Here are 100 books that Colored Travelers fans have personally recommended if you like
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For most of my life, I have dedicated myself to confronting, combatting, or deconstructing white supremacy. It impacts everyone. Much of my work is about highlighting the ways Black people have refused and resisted racial discrimination, violence, and harm. We can never have too many tools, and equally important for me was being able to have tools that achieved their purpose. I wrote We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance to remind readers that there has never been a time in the history of this country when Black people have not fought back against their oppression.
Anytime I am ever asked about a book on my top list, Du Bois’s book is a staple. Is it over 700 pages? Yes. Was it written over 100 years ago? Almost! Still, Du Bois’ arguments are evergreen.
Written with accessible and some might argue biting language, Du Bois gets to the heart of what the Civil War was really fought over, not slavery, but labor. Before one can get free, you have to know why you were enslaved.
W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history.
Black Reconstruction in America tells and interprets the story of…
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…
When I went to law school, so many of the stories we heard in class treated men’s experiences as the ordinary baseline and women’s experiences as something to skip over or briefly mention as a footnote. This narrow perspective warps our understanding of the past, present, and future, and helps perpetuate women’s inequality. I have been studying and writing about sex discrimination for more than two decades. I wanted to write a book that included women in the center of American law and history. In the process, I learned about scores of fascinating women who Americans know too little about or forget entirely.
Another common misconception is that the Nineteenth Amendment extended the vote to all American women. In fact, many women—especially women of color—remained disenfranchised after the Amendment’s ratification in 1920.
Jones’s engaging book tells the story of the black women who continued to fight for enfranchisement and equal rights for decades after the Amendment.
“An elegant and expansive history” (New YorkTimes)of African American women’s pursuit of political power—and how it transformed America
InVanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in America. She recounts how they defied both racism and sexism to fight for the ballot, and how they wielded political power to secure the equality and dignity of all persons. From the earliest days of the republic to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and beyond, Jones excavates the lives and work ofBlackwomen—Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Lou Hamer, and…
I am a historian of slavery and resistance in early America and in the Atlantic world, and I have long been passionate about how enslaved people refused to accept the chattel system and the many creative ways they found to resist their status. It has also become a central goal of mine to tell their stories and make sure we know more about how slave resistance influenced U.S. society in the past and how it shapes the world in which we live today.
In this massive study of one of the most radical movements in U.S. history, Manisha Sinha extends the story of Abolition to the 18th century and on the international stage, forcing us to rethink what we thought we knew about the movement’s trajectory and who its central figures were.
By telling the broader story, Sinha demonstrates who central Black rebels were for moving the cause along and for creating an interracial alliance that would eventually succeed in 1865.
A groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War
Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism…
After growing up in South Florida, a longstanding crossroads of Southern, Latin, and Caribbean culture, I became a student of the African Diaspora in the Americas. I learned that Africans preceded the English in the Americas and arrived in greater numbers than Europeans until 1820. As a history professor and researcher, I continually came across the stories of Black men and women, enslaved and free, who started independence movements, fought in revolutions, established schools, businesses, newspapers, and political organizations - men and women who challenged slavery and discrimination and championed freedom at every opportunity. The number of individuals was overwhelming and fundamentally altered how I understand American history and democracy.
During the Age of Revolution, enslaved and formerly enslaved residents of the French Caribbean were among those who most vigorously insisted that the “rights of man” were universal. This book focuses on the colony of Guadeloupe, though Laurent Dubois has written about the Haitian Revolution as well, an event that resulted in the first nation in the Americas to outlaw human enslavement. Enslaved and free Afro-French men and women engaged colonial assemblies and militias to stake their claims to the rights of citizenship. As they endeavored to turn Enlightenment ideals into political realities, Afro-Americans in the Caribbean championed the rise of freedom in the West.
The idea of universal rights is often understood as the product of Europe, but as Laurent Dubois demonstrates, it was profoundly shaped by the struggle over slavery and citizenship in the French Caribbean. Dubois examines this Caribbean revolution by focusing on Guadeloupe, where, in the early 1790s, insurgents on the island fought for equality and freedom and formed alliances with besieged Republicans. In 1794, slavery was abolished throughout the French Empire, ushering in a new colonial order in which all people, regardless of race, were entitled to the same rights. But French administrators on the island combined emancipation with new…
I’m an American intellectual historian and professor at Vanderbilt University. I’ve long been fascinated by the history and politics of data: the question of how publicly available knowledge shapes societies as well as individual selves. It’s led me to research the effects of popular polls and statistics on mid-century U.S. culture and to write about how ever-advancing techniques for “knowing” citizens shaped modern privacy sensibilities. My current obsession is with official identity documents—how they infiltrate people’s lives in ways that are at once bureaucratic and curiously intimate. The books I’ve selected lay bare the promise and the peril of documentation in wonderfully vivid detail.
