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Winner, 2026 New England Historical Association James P. Hanlan Book Prize

Finalist, 2026 New England Society Book Award in Nonfiction

Reuben Ruby and Nathaniel Gordon II were born eleven months apart in 1798 and 1799 and spent much of their boyhoods roaming the noisy, bustling waterfront of Portland, Maine. They lived just blocks from one another, attended school together, and went to the same church with their families. But they were worlds apart, separated by family, culture, and race. Reuben Ruby was Black and Nathaniel Gordon was White. 

The Rubys became prominent antislavery activists, equal rights advocates, and operatives on the Underground Railroad. Their neighbors, the Gordons, became well-to-do ship masters, owners, and merchants: among them, the most notorious American slave ship captain of the century, Nathaniel Gordon III. As activists, sea captains, businessmen, prospectors, and politicians, members of these two families traveled to New York, California, Texas, Louisiana, Africa, Haiti, and Brazil, where their experiences were shaped by their racial identities. At home in the “Free North,” they faced social and political divisions nearly as sharp as those they encountered elsewhere. 

To understand the issues that divided nineteenth-century America—and, in many ways, still divide the nation—few have looked to the far North. In this compelling narrative history and intimate dual-family biography, Carol Gardner traces the Rubys and Gordons as they navigate the turbulent 1800s. As families and individuals, they demonstrate that the North was a critical proving ground for American notions of freedom and equality, as telling as any town, plantation, or battlefield in the South. Their experiences help reveal what it meant to live in a free state during the age of slavery, with all the promise, disappointment, irony, and hope that the notion entailed. 

Ella E. Hall, a Black cook and landlord in Ann Arbor, Michigan, collected her favorite recipes in a journal between 1920 and 1939. Published for the first time, Hall’s recipe book contains not only recipes from family and friends, but also articles, clippings, and advertisements, which provide a glimpse into the food culture and daily life of the time. The book includes over 50 recipes that will interest and delight food historians, like sour milk griddle cakes, Lady Baltimore cake, pepper hash, green tomatoes pickles, campfire pineapple ham, and beverages such as root beer, ginger ale, and even home-brewed beer. This recipe book has been held in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive within the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Michigan Library, and this first published edition makes Hall’s charming collection accessible to more readers. Introductory essays by Jessica Kenyatta Walker, scholar of African American history and foodways, and Susan Wineberg, who found and donated the recipe collection to the Special Collections Research Center, flesh out Ella Hall’s story and help position this book in the context of Ann Arbor in the first half of the twentieth century.

In 1961, James Baldwin was asked about being Black in America. He replied, “to be Black in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” His words capture the emotional toll of living in a society where racial discrimination persists. More than six decades later, that toll can now be measured. The Enduring Shadow of Racism seeks to illuminate the deep psychological impact of these experiences, going beyond emotional responses like rage to reveal how race-based trauma symptoms shape the ways African Americans navigate the political world.

Rather than counting how frequently racism occurs or focusing on general emotional states, the book examines the trauma-like symptoms that emerge from those experiences. While political science often measures feelings like anger or fear as short-term reactions to specific events, social issues, or candidates, this book instead uses clinical indicators of trauma to assess the lasting psychological effects of racism, including intrusion, avoidance, and hypervigilance. This distinction highlights the difference between fleeting emotional responses and enduring trauma symptoms, revealing racism’s deeper psychological impact on individuals. In doing so, the book introduces a trauma-based framework for understanding the psychological consequences of racism, specifically the ways race-based trauma shapes political beliefs and behavior.

Artists fighting racism and sexism from the end of the Great Depression through the Civil Rights era

In 1943, the production of the Columbia Pictures film The Heat’s On halted for three days due to an on-set protest by featured performer Hazel Scott. Appalled by the racially demeaning and stereotypical depictions of Black women extras and dancers, Scott—one of the top African American performers of the era—forced the studio to relent. But her protest of Hollywood racism angered powerful white men in the industry, and despite her rising career, she was soon banished from American film.

Scott was far from the only Black woman in a creative field to use her professional success as leverage against prejudice. In The Fiercest Kind, cultural historian H. Zahra Caldwell explores the biographical narratives of five Black women at the top of their artistic crafts in the mid-20th century to understand how they pushed back against racism and sexism. From 1937–1965, pianist Hazel Scott, dancer Katherine Dunham, cartoonist Jackie Ormes, multihyphenate fine artist (graphic artist, painter, and sculptor) Elizabeth Catlett, and singer Lena Horne were among the most popular and nationally known Black women in their respective fields, spanning film, television, print media, and fine art. Generating creative works at the end of the Great Depression through the Civil Rights era, they used their professional and personal lives to confront seemingly insurmountable repression through what Caldwell defines as “layered resistance.”

