In Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865 (U Georgia Press, 2021), Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779…

What would it mean for American and African American literary studies if readers took the spirituality and travel of Black women seriously? With Spirit Deep: Recovering the Sacred in Black Women’s Travel (U Virginia Press, 2023), Tisha Brooks addresses this question by focusing on three nineteenth-century Black women writers who merged the spiritua…

Jane-Marie Collins's book Emancipatory Narratives & Enslaved Motherhood: Bahia, Brazil, 1830-1888 (Liverpool UP, 2023) examines three major currents in the historiography of Brazilian slavery: manumission, miscegenation, and creolisation. It revisits themes central to the history of slavery and race relations in Brazil, updates the research about t…

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Meet the Black Brooklynites who defined New York City's most populous borough through their search for social justice. Before it was a borough, Brooklyn was our nation's third largest city. Its free Black community attracted people from all walks of life--businesswomen, church leaders, laborers, and writers--who sought to grow their city in a radic…

How a new "woke" elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status--without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged. Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultura…

Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous - as was, according to legend, the temper that landed him in two of the South's most brutal prisons, while his immense talent twice won him pardons. But, as Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's…

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Black women undertook an energetic and unprecedented engagement with internationalism from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. In many cases, their work reflected a complex effort to merge internationalism with issues of women's rights and with feminist concerns. To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (U Illinois Press…

Original and deeply researched, The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York: A Cultural, Economic, and Demographic History, 1700-1827 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) provides a new interpretation of Dutch American slavery which challenges many of the traditional assumptions about slavery in New York. With an emphasis on demography and economics,…

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioni…

Today’s book is: Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (U Chicago Press, 2024), by Dr. Robin Bernstein, which tells the story of a teenager named William Freeman. Convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s new prison. Uniting incarcerat…

In 1920, W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP founders published The Brownies’ Book: A Monthly Magazine for Children of the Sun. A century later, The New Brownies' Book: A Love Letter to Black Families (Chronicle Books, 2023) recreates the very first publication created for Black youth in 1920 into a sensational anthology. Expanding on the mission of the…

Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, a…

Soul is one of those concepts that is often evoked, but rarely satisfactorily defined. In The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s (Duke University Press 2020), Emily J. Lordi takes on the challenge of explaining “soul,” through a book that zooms in and out between sweeping ideas about suffering and resilience in Black cultur…

All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Toby Green draws upon a range of underutilized sources to describe the evolution of West Africa over a period of four…

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor. In Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans (U Chicago Press, 2024), Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city si…

Black resistance to white supremacy is often reduced to a simple binary, between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence and Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary.” In We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, 2024), historian Kellie Carter Jackson urges us to move past this false choice, offering an unflinching examination of t…

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-discern class inequality and inegalitarian power relations can produce racially differentiated outcomes? Adaner Usmani, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard and on the editorial …

Previously ranked among the hemisphere’s poorest countries, Guyana is becoming a global leader in per capita oil production, a shift which promises to profoundly transform the nation. This sea change presents a unique opportunity to dissect both the environmental impacts of modern-world resource extraction and the obscured yet damaging ways in whic…

In Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean's Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century (Duke UP, 2023), Faith Smith engages with a period in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean often overlooked as nondescript, quiet, and embarrassingly pro-imperial within the larger narrative of Jamaican and Trinidadian nationalism. Between the 1865 Mor…

Ben Wright's Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism (LSU Press, 2020) demonstrates how religion structured the possibilities and limitations of American abolitionism during the early years of the republic. From the American Revolution through the eruption of schisms in the three largest Protestant denominati…

Dr. Langmia's book Black 'Race' and the White Supremacy Saga (Anthem Press, 2024) examines the conundrum that has haunted the Black and White ancestry for ages on what supremacy actually means. Is it Black or White supremacy? Granted, the term "White supremacy" has occupied the sociopolitical, cultural and economic discourse for ages, but what does…

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Join us for live broadcasts, GFUMC worship services at 9 am and 11 am on Sunday mornings are offered in-person and livestream.By Rev. Sherri Reynolds

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, teachers, administrators, and policymakers fashioned a system of industrial education that attempted to transform Black and Indigenous peoples and land. This form of teaching—what Bayley J. Marquez names plantation pedagogy—was built on the claim that slavery and land dispossession are fundamentall…