100 books like African American Childhoods

Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood is a comprehensive and important history of American children and their varied experiences.

By synthesizing a large literature in engaging prose, Mintz introduces readers to children’s lives across four centuries of the American past, starting in the seventeenth century and reaching into the present. Mintz strives to encompass different racial, class, and gender experiences. 

This is the best book to begin exploring the new field of children’s studies.

I believe this book serves as a solid foundation for the scholarly discussions surrounding the changing paradigms of childhood throughout history and the world. I find its examinations of many different times and places fascinating. This volume explores the cultural creation of concepts of childhood and the ways they have developed and evolved as the world has become more connected, something I can relate to my own childhood experiences.

Growing up, I moved from one culture to another, and I know being a teenager can be difficult. The lives of teenage girls are complex, even more so for the children of Asian immigrants, who not only face the pressures of school and society but also serve as cultural mediators, negotiators, community builders, and bridges between the many worlds they grow up in. His book looks at the lives of Asian American girls and their roles in globalization and boundary crossing as they struggle, dream, grow, and thrive. As an immigrant myself, I connected to many of the ideas in this book.

This book is very emotional and affecting to read for me. It presents two of the earliest autobiographical accounts from American women, with an introduction by Sharon Halevi. As they trace their lives, they depict a world in which childhood, as modern readers understand, does not exist, and even young women need to navigate the intricacies of their controlling and patriarchal world. I often ask what has changed and what has unfortunately stayed the same.

This anthology spans a remarkable and surprising range of topics including first-hand accounts by pageant winners—and losers—along with rich historical context. Historian Kimberly Hamlin documents the first Miss America Pageant (launched a year after women won the vote), showing how it both appropriated the format of suffrage pageants and defined itself in opposition to them. Feminist scholar Donelle Ruwe explains why becoming Miss Meridian [Miss.] in 1985 had an unexpectedly positive impact on her life, even though she considers beauty pageants to be “oppressive” and “degrading.” And the African-American scholar Gerald Early’s riveting “Waiting for Miss America” weighs the racial implications of Vanessa Williams’ 1983 crowning as the first Black Miss America. “[S]he was the most loved and most suspect woman in America,” he writes. Suspect, because “some blacks don’t trust her motives and some whites don’t trust her abilities.”  

Hersch applies the sober, decidedly unsentimental, and almost brutally incisive analytical framework of labor conflict and professionalization to a whole range of issues negotiated within NASA—from the criteria for astronaut selection to the degree of spacecraft automation to mission programming. Each of these issues emerges loaded with interests of various professional groups—test pilots, military pilots, scientists, engineers, and managers. The astronaut profession is born through a series of clashes of professional cultures, each competing for influence within the US space program.

In my view, comparing this story with the parallel developments on the Soviet side reveals drastic differences. While the pilots-cosmonauts found themselves almost completely at the mercy of powerful space engineers, the astronauts skillfully used their symbolic capital to gain influence on decision-making at NASA.

Few stood against many as the fate of Taiwan hung in the balance. This is a gripping account of the 1660s clash between Ming loyalist Koxinga and besieged Dutch colonists at Fort Zeelandia. Written by a historian with a flair for narrative, Taiwan’s most exciting historical episode is recounted in fascinating detail, with twists and turns, and wide zooms out for comparisons of European and Chinese technological prowess. It’s an accessible book yet so richly informative and dramatic that it rewards multiple readings. 

The Age of Empire is a momentous history of Europe and the world in the era that contained the immediate origins and dynamics that led into World War One, but was also crucial in shaping world history to this day. 

At the beginning of the book, Hobsbawm offers a grand-scale perspective on the ‘contradictions of liberal bourgeois society in the age of empire’, which, for me, is among the most helpful and insightful big – and dialectical – ideas about modern history. 

In the form of ‘the contradictions of neoliberal bourgeois society’, I went so far as to update and apply his original idea to world history since WWI and right up to our own times.

You might not know who Tamerlane is, but you should. He was one of the last of the ‘World-conquerors’ in the tradition of Genghis Khan, the man who marched the Mongols from one end of Eurasia to the other in the 13th century. Tamerlane died in 1405 and with him the last nomadic empire of the Eurasian steppes. The Europeans then took up the quest ‘to conquer the word’. But John Darwin tells this story like no one else before him: Rather than starting the story of the European “Age of Discovery” on the bows of Iberian ships crossing the Atlantic ocean, Darwin keeps his readers grounded in Eurasia. He redirects our gaze to this massive continent as we follow emerging European empires as they had to compete with pre-existing ones. Anyone interested in understanding the global dynamics of the early 21st century should read this book with… show more.

Especially in the 20th century, the development and recognition of the ideas of Europeanism depended on developments beyond Europe in a global context.

It is impossible to understand the development of European integration and its pan-Europeanist rationale without understanding the history of colonialism, nationalism, the international socialist movement, and, of course, war. Against this background, Hobsbawm discusses, among other things, how the European project was promoted as an alternative to, and in turn threatened by, extremisms, particularly nationalism.

I am captivated by this powerful analysis done on a very large scale. Perhaps this is why the founders of the House of European History in Brussels acknowledge the influence of Hobsbawm and this book in their narrative.