As a cultural historian of 20th century America, I’m fascinated by how culture is used to rebel against the status quo and how the status quo fights back. In my first book, Class Acts: Young Men and the Rise of Lifestyle, I looked at greasers, hippies, and white hip hop lovers to understand how they used style and fashion to push back against being white and middle class. In Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire, I went beyond looking at how individuals shape their identity to thinking about how artists and city leaders shape the identity of a place. Can artists counter the efforts of cities to create sanitized images of themselves?
In the space of two years, D. Watkins published two stunning books about Baltimore. The second, The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir, is sharp and smart, but if I had to only choose one, it would be The Beast Side. In this slim volume of essays, Watkins invites us to explore the two worlds he lives within and between. He grew up on the tough east side, known locally as the beast side, and sold drugs, but also went to college and now teaches creative writing.
While there are many books by Black authors that use stories of poverty and despair to titillate or move white audiences to pity, Watkins does none of that. He speaks first to Black audiences, especially those who maybe don’t love to read, because literacy, he says, is a step towards liberation. The Beast Sidemay be the best way to see…
A New York Times Best Seller! Baltimore, one of our country's quintessential urban war zones, is brought powerfully to life by literary talent, D. Watkins
To many, the past 8 years under President Obama were meant to usher in a new post-racial American political era, dissolving the divisions of the past. However, when seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a wannabe cop in Florida; and then Ferguson, Missouri, happened; and then South Carolina hit the headlines; and then Baltimore blew up, it was hard to find any evidence of a new post-racial order.
We discovered this book at a Little Free Library and were pleasantly surprised by how historically researched it was while also being a time-traveling book about a beloved dog.
Per my child, he loved the fact that Ranger is a time-traveler that can go back in time super fast—in this case, to the pre-Civil War era to help a pair of siblings escape slavery.
Ranger, the time-traveling golden retriever, is back for the third book in Kate Messner's new chapter book series. This time, he helps two kids navigate the Underground Railroad!
Ranger is a time-traveling golden retriever with search-and-rescue training. In this adventure, he goes to a Maryland plantation during the days of American slavery, where he meets a young girl named Sarah. When she learns that the owner has plans to sell her little brother, Jesse, to a plantation in the Deep South, it means they could be separated forever. Sarah takes their future into her own hands and decides there's only…
I never set out to be a historian of sexuality, but the more I read, the more convinced I became of the centrality of sex to politics, culture, religion, and social change. I am fascinated by histories of sexuality in the making and shaping of individual identities and behaviors, and I’m also drawn to histories of other topics—politics, religion, enslavement, leisure—that also teach us something about the history of sex and sexuality. These interests drew me to the podcast Sexing History, where I edit the stories and help produce the episodes. I love to read widely to find histories of sex in unexpected places.
What does it mean to be free—and how can you prove that you are? Millward’s utterly engrossing book demonstrates how significant Black women’s reproductive sexuality was to their pursuit of freedom. Following the formal end of US participation in the international slave trade in 1808, white enslavers placed unprecedented demands on enslaved Black women to bear more children. Because the laws defined the child according to the mother’s free or unfree status, enslaved women literally birthed the property of white enslavers. But what if a currently enslaved person proved that the womb from which they entered the world belonged to a free person? Millward shows how Black women and their descendants paved their own pathways to freedom.
Finding Charity's Folk highlights the experiences of enslaved Maryland women who negotiated for their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records and numerous manuscript documents from a diversity of archives, Jessica Millward skillfully brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre.
Millward opens with a striking discussion about how researching the life of a single enslaved woman, Charity Folks, transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in Revolutionary America. For African American women such as…
As an emigrant myself (I left Ireland in the late 1980s), I’ve always been interested in understanding the process of moving from one place to another; of existing in that liminal space between “being here” and “being there.” I spent several years researching the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century Irish migrants for my book, The Coffin Ship, but found the answers led to new questions on how other peoples, in other places, have managed being somewhere between “here” and “there.” These are some of the books that have helped me along that long, emotional journey.
Because the nineteenth-century sailing ship was such a male-dominated space, women were largely invisible in traditional histories of life at sea. Although Edith Ziegler’s book does not simply focus on the voyage itself (it includes analysis of female convicts’ lives before and after the journey as well), it does show how women combatted the “sexual opportunism and exploitation” that was endemic on convict transports. What’s great about this book is that even though many of its subjects were illiterate (and thus left precious few letters and diaries behind), Ziegler manages to unearth the women’s voices in authentic and moving ways.