A Black feminist practice, layered resistance consists of four tactics: claiming and adapting cultural spaces for Black women; strategically crafting positive images of Black womanhood that directly challenge white supremacy; combining performance and/or visual representation with social and political activism; and choosing unconventional lifestyles that defy rigid gender and racial norms. These artists also lived in, worked in, and supported important Black spaces such as Harlem and Black Chicago. Using a methodology that combines textual analysis, archival research, and oral history, Caldwell understands this strategy within larger movements for Black freedom and equality that spanned the twentieth century and continue to the present day.  

For generations, migration stories moved in one direction: toward the American Dream. Now, a seismic reversal is underway. For the first time since the Great Depression, more people are leaving the United States than moving in. Jamie D. Brooks and her family are among the many who have fled.

Blending cultural reporting with memoir, The Fleeing Season shares one mother’s story as she considers how and where to raise her family. Brooks recounts her decision to emigrate to the United Kingdom, while reckoning with issues that so many American families face: school shootings, systemic racism, a broken health care system, rising rates of homelessness, and the lack of a social safety net. Intimate and honest, Brooks’s story is not a political polemic. Rather, it maps a path toward reproductive justice.

Thought-provoking and original, The Global History of Black Girlhood opens up new possibilities for understanding Black girls in the past while offering useful tools for present-day Black girls eager to explore the histories of those who came before them.

Contributors: Janaé E. Bonsu, Ruth Nicole Brown, Tara Bynum, Casidy Campbell, Katherine Capshaw, Bev Palesa Ditsie, Sarah Duff, Cynthia Greenlee, Claudrena Harold, Anasa Hicks, Lindsey Jones, Phindile Kunene, Denise Oliver-Velez, Jennifer Palmer, Vanessa Plumly, Shani Roper, SA Smythe, Nastassja Swift, Dara Walker, Najya Williams, and Nazera Wright

The Harlan Renaissance is an intimate remembrance of kinship and community in eastern Kentucky’s coal towns written by one of the luminaries of Appalachian studies, William Turner. Turner reconstructs Black life in the company towns in and around Harlan County during coal’s final postwar boom years, which built toward an enduring bust as the children of Black miners, like the author, left the region in search of better opportunities.

The Harlan Renaissance invites readers into what might be an unfamiliar Appalachia: one studded by large and vibrant Black communities, where families took the pulse of the nation through magazines like Jet and Ebony and through the news that traveled within Black churches, schools, and restaurants. Difficult choices for the future were made as parents considered the unpredictable nature of Appalachia’s economic realities alongside the unpredictable nature of a national movement toward civil rights.

Unfolding through layers of sociological insight and oral history, The Harlan Renaissance centers the sympathetic perspectives and critical eye of a master narrator of Black life.

Many scholars have written about the white readers and patrons of the Harlem Renaissance, but during the period many black writers, publishers, and editors worked to foster a cadre of African American readers, or in the poet Sterling Brown's words, a “reading folk.” Black newspapers featured columns that reviewed the latest African American fiction. Magazines held writing contests to urge black readers to participate in the literary culture. Through newspapers, journals, and anthologies, writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Gwendolyn Bennett spoke directly to their fellow African Americans to cultivate interest in literature and the intellectual tools for reading it.

In The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader, Shawn Anthony Christian argues that print-based addresses to African Americans are a defining but understudied component of the Harlem Renaissance. Especially between 1919 and 1930, these writers promoted diverse racial representation as a characteristic of “good literature” both to exhibit black literacy and to foster black readership. Drawing on research from print culture studies, histories of racial uplift, and studies of modernism, Christian demonstrates the importance of this focus on the African American reader in influential periodicals such as The Crisis and celebrated anthologies such as The New Negro. Christian illustrates that the drive to develop and support black readers was central in the poetry, fiction, and drama of the era.

Between 1899 and 1908, five long works of fiction by the Nashville-based Black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs appeared in print in which he examined the interrelationships among race, politics, economics, gender, culture, religion, violence, and empire, making him the most prolific African American novelist at the turn of the twentieth century, a time at which the civil rights and the very existence of African Americans, especially those in the South, were increasingly in jeopardy.

Brought out by Griggs’s own Orion Publishing Company in three distinct printings in 1905 and 1906, The Hindered Hand; or, the Reign of the Repressionist addresses the author’s key themes of amalgamation, emigration, armed resistance, and US overseas expansion; includes a melodramatic love story; and features two of the most sensational scenes in early African American fiction—a harrowingly graphic lynching of an innocent black couple based on actual events and the elaboration of a plot to wipe out white Southerners by introducing yellow fever germs into the water supply.

