Written by Faculty & Alumni:
Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders
Assistant Professor - African American / U.S. History
Henry Lovejoy
Assistant Professor - Early Modern Africa / African Diaspora
- Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
- Anderson, Richard, and Henry B. Lovejoy, eds. Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896. Vol. 86. Rochester Studies in African H, 2020.
- Director of The Digital Slavery Research Lab.
Peter Wood
Adjunct Professor - U.S. History / Slavery
- Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Random House, 1974.
- Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
David Varel
Ph.D. Graduate ('15) - U.S. History
- The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018.
- The Scholar and the Struggle: Lawrence Reddick's Crusade for Black History and Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
Eric Love
Retired Associate Professor - U.S. History
Further Recommendations:
- Abrams, Stacey. Lead from the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change. Picador, 2019.
- Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press,1979.
- Bontemps, Arna, and Jack Conroy. Anyplace but Here. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966.
The original book on Black immigration north by a Black intellectual who moved from Louisiana to Harlem. - D’Emilio, John. Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
"I read this as an undergrad and it deepened my interest in studying the past, introducing me to a key figure—Bayard Rustin, a gay Black man—who profoundly shaped the ideas and strategies of the African American civil rights movement." - Professor Natalie Mendoza - Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. New York: Miller, Orton & co, 1857.
- Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge. New York: Atria Books, 2017.
- Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991 [1967].
"I read Black Skin, White Masks during my junior year of college and Fanon's seminal work provoked me to think in new ways about colonialism, anti-colonialism, and double consciousness." - Professor Lucy Chester - Harding, Vincent. There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
- Hartman, Saidiya V. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
- Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.
- Hinton, Elizabeth. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s. New York: Liveright, 2021.
- Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present. New York: Perseus Books Group, 2009.
- Kytle, Ethan J. and Blain Roberts, Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy. New York: The New Press, 2018.
- Miles, Tiya. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. New York: Random House, 2021.
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature. Suffolk: James Curry 1986.
"I read this as an undergrad and still teach it, for its personal and political examination of the far-reaching effects of colonization, down to the way we speak and the books we read." - Professor Lucy Chester - Savoy, Lauret. Trace: Memory History, Race and the American Landscape. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2015.
- Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolia Press, 2021.
- Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010.
"By weaving the stories of three individuals into a narrative of broader social change, Wilkerson fills in the blanks of what happened to black Americans between the Civil War and Civil Rights, humanizing black experiences and exposing the entire nation's deeply-rooted racism." - Dr. Julia Ogden