New Books in African American Studies

The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists armed with paint, canvas, and wax played an integral role in forging revolutionary ideals. In The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the A

At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922-1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980, Diggs, Michigan's first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till's killers, worked behind the scenes with Martin Lu

The contemporaneous movements for human rights that Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers waged during the 1960s are analysed in a comparative fashion here for the very first time. The book also examines the extra-legal measures that both the KGB and FBI employed to destroy them.The Black Panthers and the Sovi

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Ashleigh Greene Wade, Assistant Professor of Digital Studies with a joint appointment in Media Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia, about her book, Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency and Possibility in Everyday Digital Practice. The book examines

From the bustling ports of Lisbon to the coastal inlets of the Bight of Benin to the vibrant waterways of Bahia, Black mariners were integral to every space of the commercial South Atlantic. Navigating this kaleidoscopic world required a remarkable cosmopolitanism--the chameleonlike ability to adapt to new surroundings

This is a very special episode of the New Books Network, as the editor of Conversations with Kiese Laymon (UP of Mississippi, 2025), Dr. Constance Bailey, discusses the process of selecting, compiling, and publishing the volume with the subject himself, award-winning author, Kiese Laymon. Conversations with Kiese Laymo