African American Civil War

The 27th United States Colored Troops (USCT), composed largely of free black Ohio men, served in the Union army from April 1864 to September 1865 in Virginia and North Carolina. It was the first time most members of the unit had traveled so far from home. The men faced daily battles against racism and inferior treatment, training, and supplies. They suffered from the physical difficulties of military life, the horrors of warfare, and homesickness and worried about loved ones left at home without financial support.

There have been numerous books about the why, when, and where of slavery in America, but there is a dearth of material exposing what slavery was actually like. In The Great Stain, researcher Noel Rae frames firsthand accounts from former slaves, slave owners, and even African slavers. Rae exposes the commerce and culture of slavery, not only from an economic or moral standpoint but also through multitudinous perspectives within it: a young girl is beaten after being accused of stealing a piece of candy, a slave ship's surgeon recounts brutal treatment and squalid conditions.

Social statistics of 1900 indicate that material quality of life was lower for most black Americans than under slavery. Kirkpatrick Sale marshals much forgotten evidence to cast this glorious part of American history in a realistic and critical light. Emancipation, yes. But as a military measure during a cruel war of invasion? Slavery once existed throughout the western hemisphere, but almost everywhere except the United States, it ended peacefully.

Nothing but Freedom examines the aftermath of emancipation in the South and the restructuring of society by which the former slaves gained, beyond their freedom, a new relation to the land they worked on, to the men they worked for, and to the government they lived under. Taking a comparative approach, Eric Foner examines Reconstruction in the southern states against the experience of Haiti, where a violent slave revolt was followed by the establishment of an undemocratic government.

A fascinating account by an eyewitness of the formation and heroic deeds of the first black regiment in the civil war.

The story of slavery in America is not over. It lives on in how we speak to one another, in how we treat one another, in how our societies are organised. In Giving a Damn, the legal scholar Patricia Williams finds that when you begin to unpick current debates around immigration, freedom of speech, the culture wars and wall-building, beneath them lies the unexamined history of enslavement in the West. Our ability to dehumanise one another can be traced all the way from the plantation to the US president’s Twitter account.

Summer, 1851. Racial tensions in America were higher than ever. The year before, President Millard Fillmore had passed the Fugitive Slave Act to return runaway slaves to the South. In February, Congress had established the reservation system, forcing Native Americans to leave their homelands. White Americans were strengthening dominance over people of color across the continent. In Oregon City, one biracial man named Jacob Vanderpool found himself in the crosshairs of this racist discrimination.

Through oral histories and original interviews with surviving family members, Dan Goldberg brings 13 forgotten heroes away from the margins of history and into the spotlight. He reveals the opposition these men faced: the racist pseudoscience, the regular condescension, the repeated epithets, the verbal abuse, and even violence. Despite these immense challenges, the Golden Thirteen persisted—understanding the power of integration, the opportunities for black Americans if they succeeded, and the consequences if they failed.

After World War I, black Americans fervently hoped for a new epoch of peace, prosperity, and equality. Black soldiers believed their participation in the fight to make the world safe for democracy finally earned them rights they had been promised since the close of the Civil War. Instead, an unprecedented wave of anti-black riots and lynchings swept the country. From April to November of 1919, the racial unrest rolled across the South into the North and the Midwest, even to the nation's capital. Red Summer is the first narrative history about this epic encounter.

In Making the Second Ghetto, Arnold Hirsch argues that in the post-depression years Chicago was a "pioneer in developing concepts and devices" for housing segregation. Hirsch shows that the legal framework for the national urban renewal effort was forged in the heat generated by the racial struggles waged on Chicago's South Side.

Born free in 1821 to two parents who had been enslaved, William Still was drawn to anti-slavery work from a young age. Hired as a clerk at the Anti-Slavery office in Philadelphia after teaching himself to read and write, he began directly assisting enslaved people who were crossing over from the South into freedom. Andrew Diemer captures the full range and accomplishments of Still’s life, from his resistance to Fugitive Slave Laws and his relationship with John Brown before the war, to his long career fighting for citizenship rights and desegregation until the early 20th century.

Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged—feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage.

The Battle of the Crater is known as one of the Civil War's bloodiest struggles - a Union loss with combined casualties of 5,000, many of whom were members of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) under Union Brigadier General Edward Ferrero. The battle was a violent clash of forces as Confederate soldiers fought for the first time against African American soldiers.

Executive Order 9981, issued by President Harry Truman on July 26, 1948, desegregated all branches of the United States military by decree. EO 9981 is often portrayed as a heroic and unexpected move by Truman. But in reality, Truman's history-making order was the culmination of more than 150 years of legal, political, and moral struggle.

In 1862, Andrew “Andy” Jackson Smith, son of a white landowner and enslaved woman, es­caped to Union troops operating in Kentucky, made his way to the North, and volunteered for the 55th Massachusetts, one of the newly formed African American regiments. The regiment was deployed to South Carolina, and during a desperate assault on a Confederate battery, the color bearer was killed. Before the flag was lost, Smith quickly retrieved it and under heavy fire, held the colors steady while the decimated regiment withdrew.

Ersula J. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From the 1880s onward, lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted citizenship, and upheld political community.