Content Notes
This is meant to be an introduction to the historiography of major themes, events, and periods in the history of race & racism in the United States. It is not intended to be a comprehensive list - that is well beyond the scope of what we're trying to do and what we're suited to do. We have tried to include as many eBooks as possible in order to offer multiple options for accessing these books. If you'd like to suggest an addition to this list, please contact Alex Boucher at taboucher@ua.edu.
Slavery in The United States
Many Thousands Gone by Call Number: E446 .B49 1998ISBN: 9780674002111Publication Date: 2000-03-01Availability: Print Book & eBook
Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution.
Inhuman Bondage by Call Number: E441 .D2495 2006ISBN: 9780195339444Publication Date: 2008-04-18Availability: Print Book
The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slave holding planters, the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, the daily life of ordinary slaves, the highly destructive slave trade, the sexual exploitation of slaves, the emergence of an African-American culture, and much more.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Call Number: E449 .D746 2018ISBN: 9781451686036Publication Date: 2013-08-01Availability: Print & eBook
American Slavery: a Very Short Introduction by Call Number: E441 .W723 2014ISBN: 9780199922680Publication Date: 2014-11-03Availability: Print Book
This Very Short Introduction begins with the Portuguese capture of Africans in the 1400s and traces the development of American slavery until its abolition following the Civil War.
Soul by Soul by ISBN: 9780674005396Publication Date: 2001-03-02Availability: eBook
Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade.
Generations of Captivity by ISBN: 9780674010611Publication Date: 2003-03-25Availability: Print & eBook
Ira Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its fiery demise nearly three hundred years later.
Slave Country by ISBN: 9780674024168Publication Date: 2007-04-30Availability: Print & eBook
Slave Country tells the tragic story of the expansion of slavery in the new United States.
Abolitionism & Emancipation
The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition by Call Number: E441 .S56 2016ISBN: 9780300181371Publication Date: 2016-02-23Availability: Print & eBook
A groundbreaking history of abolition that recovers the largely forgotten role of African Americans in the long march toward emancipation from the American Revolution through the Civil War.
The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States by Call Number: E441 .B48 2015ISBN: 9780674286085Publication Date: 2015-09-15Availability: Print & eBook
In The Long Emancipation, Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery's demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process--a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women.
Abolitionism: A Very Short Introduction by ISBN: 9780190213220Publication Date: 2018-08-02Availability: eBook
From early slave rebels to radical reformers of the Civil War era and beyond, the struggle to end slavery was a diverse, dynamic, and ramifying social movement. In this succinct narrative, Richard S. Newman examines the key people, themes, and ideas that animated abolitionism in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries in the United States and internationally.
The Civil War & Its Legacy
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by Call Number: E173 .O94ISBN: 9780195038637Publication Date: 1988-02-25Availability: Print & eBook
A comprehensive single-volume history of the American Civil War.
Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War by Call Number: E459 .D4 2001ISBN: 9780813939438Publication Date: 2017-01-12Availability: Print & eBook
Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis.
What This Cruel War Was Over: soldiers, slavery, and the Civil War by Call Number: E607 .M32 2007ISBN: 9780307264824Publication Date: 2007-04-03Availability: Print
A vivid, unprecedented account of why Union and Confederate soldiers identified slavery as the root of the war, how the conflict changed troops’ ideas about slavery, and what those changing ideas meant for the war and the nation
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by Call Number: E468.9 .B58 2001ISBN: 9780674003323Publication Date: 2001-02-09Availability: Print & eBook
No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.
How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America by ISBN: 9780190900908Publication Date: 2020-04-01Availability: eBook
How the South Won the Civil War traces the story of the American paradox, the competing claims of equality and white domination that were woven into the nation's fabric from the beginning.
Confederate Statues and Memorialization by Call Number: E645 .C697 2019ISBN: 9780820355559Publication Date: 2019-04-01Availability: Print & eBook
This first book in UGA Press's History in the Headlines series offers a rich discussion between four leading scholars who have studied the history of Confederate memory and memorialization. Through this dialogue, we see how historians explore contentious topics and provide historical context for students and the broader public. Confederate Statues and Memorialization artfully engages the past and its influence on present racial and social tensions in an accessible format for students and interested general readers.
Reconstruction
Reconstruction: America's unfinished revolution, 1863-1877 by Call Number: E668 .F66 2014ISBN: 9780062354518Publication Date: 2014-12-02Availability: Print
Reconstruction chronicles the way in which Americans--black and white--responded to the unprecedented changes unleashed by the war and the end of slavery.
Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by ISBN: 0684856573Publication Date: 1999-12-01Availability: Print
The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time. This pioneering work was the first full-length study of the role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War, when the slaves had been freed and the attempt was made to reconstruct American society.