In Harlots, Hussies, and Poor Unfortunate Women, Edith M. Ziegler recounts the history of British convict women involuntarily transported to Maryland in the eighteenth century.
Great Britain's forced transportation of convicts to colonial Australia is well known. Less widely known is Britain's earlier programme of sending convicts - including women - to North America. Many of these women were assigned as servants in Maryland. Titled using Basing much of her powerful narrative on the experiences of actual women, Ziegler restores individual faces to women stripped of their basic freedoms. She begins by vividly invoking the social conditions of eighteenth-century Britain,…
I remember my first ever houseplant—doesn’t everyone? It was a spider plant, just a small one grown as an offset from my mother’s vast ‘mother’ plant. Yes—two mothers! The plant and my green-fingered mother got me hooked on houseplants. As a social historian, I’ve written about all things to do with the home—clothes, gardens, even gardeners themselves but houseplants? Why was there no social history of plants in the home? Where did that spider plant come from? And when? The answer is Japan in the late 18th century. But the truth is that plants have been brought into homes for centuries and their stories are fascinating.
Sometimes you don’t need glossy colour photographs of plants to be transported to green pastures. Ruth Kassinger charts her journey from complete plant novice to houseplant addict enchantingly with stories of visits to nurseries across the US as she learns about the plants she longs for and how they are grown. Before long, her conservatory fills with treasures, each with a story to tell. You come away inspired and encouraged to follow in her footsteps to create your own green patchwork of plants even if you live in the smallest apartment in the most inhospitable climate.
Paradise Under Glass is a witty and absorbing memoir about one woman's unlikely desire to build, stock, and tend a small conservatory in her suburban Maryland home. Ruth Kassinger's wonderful story of the unique way she chose to cope with the profound changes in her life-a book that will delight readers of Eat, Pray, Love and I Feel Bad About My Neck-is interwoven with the fascinating history of conservatories from the Renaissance orangeries to the glass palaces of Kew.
As an educator, I’ve experienced the power of true stories to engage readers, widen their world, spur thinking, and support content areas. I’ve learned plenty from these books, too! As an author, I’m fascinated with many aspects of the American Revolutionthat I never learned about as a student. Researching this time period has revealed much more than men at war. The revolution affected every aspect of life—a “world turned upside-down.” Today, we’re fortunate to have a range of stories that help kids understand that history is about people much like them facing the challenges of their time and place.
We all know about the Declaration of Independence and recognize at least a few of the dozens of signatures of the men who signed it. But who knew about the single female name that appears on the document?
Here’s the story of Mary Katharine Goddard, a businesswoman and newspaper publisher, who dared to break the norms of society. When the call went out for a printer to publish the treasonous Declaration, she rose to the task and went so far as to put her name on it! This story offers a fascinating peek into the life of a revolutionary woman.
A rousing picture book biography of the only woman whose name is printed on the Declaration of Independence.
Born in 1738, Mary Katharine Goddard came of age in colonial Connecticut as the burgeoning nation prepared for the American Revolution. As a businesswoman and a newspaper publisher, Goddard paved the way for influential Revolutionary media. Her remarkable accomplishments as a woman defied societal norms and set the stage for a free and open press. When the Continental Congress decreed that the Declaration of Independence be widely distributed, one person rose to the occasion and printed the document-boldly inserting her name at…
I am a professor of creative writing who knows when readers stop feeling, they stop reading. We all want to feel, to live vicariously. To experience the unimaginable. I’ve lived large. I’ve raced on the back of an ostrich, rode an elephant through the jungles of Thailand, raced catamarans in the Caribbean, and danced with the Shaka Zulu in Africa. The best books are those that feel like memories…that touch us…that make us feel.
I rarely read a book twice. I read this one three times. The romance between Ramelle and Celeste always makes me swoon and reminds me of the kind of love I want in my life.
Brown is an outstanding story-teller, and I loved all of the Southern malpropisms, traditions, and memes scattered throughout the novel. I enjoyed the romance, the mystery, and the characterization of the South, this book pushed me to visit Savannah, where her words came to life.
