Growing up in a blue-collar union family in the 1950s South I learned about the depth of racial and class injustice and the power of collective organizing. The many jobs I held in my twenties before fleeing to graduate school at Stanford University left me acutely aware of workplace sexism and disrespect. I became fascinated by how work shapes our sense of self and especially curious about the distinctive feminisms, labor movements, and politics of working-class women. These questions animate all my writing and teaching. Thirty years and seven books later, I believe reimagining work and labor movements is more necessary – and possible – than ever before.
I learned about the power of railroad unions and women’s labor auxiliaries from my parents and grandparents.
When I discovered Melinda Chateauvert’s gem of a book, I was thrilled. Chateauvert gives us the proud history of Black women’s railway auxiliaries and tells the dramatic story of how African-American women and men risked their lives and livelihoods to create the most powerful and influential Black-led union in the twentieth century.
The Sleeping Car Porters led the civil rights movement and the fight for a racially-integrated, egalitarian labor movement. There’s no better introduction to how notions of race and sex shaped twentieth-century working-class movements in America.
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) was the first national trade union for African Americans. Standard BSCP histories focus on the men who built the union. Yet the union's Ladies' Auxiliary played an essential role in shaping public debates over black manhood and unionization, setting political agendas for the black community, and crafting effective strategies to win racial and economic justice.
Melinda Chateauvert explores the history of the Ladies' Auxiliary and the wives, daughters, and sisters of Pullman porters who made up its membership and used the union to claim respectability and citizenship. As she shows, the Auxiliary actively…
I write and teach about nineteenth-century US history, and I am interested in immigration for both personal and professional reasons. A native of Dublin, Ireland, I did my undergraduate work in Edinburgh, Scotland, completed my graduate degree in New York City, moved to Austin, Texas for my first academic job and to Boston for my second job, and then returned to New City York to take up my current position at NYU, where I teach US immigration history and run Glucksman Ireland House. The key themes in my work—migration, diaspora, and empire—have been as central to my life journey as to my research and teaching.
Why did anti-Chinese violence continue to rise even after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, reaching a terrible peak in 1885 and 1886?
In a powerful reinterpretation of Chinese exclusion, Beth Lew-Williams reveals how the 1882 act was deliberately limited in scope, poorly funded, and loosely enforced—because immigration policy at this time was still governed by diplomacy. Only in the late 1880s, with China perceived as weak, did the US unilaterally abrogate its treaty obligations and move toward outright exclusion.
The chronology really matters here: for Chinese immigrants it was a question not just of entry or exclusion, but of life and death. Deftly situating anti-Chinese violence in overlapping regional, national, and international contexts, Lew Williams shows how the idea of the immigrant “alien” emerged in tandem with national citizenship during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Prize Winner of the Ellis W. Hawley Prize Winner of the Sally and Ken Owens Award Winner of the Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize Winner of the Caroline Bancroft History Prize
"A powerful argument about racial violence that could not be more timely." -Richard White
"A riveting, beautifully written account...that foregrounds Chinese voices and experiences. A timely and important contribution to our understanding of immigration and the border." -Karl Jacoby, author of Shadows at Dawn
In 1885, following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed,…
My interest in diplomatic history began in earnest when I read A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918, during my undergraduate education. I was fascinated by how nations interacted with each other over time. The pairing of immigration history came much later, during my doctoral program. I was drawn to how immigration historians discussed not just the dynamics of the movement of people, but the nature of nationality and nation, citizen and foreigner, citizenship and personhood. Studying immigration pointed me to Mexican history, which inspired me to ask the question that formed the basis of Risking Immeasurable Harm: how did tensions over immigration affect U.S.-Mexican relations?
I love this book because it tears apart any idea of objectivity in the law’s treatment of race and citizenship in US history. It argues that law plays a crucial role in creating racial categories. Far from fixed and predetermined, notions of race were constructed by courts throughout US history to determine whether persons were white enough to be included in the polity.