Written in response to Thomas Dixon’s recently published race-baiting novel The Leopard’s Spots, Griggs’s book depicts the remnants of the old Southern planter class, the racial crisis threatening the South and the North, the social ferment of the time, the changing roles of women, and the thwarted aspirations of a trio of African American veterans following the war against Spain. This scholarly edition of the novel, providing newly discovered biographical information and copious historical context, makes a significant contribution to African American literary scholarship.

A young girl reckons with the demolition of a Black Saint Paul neighborhood to make way for the Interstate in the early 1960s

When thirteen-year-old Zenobia has to leave her friends and spend the summer at Grandma’s while Mama recovers from a stroke, life seems so unfair. But then the eviction letters start arriving throughout her grandparents’ neighborhood, and white men chalk arrows to mark the gas and water lines, and a new world of unfairness unfolds before her. It’s 1963, and Zenobia’s grandparents’ house on Rondo Avenue in Saint Paul—like all the homes in this thriving Black community—is targeted for demolition to make way for the new Interstate Highway 94.

As Zenobia gradually learns about what’s planned for the Rondo neighborhood and what this means for everyone who lives there, she discovers how her story is intertwined with the history of her family, all the way back to Great Grandma Zenobia and the secrets Grandma Essie held close about the reason for her light skin. With the destruction of the neighborhood looming, Zenobia takes a stand on behalf of her community, joining her no-nonsense neighbor, onetime cowgirl Mrs. Ruby Pearl, in a protest and ultimately getting arrested. Though Zenobia is grounded for a month, her punishment seems of little consequence in comparison to what is happening all around her. Even though the demolition continues, she is proud to discover the power and connection in protesting injustice.

The House on Rondo captures the heartbreak, resistance, and resilience that marks a community sacrificed in the name of progress—a “progress” that never seems to favor Black families and neighborhoods and that haunts cities like Saint Paul to this day. As Zenobia learns what can be destroyed and what cannot, her story teaches us that joy, community, and love persist, even amid violence and loss.

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.

Racial identity and literary form in the modernist anthology

The Image and the Fire examines the coterie anthology—a small, outsider literary collection—as a key, yet understudied, instrument of literary intervention within American modernism. Whit Frazier Peterson argues that these anthologies, produced outside of institutional or canonical frameworks, served as deliberate challenges to dominant literary paradigms. Distinct from academic anthologies that helped codify the American literary canon, coterie anthologies were used by both white and Black avant-garde movements to disrupt prevailing cultural narratives and assert alternative literary visions.

Through close analysis of three seminal case studies—Des Imagistes, edited by Ezra Pound; Fire!!, a short-lived but groundbreaking magazine from the Harlem Renaissance, co-edited by Wallace Thurman; and Black Fire, compiled by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal during the Black Arts Movement—Peterson traces a genealogy of the coterie anthology as a politically charged genre. He reveals how Black American writers and editors, particularly during the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, reappropriated and reconfigured this type of anthology format from white modernists.

Ultimately, The Image and the Fire positions the coterie anthology as a site of aesthetic and ideological contestation, one through which marginalized literary communities engaged in acts of cultural self-definition, canon revision, and formal innovation. By foregrounding the coterie anthology’s role in shaping a hybrid American modernism, Peterson contributes to ongoing conversations in literary studies around race, authorship, and the politics of literary form.

“Utterly captivating and resonant.” —Chicago Review of Books
“Gorgeously told.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“Resonant. . . . Engagingly delivered, candid reflections on heritage and identity.” —Kirkus Reviews

The In-Betweens tells the story of a biracial boy becoming a man, all the while trying to find himself, trying to come to terms with his white family, and trying to find his place in American society. A rich narrative in the tradition of Justin Torres’s We the Animals and Bryan Washington’s Memorial, Davon Loeb’s memoir is relevant to the country’s current climate and is part of the necessary rewrite of the nation’s narrative and identity.

The son of a Black mother with deep family roots in Alabama and a white Jewish man from Long Island, Loeb grows up in a Black family in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey as one of the few nonwhite children in their suburban neighborhood. Despite his many and ongoing efforts to fit in, Loeb acutely feels his difference—he is singled out in class during Black History Month; his hair doesn’t conform to the latest fad; coaches and peers assume he is a talented athlete and dancer; and on the field trip to the Holocaust Museum, he is the Black Jew. But all is not struggle. In lyrical vignettes, Loeb vibrantly depicts the freedom, joys, and wonder of childhood; the awkwardness of teen years, first jobs, first passions. Loeb tells an individual story universally, and readers, regardless of subjectivity and relation, will see themselves throughout The In-Betweens.