Books for Black History Month

Books and Scholars I like, and maybe you will too.

Today was another tough day. I woke up in a panic at 2:30am this morning and just laid there for an hour until sleep finally took me again. I wrote a few nights ago about paralysis and man have I felt it lately. Most days I come home from the office and unless I am actively working on recording a podcast, I go to my couch and just sit there. No movies, no video games. I just sit for hours in the dark. It feels like waiting for the worst to happen.

I. Am. Terrified.

And I did the same tonight, doomscrolling through social media not quite knowing to do until I saw my friend Dr. Hilary Green talking about her plans for the month. Well ok, then. I have a bit of a platform. Let’s use it to promote some really amazing people and scholarship that you might like. If you’re on Blue Sky, I’ll try to link to their accounts so you can follow them. Not all of the authors are African American (that I’m aware of) but their works on Black history are really great. These are in no order and please forgive me if forget someone I shouldn’t. I’ll try to do some more of these again during the month.

Mary Hicks- Mary has a tremendous new book out called Captive Cosmopolitans and you’ve heard me talk about it before. It’s that good. If you go to the site linked above use the code 01HATM30 for 30% off. I don’t receive anything, but you get a nice discount. This works for any book on the UNC Press website.

Judith Carney- I don’t know Dr. Carney personally but her book Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas was really important to me as I moved more and more into environmental history as a field.¹ This book was really important for me as I thought about the intellectual labor of enslaved Africans in the Americas.

Adrian Miller- Food is such an amazing way to explore history and culture and Adrian’s book, Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue does so many cool things. Is it a cookbook with history? A history with recipes? I don’t know that there is a difference. I’ve gifted this book several times.

Robin Mitchell- I am a very close with Robin; she is one of my favorite people in the world. She’s also one of the few scholars who I know that work in French history. Her book, Venus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth Century France, focuses on three women during the era to show how depictions of Black women shaped national identity after both the Haitian and French revolutions.

Edda Fields-Black- I first learned of Edda’s work during a fishing trip with historians Chris Barr and Adam Domby, neither of whom could stop raving about her. “She’s changing everything,” said Chris while catching fewer and smaller fish than me. And he was right. Edda’s latest book, Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War is a massive tome that explores deeply the connections between families and communities of South Carolina, along with a newly detailed narrative of Tubman’s famous raid.

Michael Twitty- Similar to Adrian’s book, Michael’s explores Black food traditions as a way of understanding history and culture. The cool part about The Cooking Gene is his travel all the way back to Africa and the experiences there. I actually used to assign students to make cowpea soup from one of his recipes. Results were mixed but I felt that the students took something from it.

Alright, there’s simply no way I’ll ever get to list all the books in my head, mostly because I am near exhaustion right now. There are tons of books I’d like to recommend and maybe I’ll start a thread on Blue Sky about that tomorrow. But for now, this might at least get you going.

You guys take care of yourselves out there.

Jason

1. I write at the intersections of Indigenous, environmental history, and early American history