Here are 100 books that Before the Mayflower fans have personally recommended if you like
Before the Mayflower.
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America is the greatest ideal in history: “all men are created equal…” Sadly, Americans have never quite lived up to America. Only twice (Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement) have they even tried. As a black man, I live daily with the fruit of that failure, so I have an obvious personal investment in the subject. But I’m also drawn intellectually by an appalled fascination with the idea that any human beings can believe themselves superior by dint of their paint job or religion, or sex organs, or how they choose to use said sex organs. Why are we like this? That question has long vexed my reading and writing.
The fact that African-American men are funneled through the justice system at rates that dwarf every other demographic does not reflect a flaw in the system. Rather, it is the system, functioning as designed. With that revolutionary thesis, Michelle Alexander upended everything I thought I understood about race and crime.
In this ground-breaking volume, she dared me to see what was right before my eyes all the time: not simply that criminal justice in this country is deeply unfair but rather that it functions as a way of re-imposing upon black men a defacto Jim Crow sixty years after the original was sent slinking away into the dustbin of history.
In a bold and innovative argument, a rising legal star shows readers how the mass incarceration of a disproportionate number of black men amounts to a devastating system of racial control. This is a terrifying reality that exists in the UK as much as in the US. Despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, the system that once forced African-Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts and the criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and deprives an entire segment of the population of their basic rights.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
America is the greatest ideal in history: “all men are created equal…” Sadly, Americans have never quite lived up to America. Only twice (Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement) have they even tried. As a black man, I live daily with the fruit of that failure, so I have an obvious personal investment in the subject. But I’m also drawn intellectually by an appalled fascination with the idea that any human beings can believe themselves superior by dint of their paint job or religion, or sex organs, or how they choose to use said sex organs. Why are we like this? That question has long vexed my reading and writing.
This book made me rethink everything I thought I understood about race and culture. David Roediger is among a group of academics (Matt Wray and Nell Irvin Painter are others) who have been exploring the idea of race as a construction, an invention of relatively recent origin.
It–to borrow the words of a student of mine with whom I shared this book’s findings–“blew my mind” to discover that markers of identity I was taught to consider fixed and immutable (i.e., black and white) were, in fact, created and enforced for the benefit of capitalist oligarchs, first in order to justify slavery and then, in order to control and exploit labor.
At the vanguard of the study of race and labour in American history, David R. Roediger is the author of the now-classic The Wages of Whiteness , a study of racism in the development of a white working class in nineteenth-century America. In Working Toward Whiteness , he continues that history into the twentieth century. He recounts how American ethnic groups considered white today-including Jewish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans-once occupied a confused racial status in their new country. They eventually became part of white America thanks to the nascent labour movement, New Deal reforms, and a rise in home-buying. From ethnic…
America is the greatest ideal in history: “all men are created equal…” Sadly, Americans have never quite lived up to America. Only twice (Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement) have they even tried. As a black man, I live daily with the fruit of that failure, so I have an obvious personal investment in the subject. But I’m also drawn intellectually by an appalled fascination with the idea that any human beings can believe themselves superior by dint of their paint job or religion, or sex organs, or how they choose to use said sex organs. Why are we like this? That question has long vexed my reading and writing.
This book breaks my heart. It covers the African-American experience in the postbellum years and into the early 20th Century. This was a time when the country might have chosen–and fleetingly seemed as if it would choose–to finally live up to its founding ideals.
Instead, the country chose another path, and Leon F. Litwack chronicles that path–mob violence, electoral intimidation, and official government indifference–in brutal color and unsparing detail. This is one of those books that makes me think of what might have been.
A searing history of life under Jim Crow that recalls the bloodiest and most repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States—and the painful record of discrimination that haunts us to this day. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Been in the Storm So Long.
"The stain of Jim Crow runs deep in 20th-century America.... Its effects remain the nation's most pressing business. Trouble in Mind is an absolutely essential account of its dreadful history and calamitous legacy." —The Washington Post
In April 1899, Black laborer Sam Hose killed his white boss in self-defense. Wrongly accused…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
America is the greatest ideal in history: “all men are created equal…” Sadly, Americans have never quite lived up to America. Only twice (Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement) have they even tried. As a black man, I live daily with the fruit of that failure, so I have an obvious personal investment in the subject. But I’m also drawn intellectually by an appalled fascination with the idea that any human beings can believe themselves superior by dint of their paint job or religion, or sex organs, or how they choose to use said sex organs. Why are we like this? That question has long vexed my reading and writing.
