February is Black History Month, and Penn Press is marking the occasion by sharing a collection of books in African American history and studies that we have released in recent years, and through the end of February we’re offering 40% off all titles in the collection, plus free shipping on orders over $40! In today’s post, we’re sharing a handful of highlights from the collection—browse the list below, and use code PENN-BHM2024 at checkout to receive your discount.
Black Elders
Frederick C. Knight
Drawing on a wide array of printed and archival sources, Frederick C. Knight offers a unique window into the individual and collective lives of African Americans, the day-to-day struggles they waged around their experiences of aging, and how they drew upon these resources to define the meaning of family, community, and freedom.
Beyond 1619
Edited by Paul J. Polgar, Marc H. Lerner and Jesse Cromwell
Beyond 1619 brings an Atlantic and hemispheric perspective to the year 1619 as a marker of American slavery’s origins and the beginnings of the Black experience in what would become the United States by situating the roots of racial slavery in a broader, comparative context.
A Brotherhood of Liberty
Dennis Patrick Halpin
Dennis Patrick Halpin argues that Baltimore is key to understanding the trajectory of civil rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A Brotherhood of Liberty traces the civil rights victories scored by black Baltimoreans that inspired activists throughout the nation and subsequent generations.
The Creole Archipelago
Tessa Murphy
By approaching the colonial Caribbean as an interconnected region, Tessa Murphy recasts small islands as the site of broader contests over Indigenous dominion, racial belonging, economic development, and colonial subjecthood.
The Enslaved and Their Enslavers
Edward Pearson
From 1670 until the Civil War, slavery was central to the economic and social order of South Carolina. To understand its evolution and the world that its enslaved people and their enslavers made, this book examines slavery in the rural low country, the city of Charleston, and the upcountry during an era of unprecedented change and upheaval.
Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope
Edited by Barbara Will
With essays that span the topics of history, politics, philosophy, religion, cultural studies, music, and aesthetics, Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope looks back to Cornel West’s 1993 bestseller Race Matters in order to engage with urgent contemporary concerns over race, racism, and racial justice in American culture.
A Home Away from Home
Tyesha Maddox
A Home Away from Home examines the significance of mutual aid societies to the Caribbean immigrant experience in the twentieth century. These societies facilitated further immigration through their networks, provided various forms of support, fostered a shared West Indian ethnic identity, and strengthened kinship networks with those back home.
City of Dispossessions
Kyle T. Mays
City of Dispossessions argues that the dispossession of Native Americans and African Americans explains the development of modern U.S. cities, including Detroit. By comparing Black and Indigenous experiences, we gain a better understanding of the histories of race relations, settler colonialism, and urban development.
A New Working Class
Jane Berger
A New Working Class traces efforts by Black public-sector workers and their unions to fight for racial and economic justice in Baltimore. Federal policy shifts imperiled their efforts. Officials justified weakening the welfare state and strengthening the carceral state by criminalizing Black residents—including government workers.
Wicked Flesh
Jessica Marie Johnson
Unearthing personal stories from the archive, Wicked Flesh shows how black women, from Senegambia in West Africa to the Caribbean to New Orleans, used intimacy and kinship to redefine freedom in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Their practices laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century.
The Philadelphia Negro
W. E. B. Du Bois
The first example of engaged sociological scholarship, and one of a major American thinker’s earliest works, with a newly updated introduction by Elijah Anderson
Undoing Slavery
Kathleen M. Brown
Undoing Slavery excavates medical and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Facing many challenges to their goal of restoring embodied self-sovereignty to the enslaved, abolitionists learned that legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.