A Nation under Our Feet: black political struggles in the rural South from slavery to the great migration by ISBN: 9780674017658Publication Date: 2005-04-30Availability: eBook
This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people--an embryonic black nation.
West from Appomattox: the reconstruction of America after the Civil War by Call Number: E661 .R53 2007ISBN: 9780300110524Publication Date: 2007-03-28Availability: Print
A sweeping history of the United States from the era of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, this engaging book stretches the boundaries of our understanding of Reconstruction.
The Republic for Which It Stands: the United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 by Call Number: E668 .W58 2017ISBN: 9780199735815Publication Date: 2017-09-01Availability: Print & eBook
The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America.
The Jim Crow Era
Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans tell about life in the segregated south by Call Number: E185.61 .R4 2001ISBN: 1565846974Publication Date: 2001-11-01Availability: Print & eBook
In vivid, compelling accounts, men and women from all walks of life tell how their day-to-day lives were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression. At the same time, "Remembering Jim Crow" is a testament to how black Southerners fought back against the system--raising children, building churches and schools, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights.
Slavery by Another Name: the re-enslavement of Black people in America from the Civil War to World War II by Call Number: E185.2 .B545 2008ISBN: 9780385722704Publication Date: 2009-01-13Availability: Print & eBook
A Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the "Age of Neoslavery," the American period following the Emancipation Proclamation in which convicts, mostly black men, were "leased" through forced labor camps operated by state and federal governments.
Making Whiteness: the culture of segregation in the South, 1890-1940 by Call Number: F215 .H18 1998ISBN: 0679442634Publication Date: 1998-04-07Availability: Print
Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners re-established their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical separation.
Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 by Call Number: JK1929.A2 P47 2001ISBN: 9780807825938Publication Date: 2001-02-26Availability: Print & eBook
Around 1900, the southern states embarked on a series of political campaigns aimed at disfranchising large numbers of voters. By 1908, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia had succeeded in depriving virtually all African Americans, and a large number of lower-class whites, of the voting rights they had possessed since Reconstruction--rights they would not regain for over half a century.
Gender and Jim Crow : women and the politics of White supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 by ISBN: 9781469652030Publication Date: 2019-01-09Availability: eBook
This classic work helps recover the central role of black women in the political history of the Jim Crow era. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore explores the pivotal and interconnected roles played by gender and race in North Carolina politics from the period immediately preceding the disfranchisement of black men in 1900 to the time black and white women gained the vote in 1920.
The Warmth of Other Suns: the epic story of America's great migration by Call Number: E185.6 .W685 2010ISBN: 9780679444329Publication Date: 2010-09-07Availability: Print & eBook
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.
Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing by ISBN: 9780226643311Publication Date: 2019-08-02Availability: eBook
Murder in New Orleans lays bare how decades-old crimes, and the racially motivated cruelty of the official response, have baleful resonance in the age of Black Lives Matter.
Lynching & Anti-Black Violence
At the Hands of Persons Unknown: the lynching of Black America by Call Number: HV6464 .D73 2002ISBN: 0375503242Publication Date: 2002-01-08Availability: Print
The celebrated historian Philip Dray shines a clear, bright light on this dark history—its causes, perpetrators, apologists, and victims. He also tells the story of the men and women who led the long and difficult fight to expose and eradicate lynching, including Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W.E.B. Du Bois.
Lynching and Spectacle: witnessing racial violence in America, 1890-1940 by Call Number: HV6457 .W66 2009ISBN: 9780807832547Publication Date: 2009-04-30Availability: Print & eBook
Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy.
Southern Horrors: women and the politics of rape and lynching by Call Number: HV6250.4.W65 F43 2009ISBN: 9780674035621Publication Date: 2009-11-23Availability: Print
Crystal Feimster breaks new ground in her story of the racial politics of the postbellum South by focusing on the volatile issues of sexual violence.
Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, Second Edition by Call Number: E185.97.B26 A3 1970ISBN: 9780226691428Publication Date: 2020-05-13Availability: Print & eBook
Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling. Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She co-founded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement, working alongside W. E. B. Du Bois, Madam C. J. Walker, Mary Church Terrell, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony. This engaging memoir, originally published 1970, relates Wells's private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice.
Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations by Call Number: F294.A89 N439 2005ISBN: 0807829625Publication Date: 2005-09-26Availability: Print & eBook
In 1906 Atlanta, after a summer of inflammatory headlines and accusations of black-on-white sexual assaults, armed white mobs attacked African Americans, resulting in at least twenty-five black fatalities. Atlanta's black residents fought back and repeatedly defended their neighborhoods from white raids. Placing this four-day riot in a broader narrative of twentieth-century race relations in Atlanta, in the South, and in the United States, David Fort Godshalk examines the riot's origins and how memories of this cataclysmic event shaped black and white social and political life for decades to come.
