public.

The essays demonstrate that the black experience in America has been integral throughout the nation’s history. Although each contributor deals with a different aspect of this experience, they all share a common commitment to sound historical scholarship. The essays also reflect the intensive research in the field of black history during a time of high racial tension.

Henry Allen Bullock, in an exploration of education in the slave experience, shows that, despite organized attempts to dehumanize the Negro, the black man’s position in the American social order was not static. By training and educating the Negro, the slaveowner was weakening the peculiar institution and preparing the slave for freedom. In the field of cultural anthropology, which had largely ignored blacks in the United States, William S. Willis, Jr., examines the interaction of whites, blacks, and Indians on the Southern colonial frontier. Arthur Zilversmit traces the development of abolitionist attitudes from patience to militance and points out that both those reformers who abandoned action and those who demanded radical violent change were forced into their positions by society’s failure to listen to the arguments of moderate reformers.

William S. McFeely takes a fresh look at the Reconstruction era, one of the only times in American history when white Americans have even come close to wanting for black Americans what black Americans wanted for themselves. In a discussion of protest against segregated streetcars in the South, August Meier and Elliott Rudwick show that the boycotts of the late 1950s had their counterparts in more than twenty-five Southern cities between 1900 and 1906. Thomas R. Cripps attacks the myth of the Southern box office and shows how Hollywood’s own timidity fostered racial stereotyping in American movies. Robert L. Zangrando outlines the role of the NAACP, founded in 1909, in the evolution of civil rights protests during the mid-twentieth century. He argues that the organization’s precarious position in American society prevented it from exercising strong leadership within the black community. Louis R. Harlan concludes the volume by assessing the past and looking toward the future of black history in America.

Expansive in scope and interdisciplinary in practice, The Black Intellectual Tradition delves into the ideas that animated a people’s striving for full participation in American life.

Contributors: Derrick P. Alridge, Keisha N. Blain, Cornelius L. Bynum, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Stephanie Y. Evans, Aaron David Gresson III, Claudrena N. Harold, Leonard Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, La TaSha B. Levy, Layli Maparyan, Zebulon V. Miletsky, R. Baxter Miller, Edward Onaci, Venetria K. Patton, James B. Stewart, and Nikki M. Taylor

Black people have been on a continual search for freedom. Since their arrival in the West as exploited sources of labor, through the great migrations out of and back to the U.S. South, to repatriation efforts to Africa and throughout the Diaspora, they have been longing for place and to find or create a Mecca.

The Black Mecca Blueprint examines the current Black Mecca, Atlanta, Georgia.  Jonathan Grant explores the dynamism of Black life in a “Black city,” homing in on race, class, and place and all their inherent complexities. He analyzes the ways place and city spaces are negotiated through power and class struggles and how various spaces, such as the Atlanta University Center and its reputation as a beacon, are recreated.

Drawing on in-depth interviews, hip hop music, cultural podcasts, stand-up comedy, archival research, media, autoethnographic data, and historiography, The Black Mecca Blueprint captures the beauty and burden of Atlanta while creating a blueprint that can be used to help devise more democratic cities across the U.S. and around the world. 

Absher’s work diverges from existing studies in three ways: First, she takes the history beyond the study of jazz and blues by examining the significant role that classically trained black musicians played in building the Chicago South Side community. By acknowledging the presence and importance of classical musicians, Absher argues that black migrants in Chicago had diverse education and economic backgrounds but found common cause in the city’s music community. Second, Absher brings numerous maps to the history, illustrating the relationship between Chicago’s physical lines of segregation and the geography of black music in the city over the years. Third, Absher’s use of archival sources is both extensive and original, drawing on manuscript and oral history collections at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago, Columbia University, Rutgers’s Institute of Jazz Studies, and Tulane’s Hogan Jazz Archive. By approaching the Chicago black musical community from these previously untapped angles, Absher offers a history that goes beyond the retelling of the achievements of the famous musicians by discussing musicians as a group. In The Black Musician and the White City, black musicians are the leading actors, thinkers, organizers, and critics of their own story.