Torpey’s book, first published in 2000, is now a classic. With it, he helped open up a whole field of inquiry into the history of official documents and identification techniques that both constrain—and make conceivable—modern society. Here, think of street addresses, fingerprints, birth certificates, credit records, driver’s licenses, tax forms, and visas. For Torpey, the passport, “that little paper booklet with the power to open international doors,” is a window into modern nation states’ interest in regulating movement. For his readers, it is a bracing reminder of how recent those controls are and how habituated we denizens of the 21st century have become to showing our papers.
This book presents the first detailed history of the modern passport and why it became so important for controlling movement in the modern world. It explores the history of passport laws, the parliamentary debates about those laws, and the social responses to their implementation. The author argues that modern nation-states and the international state system have 'monopolized the 'legitimate means of movement',' rendering persons dependent on states' authority to move about - especially, though not exclusively, across international boundaries. This new edition reviews other scholarship, much of which was stimulated by the first edition, addressing the place of identification documents…
I am a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University. I have taught and written on political theory and cultural studies for over thirty years, specializing in theories of capitalism and imperialism. However, my main motivation for writing the books and articles I have published has had more to do with my life-long commitment to progressive social change and the political movements that can bring that change about. First and foremost, I have tried to make sometimes challenging theoretical and political concepts accessible to the informed reader and especially to those on the front lines of progressive political and social movements.
In an age when statues commemorating former colonialists and slave owners have been toppled worldwide, the figure of Winston Churchill has been left largely untouched. Myth-making around Churchill’s role in defeating Hitler is surely part of the explanation: no less than sixteen feature films have been made about his supposed historical achievements, three of them in the past decade.
As Tariq Ali points out in this informative book, “Churchill has become a highly burnished icon whose cult has long been out of control.” Yet, during the 1930s, as fascism ascended throughout continental Europe, Churchill was a fanboy of the far-right. Like many of his social class, Churchill admired fascism for its capacity to keep communism in check. Until 1937, his “support for Mussolini was effusive, his hopes for Franco outlasted the war, and, for some years, he was impressed by Hitler and the sturdy, patriotic Hitler youth.” “Imperialism,” Ali argues,…
The subject of numerous biographies and history books, Winston Churchill has been repeatedly voted as one of the greatest of Englishmen. Even today, Boris Johnson in his failing attempts to be magisterial, has adopted many of his hero's mannerism! And, as Tariq Ali agrees, Churchill was undoubtedly right in 1940-41 to refuse to capitulate to fascism. However, he was also one of the staunchest defenders of empire and of Britain's imperial doctrine.
In this coruscating biography, Tariq Ali challenges Churchill's vaulted record. Throughout his long career as journalist, adventurer, MP, military leader, statesman, and historian, nationalist self belief influenced Churchill's…
An Heir of Realms tells the tale of two young heroines—a dragon rider and a portal jumper—who fight dragon-like parasites to save their realms from extinction.
Rhoswen is training as a Realm Rider to work with dragons and burn away the Narxon swarming into her realm. Rhoswen’s dream is to…
The past fascinates me because it is strange and different to the world we live in today. That is why I prefer looking at earlier centuries than contemporary times because the distant past requires an extra effort on our part to unlock how people back then made sense of their world. When I read an old chronicle on how Indigenous people spent days traveling to meet acquaintances and even strangers, it piqued my interest. Did they really need to meet face-to-face? What did traveling mean to them? The books on the list below are attempts by historians to understand the travelers of the past.
I like Borders and Freedom because Scholz shows a different way of interpreting political borders and territories.
Most people would think that toll stations would be located at the boundary between states. But Scholz illustrates how they were actually located well within the borders of political territories because channeling movement was far more important than maintaining fixed boundaries.
In the Holy Roman Empire 'no prince... can forbid men passage in the common road', wrote the English jurist John Selden. In practice, moving through one the most fractured landscapes in human history was rarely as straightforward as suggested by Selden's account of the German 'liberty of passage'.