My God, the way this man writes. There is an unforced elegance to his sentence structure and word choice that never fails to leave me with my metaphoric mouth agape, whether I’m nodding along with his arguments or, as sometimes happens, debating with him in my head.
Either way, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a clear-eyed and unsentimental observer of the hypocrisies, betrayals, and stubborn resilience that have characterized the African-American sojourn.
'I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates' Toni Morrison
'Searing. One of the foremost essayists on race in the West... [He] is responsible for some of the most important writing about what it is to be black in America today' Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant
An essential account of modern America, from Obama to Trump, from black lives matter to white supremacists rising - by the bestselling author of Between the World and Me
Obama's presidency was a watershed moment in American…
How do ideas about gender, sexuality, and race show up in our political culture? And how do people’s political needs play a role in constructions of race, sex, and gender? I’ve been researching the intersections between ideas about gender, sexuality, and political culture in the modern United States for almost twenty years. And I think history can show us the ways ideas about sex, gender, and race suffuse political culture, revealing hierarchies of power that often discriminate, alienate, and silence. By reading books like the ones on this list we can understand how this power works, we can recognize it more clearly in the present, and we can find ways to dismantle it.
This book is a brilliant collection of essays highlighting “race rebels,” where Kelley looks outside of traditional politics and organized movements to find Black resistance to forces such as white supremacy, labor exploitation, and war. Kelley focuses in on the everyday lives of working-class Black men and women, highlighting a “hidden transcript” of expression and resistance in things like music, language, dance, and choice of dress. He elevates the political potential found in these cultural elements, urging historians to see these “style politics” in the social and economic contexts which give rise to them, for they are powerful and worthy of our attention.
Many black strategies of daily resistance have been obscured--until now. Race rebels, argues Kelley, have created strategies of resistance, movements, and entire subcultures. Here, for the first time, everyday race rebels are given the historiographical attention they deserve, from the Jim Crow era to the present.
I taught American, European, and World History at the University of British Columbia for over 30 years. I was constantly reminded of the dynamics and consequences of slavery and how a history of black America should be more prevalent in understanding the development of American culture, institutions, and identity over time. In writing two books on colonial America and the American Revolution, the roots of America’s racial divide became clearer and the logic of permanence seemed irresistible. My Shaping the New World was inspired by a course I taught for years on slavery in the Americas. Compiling the bibliography and writing the chapters on slave women and families helped to refine my understanding of the “peculiar institution” in all its both common and varied characteristics throughout the Americas.
This succinct and persuasive study of the profound failure to integrate the freed slave population in the U.S. after 1865 is a rare example of a scholarly work’s direct influence on governments and the process of reform. The author’s premise and analysis is that popular and local official antipathy to emancipation led to enforced, violent segregation (Jim Crow) that was constitutionally affirmed in the 1896 Plessy case. The book’s three editions follow the history of civil rights reform from the 1950s to the 1970s and the Supreme Court’s gradual dismantling of the Plessy rule. While Jim Crow law has been overturned, versions of real-life Jim Crow conditions remain.
Strange Career offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws and American race relations. This book presented evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1880s. It's publication in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court ordered schools be desegregated, helped counter arguments that the ruling would destoy a centuries-old way of life. The commemorative edition includes a special afterword by William S. McFeely, former Woodward student and winner of both the 1982 Pulitzer Prize and 1992 Lincoln Prize. As William McFeely describes in the new afterword, 'the slim volume's social consequence far…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
My passion and expertise related to African American business history began years ago when I searched for a Ph.D. dissertation topic. After mulling over a variety of options, I ultimately decided to examine the history of an African American insurance company in my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. While working on this project, I began to formulate ideas for future research in the realm of African American business history. I subsequently developed into one of the acknowledged experts in this field. Based upon my track record, I served as a historical consultant and appeared in the documentary Boss: The Black Experience in Businesswhich premiered on PBS in April 2019.
This classic work, originally published in 1940, provides a panoramic examination of African American insurance companies (including a detailed overview of individual firms).
Although An Economic Detourfocuses on black insurers, its’ broader analysis encompassed all black-owned enterprises during this period. Specifically, Stuart declared that, under the dictates of Jim Crow racial segregation,African American entrepreneurs were relegated to only serving African American consumers.
This, necessarily, had an inhibiting impact on their profitability. Especially since non-African American entrepreneurs also had access to the African American consumer market.
