Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Black History

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to Black History

Posted on February 13, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on Black history. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black freedom during the Civil War
Fields-Black, Edda L. Oxford, 2024

Given the number of enslaved South Carolinians who were liberated by the June 1863 raid on the Combee Ferry, as well as the importance of the expedition to the 2nd South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment of Black soldiers and to Northern public opinion, it is curious that the upriver incursion has attracted so little scholarly attention. The successful liberation of roughly 727 Carolinians—many of whom then enlisted in the US Army—has been relegated to chapters in biographies of Harriet Tubman, who helped guide the raid, and in works on James Montgomery, the colonel of the regiment. Fields-Black (Carnegie Melon Univ.), an authority on Carolina rice culture, spent more than a decade reading thousands of pages of pension files housed at the National Archives. Because most of the Black soldiers who took part in the raid were themselves recently liberated, Fields-Black convincingly argues that the incursion constituted one of the largest slave rebellions in North American history. Elegantly written, this thick volume is supported by 15 appendixes that include the names of liberated bondmen, the names of Tubman’s scouts, military orders, correspondence by both white and Black participants, and 151 pages of endnotes. View on Amazon

2. Bayard Rustin: a legacy of protest and politics
ed. by Michael G. Long New York University, 2023

Edited by Long (formerly, Elizabethtown College), this outstanding collection provides a wide-ranging, multifaceted view of the life and experiences of civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. Despite his numerous contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, such as advising Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Montgomery bus boycott and effectively organizing the famed 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Rustin has received relatively scant attention in histories of the movement. In explaining this omission, Long and other contributors point to multiple factors, such as Rustin’s association with communism and socialism, his pacifism, and his openness as a gay man. In many of the essays, the authors explore these and other aspects of Rustin’s life, highlighting the complexities of his relationships, identities, allegiances, and political priorities. While demonstrating the importance of restoring Rustin’s place in historical memory, the authors take great care to avoid uncritically venerating him, and to point out the ways in which his own vision for social change could be limited. Their treatment reveals much about Rustin, the Civil Rights Movement as a whole, and other movements for social justice in the 20th-century US. View on Amazon

3. This is our home: slavery and struggle on southern plantations
Stewart, Whitney Nell. North Carolina, 2023

Home is an abstract yet powerful concept. This book creatively wrestles with what home meant for enslaved people in the American South. It is a critique of public history and the public interpretation of slavery which seeks to center enslaved people’s living spaces beyond the daily routine of labor exploitation. Drawing on documentary sources and archaeological evidence from public heritage sites, Stewart (Univ. of Texas, Dallas) examines how enslaved people made domestic spaces that materially and ideologically fostered hope, stability, community, and security under the coercive structure of slavery. By exploring the public heritage sites of enslaved people from Virginia to Texas, she challenges historical narratives that have erased the process of homemaking among enslaved people. These case studies allow Stewart to bridge temporal and geographic distances and identify common homemaking strategies. For example, in Virginia Stewart uses evidence from James Madison’s Montpelier Plantation to show how enslaved people took control of the landscape to create spaces for living distinct from spaces for labor. At Chatham Plantation in Alabama, Stewart examines ancestral rootedness through enslaved burial grounds. This is a must-read volume for public historians of the African diaspora. View on Amazon

4. To advance the race: Black women’s higher education from the antebellum era to the 1960s Perkins, Linda Marie. Illinois, 2024

This book is the story of the crossroad between race, gender, education, and leadership. Perkins (gender studies, Claremont Graduate Univ.) traces the educational experiences of women of color in the United States from the years after the Civil War to the Civil Rights era in the 1960s. The book seeks to show “African American women and their multi-generational commitment to the ideal of education as a collective achievement.” To this end, Perkins marshals a wide variety of primary and secondary sources and presents a narrative that is clearly written and persuasively argued. Consisting of nine chapters divided into three parts, the book provides illuminating details on the struggles and triumphs that women of color experienced at major public universities in the heartland and later at historically Black colleges in the South. Of particular value are the chapters on the role of Black women as leaders at historically Black colleges. This is an important book that belongs in the collections of every college and university library and on the shelves of public libraries with sizable collections on Black history. View on Amazon.

5. Blacksound: making race and popular music in the United States Morrison, Matthew D. California, 2024

In this original monograph, Morrison (NYU) argues that today’s popular music industry was built on the exploitation of songs of enslaved people and blackface minstrelsy, resulting in an amalgamation of Black and other racialized (including white) musics that he theorizes as “Blacksound.” Over five chapters, Morrison uses Blacksound to analyze sonic identity, performance, and property within a cultural and legal system under white control. For example, William Henry Lane (”Master Juba”), a Black antebellum minstrel whose virtuosic dancing defied description, was an early Black performer robbed of his “intellectual performance property,” since incipient US copyright law protected only notated music (and later, recordings). Through blackface, whites typically denigrated and stereotyped Black performers by their (unwritten) movements and improvisations, only to embody those same performative acts for their own profit. Morrison also devotes chapters to Stephen Foster’s “Americana” and the under-studied publishing house M. Witmark & Sons (“the house that blackface built”). The final chapter, on the evolution of ragtime from a local Black music to the aesthetic basis of mainstream popular music, traces how Tin Pan Alley commodified Blacksound, allowing non-Black performers to profit without the burden of Black skin. This book is essential reading, marred only by frequent and lengthy footnotes. View on Amazon.

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