In The Second Battle for Africa, Erik S. McDuffie establishes the importance of the US Midwest to twentieth-century global Black history, internationalism, and radicalism. McDuffie shows how cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, as well as rural areas in the heartland, became central and enduring incubators of Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA...

In Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music, John Paul Meyers argues that these phenomena are part of what he calls “historical consciousness in popular music.” These deep relationships with the past are an important but underexamined aspect of how musicians and listeners engage with this key cultural form.

McKinnis asks, ‘What does it mean to imagine Blackness?’ Drawing on ten years of archival research and interviews with current members of the church, The Black Coptic Church offers a look at a group that insisted on its own understanding of its divine Blackness. In the process, it provides a more complex look at the diverse world of Black religious life in North America, particularly within non-...

This book unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Bobby J. Smith II re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to sociopolitical and economic conditions.

For Land and Liberty is a comparative study of the history and contemporary circumstances concerning Brazil's quilombos (African-descent rural communities) and their inhabitants, the quilombolas.

Two articles authored by Dr. Bobby J. Smith II are featured in the 7th Edition of An Annotated Bibliography on Structural Racism Present in the U.S. Food System (January 2020) by the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems.

Dr. Jenkins' book "explores the forces that keep black people vulnerable even amid economically privileged lives. With today’s repeated reminders of the vulnerability of African Americans to state and extralegal violence, Black Bourgeois considers the contradiction of privileged, presumably protected black bodies that remain racially vulnerable. Examining disruptions around race and...

In an article published in the journal Jazz Perspectives, John Paul Meyers analyzes the performances of Miles Davis at a key moment in the 1960s: when Davis was straddling the post-bop, free jazz, and fusion styles.

In Private Lives, Proper Relations, Candice M. Jenkins addresses the question of why contemporary African American literature—particularly that produced by black women—is continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety.