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While basketball didn’t take up residence in the White House in January 2009, the game nonetheless played an outsized role in forming the man who did. In The Audacity of Hoop, celebrated sportswriter Alexander Wolff examines Barack Obama, the person and president, by the light of basketball. This game helped Obama explore his identity, keep a cool head, impress his future wife, and define himself as a candidate. 

Wolff chronicles Obama’s love of the game from age 10, on the campaign trail—where it eventually took on talismanic meaning—and throughout his two terms in office. More than 125 photographs illustrate Obama dribbling, shooting free throws, playing pickup games, cooling off with George Clooney, challenging his special assistant Reggie Love for a rebound, and taking basketball to political meetings. There is also an assessment of Obama’s influence on the NBA, including a dawning political consciousness in the league’s locker rooms. 

Sidebars reveal the evolution of the president’s playing style, “Baracketology”—a not-entirely-scientific art of filling out the commander in chief’s NCAA tournament bracket—and a timeline charts Obama’s personal and professional highlights.

Equal parts biographical sketch, political narrative, and cultural history, The Audacity of Hoop shows how the game became a touchstone in Obama’s exercise of the power of the presidency.  

The third volume in the anthology, featuring a wide range of plays that reimagine Shakespeare works from Borderlands perspectives.

For several decades, Chicanx and Indigenous theatermakers have been repurposing Shakespeare’s plays to reflect the histories and lived realities of the US–Mexico Borderlands and to create space to tell stories of and for La Frontera. Celebrating this rich tradition, The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera brings a wide range of Borderlands Shakespeare plays together for the first time in a multi-volume open-access scholarly edition. This anthology celebrates the dynamic, multilingual reworking of canon and place that defines Borderlands Shakespeare, and it situates these geographically and temporally diverse plays within the robust study of Shakespeare’s global afterlives.

The plays featured in this volume diverge drastically from Shakespeare, bringing elements of Hamlet, Henry IV, Part 1, Macbeth, and The Tempest into a range of subcultures that challenge dominant structures of power. In so doing, they remix and revise intersecting histories and traditions to heal colonial wounds and to call forth new worlds for fronterizos.

Winner of the CASCA Labrecque-Lee Book Prize

In both local and international imaginations, Vancouver, Canada, is often celebrated as one of the world’s most beautiful, cosmopolitan, and livable cities. Simultaneously, the city continues to be ground zero for successive waves of public health emergency and intervention, including a recent and unprecedented drug overdose crisis driven by the proliferation of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and related analogs in the local drug supply. In The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver, Danya Fast explores these politics of place from the perspectives of young people who use drugs. Those who are the subject of this book were in many ways relegated to the social, spatial, and economic margins of the city. Yet, they were also often at the very center of city life and state projects, including the project of protecting life in the context of the current overdose crisis.

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.

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.

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

An ethnographic history of one of the dozens of indigenous domains that occupied China’s border regions during the Qing dynasty and before.

Erik Mueggler’s The Book of Cunning and Treachery is an ethnographic history of a chiefly household that ruled one of the many indigenous domains scattered through upland southwest China during the late Ming and Qing dynasties. The imperial colonization of this region proceeded by way of defeating indigenous polities and absorbing them into a system of indirect governance. In this system, indigenous chieftains inherited power over multiethnic domains, subject to ratification by the imperial court. Mueggler tracks the history of two crucial yet unexamined archives pertaining to this household—a trove of Chinese-language legal, military, and administrative documents, and hundreds of ritual manuals, histories, and morality books written in the indigenous Né script—to show how the chiefly house reproduced itself through these languages, each with its own forms of ritual, recitation, and inscription.

As Mueggler demonstrates, through different forms of access to writing in Chinese and Né, male and female chieftains, domestic slaves, enslaved bondsmen, bonded tenants, chiefly concubines, and more existed in a complex ecology of relations. House and domain were governed through a dynamic process in which residents continuously worked out the status hierarchies that animated their relations with one another as well as the relations between the chiefly house and the local administrative system. This groundbreaking book provides a compelling account of the intertwined problems of writing, slavery, and sovereignty, as well as a vivid portrait of the unique form that indigenous jurisdiction took in this era.

Explores efforts to restrict and expand notions of US citizenship as they relate specifically to the US-Mexico border and Latina/o identity.

Borders and citizenship go hand in hand. Borders define a nation as a territorial entity and create the parameters for national belonging. But the relationship between borders and citizenship breeds perpetual anxiety over the purported sanctity of the border, the security of a nation, and the integrity of civic identity.

In The Border Crossed Us, Josue David Cisneros addresses these themes as they relate to the US-Mexico border, arguing that issues ranging from the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 to contemporary debates about Latina/o immigration and border security are negotiated rhetorically through public discourse. He explores these rhetorical battles through case studies of specific Latina/o struggles for civil rights and citizenship, including debates about Mexican American citizenship in the 1849 California Constitutional Convention, 1960s Chicana/o civil rights movements, and modern-day immigrant activism.

Cisneros posits that borders—both geographic and civic—have crossed and recrossed Latina/o communities throughout history (the book’s title derives from the popular activist chant, “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us!”) and that Latina/os in the United States have long contributed to, struggled with, and sought to cross or challenge the borders of belonging, including race, culture, language, and gender.

The Border Crossed Us illuminates the enduring significance and evolution of US borders and citizenship, and provides programmatic and theoretical suggestions for the continued study of these critical issues.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, Mexican Americans experienced segregation in many areas of public life, but the structure of Mexican segregation differed from the strict racial divides of the Jim Crow South. Factors such as higher socioeconomic status, lighter skin color, and Anglo cultural fluency allowed some Mexican Americans to gain limited access to the Anglo power structure. Paradoxically, however, this partial assimilation made full desegregation more difficult for the rest of the Mexican American community, which continued to experience informal segregation long after federal and state laws officially ended the practice.

In this historical ethnography, Jennifer R. Nájera offers a layered rendering and analysis of Mexican segregation in a South Texas community in the first half of the twentieth century. Using oral histories and local archives, she brings to life Mexican origin peoples’ experiences with segregation. Through their stories and supporting documentary evidence, Nájera shows how the ambiguous racial status of Mexican origin people allowed some of them to be exceptions to the rule of Anglo racial dominance. She demonstrates that while such exceptionality might suggest the permeability of the color line, in fact the selective and limited incorporation of Mexicans into Anglo society actually reinforced segregation by creating an illusion that the community had been integrated and no further changes were needed. Nájera also reveals how the actions of everyday people ultimately challenged racial/racist ideologies and created meaningful spaces for Mexicans in spheres historically dominated by Anglos.