As someone who has written extensively on black-owned insurance companies, An Economic Detourhas been a long-standing “go-to” resource for me.
As the Director of the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University, I’m excited to stay on top of all that’s being done in the field of Texas Music and let me assure you that it is a great way to spend one’s days. Texas music and culture reflect the state’s diverse and contested past, and every month, it seems that there is not only a new artist appearing on the stage to sing her or his truth but a writer helping us to understand how those truths fit into the larger narratives of Texas history.
Lead Belly is a ghost that haunts all of American music. His voice is at the center of Bob Dylan’s folk revival as much as it is behind the Beatles’ British Invasion. When Nirvana made their final live recording, they closed with a Lead Belly tune, Kurt proclaiming that Lead Belly was his favorite artist. And yet, when most people talk about Lead Belly, they are repeating lore propagated by a small group of white folklorists and gatekeepers rather than seeing Lead Belly—that is, Huddie Ledbetter—as a full historical individual with agency in his own story.
In this deeply researched account, Curran corrects the record. I was riveted by her ability to re-center Ledbetter and draw a complex portrait of the man while also placing him within the wider context of racial exclusions and white supremacy in the midcentury music industry and academy. Much of the world’s popular and vernacular…
Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous - as was, according to legend, the temper that landed him in two of the South's most brutal prisons, while his immense talent twice won him pardons. But, as this deeply researched book shows, these stories were shaped by the white folklorists who 'discovered' Lead Belly and, along with reporters, recording executives, and radio and film producers, introduced him to audiences beyond the South. Through a revelatory examination of arrest, trial, and prison records; sharecropping reports; oral histories; newspaper articles; and…
I have two major passions in life: music and writing. I started learning guitar aged 16, and my friends and I formed a band as soon as we possibly could. My first professional job was writing about pop music for a monthly magazine, and much later in life, I discovered jazz. Now I’m a bass-player, jazz singer, and composer who works with some of the finest jazz musicians in London, and I play regularly at Ronnie Scott’s club. As well as the Donald Fagen biography, I’ve also written biographies of the great jazz singers Mark Murphy (for me, the greatest of them all) and Jon Hendricks.
I make no apology for including this immense and important work. So much of the music I love originated with the kidnapping of black people from Africa.
This book shows how not merely the music of Africa but whole swathes of culture now considered “American” were imported along with the slaves. How did they cope with being ripped from their homeland, transported across the Atlantic in chains, and forced to work in the fields of an alien land?
Levine lays it all out, including everything from Black religion to Black comedy, and despite what you might think, it’s a real page-turner.
When Black Culture and Black Consciousness first appeared thirty years ago, it marked a revolution in our understanding of African American history. Contrary to prevailing ideas at the time, which held that African culture disappeared quickly under slavery and that black Americans had little group pride, history, or cohesiveness, Levine uncovered a cultural treasure trove, illuminating a rich and complex African American oral tradition, including songs, proverbs, jokes, folktales, and long narrative poems called toasts-work that dated from before and after emancipation. The fact that these ideas and sources seem so commonplace now is in large part due this book…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
The first twenty-five years of my life appeared to be atypical for an inner-city African American boy from a large family. Only a small number of children were bused to more “academically advanced” schools. I earned that honor by frequently running away from the local school. Overcoming the challenges of being a minority in a demanding, predominantly Jewish, school district eventually benefited me greatly. In the early 1970s, my parents did something unprecedented for a working-class African American family from Queens: They bought an old, dilapidated farmhouse in Upstate New York's dairy country as a summer home. What other unusual life experiences that impact people of color have taken place on the American tapestry?
As a reader, these shared life experiences may prove to be the closest you will ever come to walking in someone else’s shoes. This book would have the greatest impact on historically privileged Americans if read with an open heart. Immensely enlightening: Lythcott-Haims does more than take the reader on a walk through her lived experiences. She shared the complex building blocks found in England, Africa, and America that impacted her mother’s character, along with the extraordinarily successful professional life of her father.
A fearless memoir in which beloved and bestselling How to Raise an Adult author Julie Lythcott-Haims pulls no punches in her recollections of growing up a black woman in America.
Bringing a poetic sensibility to her prose to stunning effect, Lythcott-Haims briskly and stirringly evokes her personal battle with the low self-esteem that American racism routinely inflicts on people of color. The only child of a marriage between an African-American father and a white British mother, she shows indelibly how so-called "micro" aggressions in addition to blunt force insults can puncture a person's inner life with a thousand sharp cuts.…