In the present study, Craig A. Monson takes advantage of a recent discovery—the 1,450-page notary’s transcript of the 1659 investigation.  It is supplemented here by many ancillary archival sources, unknown to all previous writers. Since the story of Gironima Spana and the would-be widows is partially about what people believed to be true, however, this investigation also juxtaposes some of the “alternative facts” from earlier, sensational accounts with what the notary’s transcript and other, more reliable archival documents reveal.

Written in a style that avoids arcane idioms and specialist jargon, the book can potentially speak to students and general readers interested in seventeenth-century social history and gender issues. It rewrites the life story of Gironima Spana (largely unknown until now), who has dominated all earlier accounts, usually in caricatures that reiterate the tropes of witchcraft. It also concentrates on the dozen other widows whose stories could be the most  recovered from archival sources and whom Spana had totally eclipsed in earlier accounts. Most were women “of a very ordinary sort” (prostitutes; beggars; wives of butchers, barbers, dyers, lineners, innkeepers), the kinds of women commonly lost to history. The book seeks to explain why some women were hanged (only six, in fact, most of whom may not have directly poisoned anyone), while dozens of others who did poison their husbands escaped the gallows and, in some cases, were not even interrogated. It also reveals what happened to these other alleged perpetrators, whose fates have remained unknown until now.  Other purported culprits, about whom less complete pictures emerge, are briefly discussed in an appendix.

The study incorporates illustrations of archival manuscripts to demonstrate the challenges of deciphering them and illustrates “scenes of the crime” and other important locations, identified on seventeenth-century, bird’s eye-perspective views of Rome and in modern photographs. It also includes GPS coordinates for any who might wish to revisit the sites.

Uniting the latest scholarship on race, labor, and civil rights, The Black Worker aims to establish the richness of the African American working-class experience, and the indisputable role of black workers in shaping the politics and history of labor and race in the United States.

To capture the complexity of African Americans’ experiences in the workplace, this reader examines workers engaged in a wide array of jobs, including sharecropping, coal mining, domestic service, longshoring, automobile manufacturing, tobacco processing, railroading, prostitution, lumbering, and municipal employment. The essays’ subjects include black migration, strikebreaking, black conservatism, gender, and the multiple forms of employment discrimination in the South and North. Other contributions deal explicitly with state policy and black workers during the transition from slavery to freedom, World Wars I and II, and the 1960s.

The variety of challenges made by these workers, both quiet and overt, served as clear reminders to the supporters of white supremacy that, despite their best efforts through violence, fraud, and the law, as long as they insisted on racial inequality, the “race question” would never be fully resolved.

Contributors: Eric Arnesen, Beth Tompkins Bates, Cynthia M. Blair, Tera W. Hunter, William Powell Jones, Brian Kelly, Robert Korstad, Nelson Lichtenstein, Joseph A. McCartin, Steven A. Reich, Leslie A. Schwalm, Nan Elizabeth Woodruff

This meticulously documented, deeply engaging book represents a unique approach to Utah and Latter-day Saint history, drawing on previously untapped private letters and diaries of members of the large and widely known polygamist family of the prominent Latter-day Saint leader, Heber C. Kimball.

The story includes compelling accounts of Helen Kimball Whitney, who married Joseph Smith polygamously at fourteen and became, according to Emmeline B. Wells, “one of the best known and most estimable women of the Church,” and of her son Orson F. Whitney, who forswore his embrace of reincarnation only six years before his call as an apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Another daughter, Alice Kimball Smith, married a man who was tracked to a brothel and arrested for armed robbery and assault in 1883, after which Alice turned to family friend and apostle Joseph F. Smith and became his fifth wife. Heber’s son, J. Golden Kimball, one of the most beloved and colorful personalities in Mormon and Utah history, is brought to life in another sketch. The Kimballs had to navigate the ticklish business of explaining or obfuscating polygamy to disapproving family in the East, including the extended claim by Heber’s wife Christeen to her New Jersey family that she had married a Mr. Chase monogamously. Two of Heber’s sons, both stake presidents, contemplated plural marriage in the first decade of the twentieth century, well after the church publicly disavowed the practice.

Additional light is shone on the now-defunct Latter-day Saint practices of adult adoptions and speaking in tongues, Mormon-settler relations with the Utes and Pahvants, the 1856 handcart rescue, the John Hyrum Koyle “Dream Mine,” the Jackson County, Missouri, Temple Lot suit of 1892, and federal pursuit of polygamists.