Browse by Subject: African American History

Please note that while you may order forthcoming books at any time, they will not be available for shipment until shortly before publication date

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New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization

This volume closely examines the movement to resettle Black Americans in Africa, an effort led by the American Colonization Society during the nineteenth century and a heavily debated part of American history.

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Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers: Reflections from the Deep South, 1964–1980

While bus boycotts, sit-ins, and other acts of civil disobedience were the engine of the civil rights movement, the law was a primary context. Lawyers played a key role amid profound social upheavals, and the twenty-six contributors to this volume reveal what it was like to be a southern civil rights lawyer in this era.

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The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History

Annotating and interpreting a vast collection of documents that illuminate and contextualize the 1822 Denmark Vesey plot, the editors of this volume argue that this landmark event was one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the United States.

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Known for My Work: African American Ethics from Slavery to Freedom

In Known for My Work, Lynda Morgan looks beyond slavery’s legacy of racial and economic inequality and counters the idea that slaves were unprepared for freedom. By examining African American social and intellectual thought, Morgan highlights how slaves built an ethos of "honest labor" and collective humanism. As moral economists, slaves and their descendants insisted that economic motives formed the foundation of their exploitation and made sophisticated arguments about the appropriate role of labor in a just and democratic society.

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Black Well-Being: Health and Selfhood in Antebellum Black Literature

Analyzing slave narratives, emigration polemics, a murder trial, and black-authored fiction, Andrea Stone highlights the central role physical and mental health and well-being played in antebellum black literary constructions of selfhood. At a time when political and medical theorists emphasized black well-being in their arguments for or against slavery, African American men and women developed their own theories about what it means to be healthy and well in contexts of injury, illness, sexual abuse, disease, and disability.


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Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans

Exploring parts of the city’s early nineteenth-century history that have previously been neglected, Dessens examines how New Orleans came to symbolize progress, adventure, and culture to so many.

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Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World

In Embracing Protestantism, John Catron argues that people of African descent in America who adopted Protestant Christianity during the eighteenth century did not become African Americans but instead assumed more fluid Atlantic-African identities.

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The Life and Crimes of Railroad Bill: Legendary African American Desperado

Ride, ride, ride--The true story of America’s most infamous black outlaw

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Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida

Investigating this dark period of the state's history and focusing on a rash of anti-black violence that took place during the 1940s, Tameka Hobbs explores the reasons why lynchings continued in Florida when they were starting to wane elsewhere.

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Creating and Consuming the American South

The contributors emphasize how narratives and images of "the South" have real social, political, and economic ramifications, and that they register at various local, regional, national, and transnational scales.