Books in the series examine political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels. The series is motivated by a desire to encourage synthetic perspectives.
Series Editors:
Keisha N. Blain
Professor of History and Africana Studies, Brown University
Margot Canaday
Professor of History, Princeton University
Matthew Lassiter
Professor of History, University of Michigan
Stephen Pitti
Professor of History and American Studies, Yale University
Thomas J. Sugrue
Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History, New York University
Staff Editorial Contact:
Robert Lockhart, Senior Editor rlockhar@upenn.edu
Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism amid the War on Crime
Caitlin Reed Wiesner
Price: $45.00
ISBN: 9781512828269
Pub Date: September 2025
Format: Hardcover
256 Pages
In the 1970s, Black anti-rape organizers inflected Black women’s tradition of community-based caring with Black feminist condemnation of patriarchal and state violence. Between the Street and the State deepens our understanding of Black women’s anti-rape activism by attending to how their tactics shifted in response to the federal War on Crime.
Black Excellence offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post–civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition.
Wildcat of the Streets reveals how the “community policing” approach of Mayor Coleman Young (1974–1993) transformed Detroit into a crucial site of experimentation in policing while continuing to subject many Black Detroiters, especially young people, to police brutality and repression.
Cracked Foundations reveals that the postwar suburban boom was built on debt and speculation. Historian Michael R. Glass shows how home mortgages and municipal bonds made suburban life increasingly precarious and insecure, and how they established inequalities that have persisted to this day.
The Silver Women argues that Black West Indian women made the construction of the Panama Canal possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. The book links this labor to the histories of U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women’s own survival.
Strange Bedfellows recounts the unlikely ways in which the efforts of feminists and divorced men's activists dovetailed with the activity of lawmakers, judges, welfare activists, immigrant spouses, the LGBTQ community, the Reagan coalition, and other Americans, to redefine family and marriage without relying on traditional gender norms.
Chicago, Ethiopianism, and the Black Apocalyptic Imagination
Kai Parker
Price: $49.95
ISBN: 9781512827521
Pub Date: May 2025
Format: Hardcover
288 Pages
City of Black Souls uncovers the history of how, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Black Protestants in Chicago created a transnational religious movement, known as Ethiopianism, that connected the Black struggle for freedom in the United States to the global Black fight against Western imperialism.
In his narrative history of black Republicans in the twentieth century, Joshua Farrington reevaluates the relationship between black politicians, activists, and voters and the Republican Party, challenging the assumption that African Americans abandoned the "Party of Lincoln" after 1936.
Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program
Verónica Martínez-Matsuda
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 9781512826920
Pub Date: October 2024
Format: Paperback
376 Pages
Migrant Citizenship examines the Farm Security Administration's Migratory Labor Camp Program and its impact on diverse farmworker families across the United States. Verónica Martínez-Matsuda reveals how these camps operated beyond their economic function, helping migrants secure their full political and social participation as citizens.
Far-Right Vanguard chronicles the history of the ultraconservative movement, its national network, its influence on Republican Party politics, and its centrality to America's rightward turn during the second half of the twentieth century.