Across the Old Reich, mobile populations-from emperors to peasants-defied attempts to channel their mobility with actions ranging from mockery to bloodshed. In this study, Luca Scholz charts this contentious ordering of movement through the lens of safe conduct, an institution that was common throughout the early modern world but became a key…
I’m an entrepreneur and investor. I’ve been obsessed with financial independence and wealth creation for the Black community for 30 years. I wrote my book, below, to invite Black and white Americans alike onto the playing field of what I believe to be an existential crisis—closing America’s racial wealth gap. I wanted to share my story of living through the gap. I also elevate the work of Black leaders who are tackling the problem in different ways. I’ve created an easy way for readers to understand the depth and nature of the problem…and know how they could take small and big steps to help solve it.
Everyone loves taxes, right? Before reading this, I hadn’t realized the outsized role disproportionate allocation of state and local tax revenues plays in perpetuating the gap. One often-repeated untruth is “black people don’t pay taxes.”
I loved how Kahrl debunked that concept and thoroughly explained the role of tax policy (and individual acts) in re-appropriating land and property over multiple generations. I hadn’t made this connection to the problem before taking this deep dive. I was deeply troubled by this one; instance upon instance of plunder across the States.
Revealing a history that is deep, broad, and infuriating, The Black Tax casts a bold light on the racist practices long hidden in the shadows of America's tax regimes.
American taxation is unfair, and it is most unfair to the very people who critically need its support. Not only do taxpayers with fewer resources-less wealth, power, and land-pay more than the well-off, but they are forced to fight for their rights within an unjust system that undermines any attempts to improve their position or economic standing. In The Black Tax, Andrew W. Kahrl reveals the shocking history and ruinous…
I read history to better understand myself, others, and the world around me; I write historical fiction to share what I have learned. At New York University, I was the Jacob K. Javits Fellow in fiction. In addition to Our Man in the Dark, I am the author of The Abduction of Smith and Smith, one of Huffington Post's 25 Necessary Books By Black Authors (2015),andHuffington Post's 50 Amazing Books By Black Authors from the Past Five Years (2019).
In the late ’60s, Dan Freeman, a Black token hire at the CIA shares spy-craft with Black revolutionaries. The book may claim to be a satire, but it demands to be taken seriously. The historical implications of the novel are obvious; there are plenty of exhilarating thrills, and the writing bops with a jazz-like cool. The mystery, however, is subterranean and internal. Freeman has perfected many masks to survive in America, to infiltrate the CIA, and to earn the respect of revolutionaries. The amazing thing is that there is so much suspense in discovering which identity will truly take hold.
A classic in the black literary tradition, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is both a comment on the civil rights problems in the United States in the late 1960s and a serious attempt to focus on the issue of black militancy.
Dan Freeman, the ""spook who sat by the door,"" is enlisted in the CIA's elitist espionage program. Upon mastering agency tactics, however, he drops out to train young Chicago blacks as ""Freedom Fighters"" in this explosive, award-winning novel.
As a story of one man's reaction to ruling-class hypocrisy, the book is autobiographical and personal. As a tale…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I am a theater historian whose research focuses on African American theater of 1940s-50s. While other periods and movements—the Harlem Renaissance (1920s), the Federal Theatre Project (1930s), the Black Arts Movement (1960s), and contemporary theater—have been well studied and documented, I saw a gap of scholarship around the 1940s-50s; I wondered why those years had been largely overlooked. As I dived deeper, I saw how African American performance culture (ie. theater, film, television, music) of the later-20th Century had its roots in the history of those somewhat overlooked decades. I’m still investigating that story, and these books have helped me do it.
We often learn about African American history in the 20th Century in terms of a conflict between nonviolent resistance vs. violent radicalism, integrationism vs. separatism, Martin vs. Malcolm. But this is an over-simplification of a complex and dynamic moment in the history of our nation. More than any other work, Black is a Country helped me think differently about the period that I study, and see African American history and culture of the mid-20th Century in a new way.
Despite black gains in modern America, the end of racism is not yet in sight. Nikhil Pal Singh asks what happened to the worldly and radical visions of equality that animated black intellectual activists from W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. In so doing, he constructs an alternative history of civil rights in the twentieth century, a long civil rights era, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central to the history of black struggle.
It is through the words and thought of key black intellectuals, like…
