In celebration of Black History Month, the University of Notre Dame Press has organized a page of some of our most indispensable books in African American studies and African American Intellectual history to amplify Black voices and their tremendous history, continued difficulties and triumphs of the present, and perseverance toward the future.
Described as a “Central American love song,” Stepmotherland is a collection of poems that takes readers on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. Afro-Panamanian American writer Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s first full-length poetry collection and winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize takes readers on a wild ride through the most pressing political issues of our time and the most intimate and transformative personal experiences of his life. This collection is a celebration of the discovery of America, the discovery of self, and the ways they may be one and the same.
“Darrel Alejandro Holnes navigates the fraught politics of national, racial, and sexual identities with grace and wisdom beyond his years in order to locate that precarious but remarkable space that a queer Afro/Black-Latino immigrant from Panamá can call home. . . . What a unique, multivalent, and incredibly moving debut.”
—Rigoberto González, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and author of The Book of Ruin
William Still: The Underground Railroad and the Angel at Philadelphia is the first major biography of the free black abolitionist William Still, who coordinated the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad and was a pillar of the Railroad as a whole. This monumental work details Still’s life story beginning with his parents’ escape from bondage in the early nineteenth century and continuing through his youth and adulthood as one of the nation’s most important Underground Railroad agents and, later, as an early civil rights pioneer. Unique to this book is an accessible and detailed database of the 995 fugitives Still helped escape from the South to the North and Canada between 1853 and 1861.
“With this book, William C. Kashatus has delivered a valuable addition to the growing body of serious literature on the Underground Railroad. His attention to the details of Still’s life both before and after his engagement in abolitionist work provides a new and rounded picture of a man who for too long remained a vague figure behind his well-known compendium of information on the fugitive slaves who passed through Philadelphia.”
—Fergus M. Bordewich, author of Bound for Canaan
Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879–1961) is just one of the many African American intellectuals whose work has been long excluded from the literary canon. Burroughs was a celebrated female activist, educator, and intellectual. This book represents a landmark contribution to the African American intellectual historical project by allowing readers to experience Burroughs in her own words. Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer, 1900–1959 is an anthology written between 1900 and 1959 that encapsulates Burroughs’ work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual, and evangelist.
This is a tremendous scholarly reintroduction of Nannie Helen Burroughs as a black thinker, a civil rights activist, and a race woman. It not only makes a substantial contribution to black intellectual history, but provides invaluable resources to black historians and black political theorists looking to theorize black women anew.
—Tommy J. Curry, University of Edinburgh
Walls: Essays, 1985-1990, Kenneth McClane’s first book of autobiographical essays originally published in 1991, is a powerful and deeply moving meditation on relationships. Beginning with an essay on the death of his brother, Paul, this inspiring work details pivotal life experiences of McClane’s including giving a poetry reading in a maximum-security prison, his experience of being one of the first two African American students to attend America’s oldest private school, teaching creative writing, a divestment protest at Cornell, and his encounters with James Baldwin.
“McClane is foremost a poet, and his essays carry the reverberant weight of poetry, demanding a careful read. Moreover, he peppers his prose with esoteric references to James Baldwin, Chekhov, Kafka, and others, lending these essays an academic air.”
—PW Annex Reviews
Black Domers: African-American Students at Notre Dame in Their Own Words tells the compelling story of racial integration at the University of Notre Dame in the post–World War II era. In a series of seventy-five essays, beginning with the first African-American to graduate from Notre Dame in 1947 to a member of the class of 2017 who also served as student body president, we can trace the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the African-American experience at Notre Dame through seven decades.
“Some stories need to be lived in order to be told truthfully, truly and fully. But even an African-American student would be unable to tell the story of being black at Notre Dame because there is no single story, no singular experience, no one person who can speak for all who have come here from so many places, families, and personal histories. It would take a book to explain. And one with many voices. Now we have that book.”