Perched right on the Mason-Dixon line, tiny Runnymede, Maryland, is ripe with a history almost as colorful as the women who live there—from Celeste Chalfonte, headstrong and aristocratic, who murders for principle and steals her brother’s wife, to Fannie Jump Creighton, who runs a speakeasy right in her own home when hard times come knocking. Then of course, there’re Louise and Julia, the boldly eccentric Hunsenmeir sisters. Wheezie and Juts spend their whole lives in Runnymede, cheerfully quibbling about everything from men to child-rearing to how to drive a car. But they never let small-town life keep them from chasing…
I grew up in New York City on the corner of 16th Street and 7th Avenue in an apartment on the 11th floor. I loved the city’s pace, diversity, and freedom. So, I decided to study New York Jews, to learn about them from not just from census records and institutional reports but also from interviews. After publishing my first book, I followed New York Jews as they moved to other cities, especially Miami and Los Angeles. Recently, I’ve been intrigued by what is often called street photography and the ways photographs let you see all sorts of details that potentially tell a story.
Goldstein’s and Weiner’s history of Jews of Baltimore is an unconventional account of this border city. Jews in Baltimore were definitely located in the middle between white Christians on the one hand and Blacks on the other. The book does not flinch from uncovering just what this middle ground meant, how the antisemitism that pervaded Baltimore propelled some Jews toward conservatism (including the support of slavery) and others toward progressivism (including abolition). At the same time, the book explores the rich diversity of Jewish religious life in the city that parallels Jewish participation in building important elements of Baltimore’s economy. I loved learning about a city that was new to me.
A model of Jewish community history that will enlighten anyone interested in Baltimore and its past.
Winner of the Southern Jewish Historical Society Book Prize by the Southern Jewish Historical Society; Finalist of the American Jewish Studies Book Award by the Jewish Book Council National Jewish Book Awards
In 1938, Gustav Brunn and his family fled Nazi Germany and settled in Baltimore. Brunn found a job at McCormick's Spice Company but was fired after three days when, according to family legend, the manager discovered he was Jewish. He started his own successful business using a spice mill he brought over…
I’m a Black man born in Jim Crow America to domestic servants so challenged by their circumstances that they had to place me in a kind of orphanage because they weren’t given permission to raise me in their employer’s home. I’ve known poverty, violence, racism, and law enforcement changing the rules to single me out. But I have also known the rarified success of Wall Street, my own thriving law practice, entertainment industry deals, and, of course, the privilege of a lifetime working side-by-side with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Therefore, I understand both the promise of the American Dream and the cruelty with which it’s mostly (and purposely) withheld from her citizens of color.
There is something in the structure of this true story that aligns with my fundamental understanding of life as a Black American man.
Education saved me, plain and simple. Education is the answer out of the ghetto, out of street life, out of poverty. Two Black boys named Wes Moore grow up on the same streets, get into the same kind of trouble early, and start a friendship as adults – one is a governor-elect of his home state, the other serving life without parole.
Their names appeared in the newspaper on the same day: for one, the announcement of a Rhodes Scholarship win; for the other, a manhunt in a botched robbery. Little difference between the men, but a lot in terms of where they put their focus.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “compassionate” (People), “startling” (Baltimore Sun), “moving” (Chicago Tribune) true story of two kids with the same name from the city: One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison.
In development as a feature film executive produced by Stephen Curry, who selected the book as his “Underrated” Book Club Pick with Literati
The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his.
Before I’m a scholar, author, or policy wonk, I’m a Christian who believes that God has shown us that our highest and greatest call after loving God is to love each other—and thus we are to value people’s and communities’ well-being above profit, wealth, and status. Thus, I come to sociology with a sense of mission: to use the tools of social science to understand the mechanisms creating inequitable resource access and, with that insight, to imagine and work alongside like-minded others to build economic and political systems that foster communal and individual prosperity. By studying the Black middle class, specifically, I gain traction for understanding how racial status distorts our economic and political systems.
This book brings together questions regarding political power alongside those of race and class inequality.
While the previous three books I’ve recommended are written by sociologists, Johnson is a political scientist. Using the case of Prince George’s County, the jurisdiction I examine in my research, she investigates the extent to which Black Americans’ political control of this suburban county leads to agreement on policy goals and African Americans’ ability to achieve them.
As I was crafting the questions that guided my research in Prince George’s, this book helped me to identify that fiscal capacity, the ability to generate sufficient tax revenue for high-quality public goods and services, is key to understanding whether Black Americans have the ability to maintain a high quality of life.
The first comprehensive study of African American suburban political empowerment.
The country's largest concentration of African American suburban affluence represents a unique laboratory to study the internal factors associated with African American political ascendancy and the convergence of race and class. Black Power in the Suburbs chronicles Prince George's County, Maryland, and the twenty-three year quest by African Americans to influence educational policy and become equal partners in the county's governing coalition. Johnson challenges conventional notions of a monolithic community by addressing the manner in which class cleavages among African Americans affect their representation and policy interests in suburbia. She…