While this book does not specifically address Mexican immigration it is, nevertheless, immensely important to the study of US immigration history because of how it treats the law as a contested space. The law is not an aloof arbitrator in disputes over race and citizenship, but rather a central player in determining the contours of the nationality of a people. The book appears in many bibliographies, and is a foundational text of Critical Race Theory.
I am a biographer and literary scholar who loves to resurrect stories otherwise lost to history. I first felt this calling on football Saturdays at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, when I would sneak into the Rare Book Room to pore over old records, while my friends all went to the game. There I checked out manuscript boxes that told stories of the communities I inhabited. On these Saturdays, I started to see the invisible forces that created my physical world and marked my presence. Every book I picked below does the same precise work—they make visible a past that shapes our present.
Weaving in her own ancestral history, Kelley knits an extraordinary journey of the Black working class from slavery to our contemporary world—from Georgia to Philadelphia, Florida to Chicago, Texas to Oakland, we engage generations of mostly unheralded workers whose radical genius shaped our labor history and forged nourishing and joyful lives out-of-view of most white accounts of the working class.
Kelley’s prose celebrates and brings to the surface the hidden lives that improved our contemporary world.
There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic "white working class," a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story.
Spanning two hundred years-from one of Kelley's earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the Covid-19 pandemic-Black Folk highlights the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal…
I began advocating for the rights of California prisoners and their families while incarcerated. As co-director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC), in 2003, I cofounded All of Us or None (AOUON), a grassroots movement of formerly incarcerated people working on their own behalf to secure their civil and human rights. AOUON is now the policy and advocacy arm of LSPC, which I have led as executive director since 2011. Collective victories include ending indefinite solitary confinement in California, expanding access to housing and employment for formerly incarcerated people, and restoring the vote to those on parole and probation.
I knew Michelle when she was teaching at Stanford University before she wrote this book, but I didn’t know then how much of the work she’d done. Her book is so profound that when I first read it, I was in Vegas on vacation, and I couldn’t get out of the room because I was so deep into reading her book. I couldn’t get to the great food or the penny slots because she was putting together all the pieces I had read about or heard discussed in different places, and she built a picture of the system of oppression Black people live under in the United States.
She affirmed what I had suspected: that incarceration continues the enslavement of Black people. I called a colleague and said, this book will have more impact than I could making speeches to a thousand people at a time, a hundred times a…
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that 'we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.'
Being from Upstate New York I went to college at Cornell University but headed off to New Orleans as soon as I could. By and by I became an instructor at Delgado Community College. Always a big fan of the city’s amazing historic cemeteries, when teaching a world architectural history class, I took the class to the Metairie Cemetery where I could show the students real examples of every style from Ancient Egyptian to Modern American. After coming to Texas State University, San Marcos (30 miles from Austin), I went back to New Orleans on sabbatical in 2013 and wrote The Cemeteries of New Orleans.
Necropolis describes how the yellow fever shaped New Orleans society in the 1800s.
While the fever was killing tens of thousands of people for almost two centuries from the founding of the city in 1718 until the last yellow fever epidemic in 1905, giving its victims horrible deaths in which they cried blood and vomited tar-like bile in the process, the disease helped preserve the city’s Creole culture by killing off a large proportion of immigrants to the city who were more susceptible than native-born New Orleans.
Before reading this book, I had no idea that being “acclimated” to yellow fever by surviving a case of this horrible disease was what made white transplants into bonafide citizens of the city.
Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the brutal inequities of slave-powered capitalism.
Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America's slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne viruses-and meager public health infrastructure-a person's only protection against the scourge was to "get acclimated" by surviving the disease. About half of those who contracted yellow fever died.
Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans's strict racial…
I’m that infamous medievalist who wrote the big book on medieval race. It took 20 years of thinking and research, and a whole lot of writing, but now people are convinced that there was, indeed, such a thing as race and racism between the 11th and 15th centuries in the West (aka Christendom/Europe). I'm Perceval Professor of English and Comparative Literature, with a joint appointment in Middle Eastern studies and Women’s studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
If you’re curious about what the ancient Greeks and Romans thought about their neighbors—Persians, Egyptians, etc.— you’ll want to read this book from cover to cover. It’s smart, learned, and doesn’t shy away from hard truths. After you read it, you’ll also want to read Benjamin Isaac’s The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, David M. Goldenberg’s The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and The Origins of Racism in the West, edited by Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler.
How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one's skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into…
Studying anthropology and biology in the 1970s, I was in the perfect position to understand why race was not genetic. From that time on, I wanted everyone to know what race was and was not. But here we a half century later and most individuals in the US – and the world – still believe that race is a valid way to divide individuals into biological groups, and worse, that race, rather than racism, explains differences in life circumstances. As a professor and president of the American Anthropological Association I have taught courses and helped with documentaries, museum exhibits, websites, articles, and books to dispel consequential myth about race and genetics.
In 1939 it was well-accepted that Europe was home to many different races. Jacobson tells the story of how, after the Holocaust, different ethnic and national groups slowly because members of the “Caucasian” or White race. Jacobson uses a variety of sources, including those from popular culture to tell the story of how these marginal groups, such as the Irish, Poles, Italians, and of course Ashkenazi Jews, became honorary white. This is a highly readable book about the history of racism against some ethnic Europeans. More so, it is an important book for showing how racial categories change through time and how being white is neither stable nor a given. Rather, it is a club that policies entry.
America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were re-racialized to become…
I am a teacher, a mom, a bubbe, and a writer. I taught elementary school and college courses, directed a daycare, and owned a children’s bookstore, but my favorite job is scribbling words on paper. I have two grown children and four wonderful granddaughters who love to listen as I read to them. Many of my ideas come from my experiences with my granddaughters and from their questions. Our family and friends are a mix of religions and cultures, and most of my books reflect the importance of diversity, acceptance, and knowledge.
I am recommending this book because it is a great story of friendship. It also captures the atmosphere in the South after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.
Joe and John Henry are best friends and do everything together. When the two boys, one black and one white, want to swim in the town pool, they discover that even though a law was passed to allow everyone to swim together in the same pool, there are people in the town who don’t want to follow the law. They want blacks and whites to stay separate.
I love the way Joe stands up for John Henry. At the end, we see a more positive future as Joe and John Henry walk into the General Store together. This book is a great conversation starter.
Two boys—one black, one white—are best friends in the segregated 1960s South in this picture book about friends sticking together through thick and thin.
John Henry swims better than anyone I know. He crawls like a catfish, blows bubbles like a swamp monster, but he doesn’t swim in the town pool with me. He’s not allowed.
Joe and John Henry are a lot alike. They both like shooting marbles, they both want to be firemen, and they both love to swim. But there’s one important way they're different: Joe is white and John Henry is black, and in the South…
I was born in 1951 and came of age during the 60s heyday of the civil rights movement. The images of that struggle—“Bloody Sunday” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham, etc.—were seared into my brain and helped reinforce a powerful sense of outrage and empathy for black activists. The movement also inspired me to get deeply involved in the Anti-War movement while in college. And so it seemed perfectly natural, when I got to graduate school, that I choose to study the origins and impact of the civil rights struggle and more recently, the continued resistance to that struggle by a significant minority of Americans.
Katznelson explodes another myth in the troubled history of civil rights policy in the US. Most of us grew up believing that FDR’s New Deal policy innovations benefited the neediest of Americans at the height of the Great Depression. But as Katznelson documents in this groundbreaking book, African-Americans were largely excluded from New Deal programs as the price Southern Senators and Congressmen extracted from FDR in exchange for their support in stewarding the legislation through the Congressional committees they controlled.
In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson's incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American…