—Kerry Temple, editor, Notre Dame Magazine
Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence is a comprehensive reassessment of the ideas that Americans have had about race. Edited by Paul Spickard ad G. Reginald Daniel, this useful book draws on the skills and perspectives of nine scholars from the fields of history, sociology, theology, American studies, and ethnic studies. In thirteen carefully crafted essays, they tell the history of the American system of racial domination and of twentieth-century challenges to that racial hierarchy, from monoracial movements to the multiracial movement. The volume provides excellent summaries of historical events and cultural movements, as well as analysis and criticism.
“This collection is stunning. The editors’ introduction offers a superb brief discussion of the meaning of the term “race,” and the essays are vigorous, sophisticated, earnest, interesting, and honest. It ought to be read widely.”
—Winthrop D. Jordan, William F. Winter Professor of History and of Afro-American Studies, F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished Professor, University of Mississippi
In Abandoned Tracks: The Underground Railroad in Washington County, Pennsylvania, W. Thomas Mainwaring bridges the gap between scholarly and popular perceptions of the Underground Railroad. Historians have long recognized that many aspects of the Underground Railroad have been mythologized by emotion, memory, time, and wishful thinking. Mainwaring’s book is a rich, in-depth attempt to separate fact from fiction in one local area, while also contributing to a scholarly discussion of the Underground Railroad by placing Washington County, Pennsylvania, in the national context.
“Abandoned Tracks separates the myths of the Underground Railroad in Western Pennsylvania from the facts. The author has dissected and discredited long-believed legends while uncovering verifiable evidence of exactly how escaped slaves traveled through the region and who assisted them on their way. The book reveals the often overlooked heroics of the fleeing slaves and the free African Americans who aided their escape.”
—A. Parker Burroughs, author of Washington County Murder and Mayhem: Historic Crimes of Southwestern Pennsylvania
Despite the extensive scholarship on Max Weber (1864–1920) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), very little of it examines the contact between the two founding figures of Western sociology. Drawing on their correspondence from 1904 to 1906, and comparing the sociological work that they produced during this period and afterward, The Spirit vs. the Souls: Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Politics of Scholarship examines for the first time the ideas that Weber and Du Bois shared on topics such as sociological investigation, race, empire, unfree labor, capitalism, and socialism.
“McAuley explores the little-known personal and intellectual relationship between Max Weber and W. E. B. Du Bois in this volume. The two scholars corresponded briefly until, as McAuley claims, the divergence in their ideas made an ongoing relationship impossible. Today, he argues, academia remembers Weber incorrectly as the ‘pure scholar,’ while downgrading and misconstruing Du Bois’s intellectual credentials as those of a mere ‘political academic.'”
—Choice
Dennis Looney’s Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy examines how African American authors have read, interpreted, and responded to Dante Alighieri and his work from the late 1820s to the present. Looney documents how African American “translations” of Dante use the medieval author to comment on segregation, migration, and integration. This unique account demonstrates this appropriation of Dante as a locus for black agency in the creative work of such authors as William Wells Brown, the poet H. Cordelia Ray, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, and the filmmaker Spencer Williams.
“[Dennis Looney’s] subject of Dante’s African American reception has been somewhat neglected up to now, but offers some striking evidence of his relevance to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Looney’s major focus is on the novels Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The System of Dante’s Hell by LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), both at various levels autobiographical; he also covers a wide range of writing, and some film, from the 1860s to Toni Morrison and contemporary rap music.”
—Times Literary Supplement
Colin Powell: Imperfect Patriot is the fascinating story of Powell’s professional life, and of what we can learn from both his good and bad followership. This biography demonstrates that Powell’s decades-long development as an exemplary subordinate is crucial to understanding his astonishing rise from a working-class immigrant neighborhood to the highest echelons of military and political power.
“Jeffrey Matthews’s excellent biography rightly praises Colin Powell’s distinguished service over the past half-century, while also delineating how Powell faltered at crucial moments while serving as George W. Bush’s secretary of state. This is a comprehensive and compelling analysis.”
—Walter LaFeber, Andrew and James Tisch University Professor Emeritus, Cornell University