Wilmington's Lie: the murderous coup of 1898 and the rise of white supremacy by ISBN: 9780802128386Publication Date: 2020-01-07Availability: Print
From Pulitzer Prize-winner David Zucchino comes a searing account of the Wilmington riot and coup of 1898, an extraordinary event unknown to most Americans.
The Burning: massacre, destruction, and the Tulsa race riot of 1921 by Call Number: F704.T92 M33 2001ISBN: 0312272839Publication Date: 2001-11-02Availability: Print
On the morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing black from white in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a black community then celebrated as one of America's most prosperous.
Behind the Mask of Chivalry: the Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan by Call Number: HS2330.K63 M225 1994ISBN: 0195098366Publication Date: 1995-07-13Availability: Print & eBook
Using an unusual and rich cache of internal Klan records from Athens, Georgia, to anchor her observations, author Nancy MacLean combines a fine-grained portrait of a local Klan world with a penetrating analysis of the second Klan's ideas and politics nationwide. No other right-wing movement has ever achieved as much power as the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and this book shows how and why it did.
Klansville, U. S. A.: the rise and fall of the civil rights-era Ku Klux Klan by Call Number: HS2330.K63 C75 2013ISBN: 9780199752027Publication Date: 2012-11-14Availability: Print
Klansville, U.S.A. is the first substantial history of the civil rights-era KKK's astounding rise and fall, focusing on the under-explored case of the United Klans of America (UKA) in North Carolina.
Steeped in the Blood of Racism: Black Power, Law and Order, and the 1970 Shootings at Jackson State College by ISBN: 9780190215378Publication Date: 2020-05-01Availability: eBook
Taking place just ten days after the killings at Kent State, the attack at Jackson State never garnered the samelevel of national attention and was chronically misunderstood as similar in cause. This book reclaims this story and situates it in the broader history of the struggle for African American freedom in the civil rights and black power eras.The book explores the essential role of white supremacy in causing the shootings and shaping the aftermath.
The Civil Rights Movement
Defying Dixie: the radical roots of civil rights, 1919-1950 by Call Number: HN79.A13 G54 2008ISBN: 9780393062441Publication Date: 2008-01-17Availability: Print
A groundbreaking history of the Southern movement for social justice that gave birth to civil rights.
Walking with the Wind: a memoir of the movement by Call Number: E840.8.L43 A3 1998ISBN: 0684810654Publication Date: 1998-06-01Availability: Print
John Lewis's life, which he tells with charm, warmth, and toughness, ranges across the battlefields of the civil rights movement -- Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham, Mississippi. It is peopled with characters, including Diane Nash, Julian Bond, and Marion Barry; Bull Connor and Bobby Kennedy; James Farmer and Jim Forman; Malcolm X and Lyndon Johnson; Shirley MacLaine and David Halberstam; Harry Belafonte and Martin Luther King, and many more.
Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama : the climactic battle of the civil rights revolution by Call Number: F334.B69 N449 2001ISBN: 9780684807478Publication Date: 2001-03-15Availability: Print
"Carry Me Home is a dramatic account of the civil rights era's climactic battle in Birmingham, as the Movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation."
In Struggle: SNCC and the Black awakening of the 1960s by ISBN: 0674447271Publication Date: 1995-04-03Availability: eBook
With its radical ideology and effective tactics, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was the cutting edge of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. This sympathetic yet evenhanded book records for the first time the complete story of SNCC's evolution, of its successes and its difficulties in the ongoing struggle to end white oppression.
Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC by Call Number: E185.96 .H24 2010ISBN: 9780252035579Publication Date: 2010-09-30Availability: Print & eBook
In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement.
Carry It On: the war on poverty and the civil rights movement in Alabama, 1964-1972 by Call Number: E185.93.A3 A74 2008ISBN: 9780820330518Publication Date: 2008-07-15Availability: Print
Carry It On is an in-depth study of how the local struggle for equality in Alabama fared in the wake of new federal laws--the Civil Rights Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, and the Voting Rights Act.
Parting the Waters: America in the King years, 1954-63 by Call Number: E185.61 .B7914 1988ISBN: 9780671460976Publication Date: 1988-11-15Availability: Print
A history of the civil rights movement that concentrates on the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Pillar of Fire: America in the King years, 1963-65 by Call Number: E185.61 .B7915 1998ISBN: 0684808196Publication Date: 1998-02-02Availability: Print
Volume two of a three volume history of the American civil rights movement, America in the King Years. This volume takes the reader from the assassination of President Kennedy and describes Martin Luther King's struggle to hold his movement together in the face of factionalism and violence.
At Canaan's Edge: America in the King years, 1965-68 by Call Number: E185.615 .B67 2006ISBN: 068485712XPublication Date: 2006-01-10Availability: Print
'At Canaan's Edge' chronicles dramatic campaigns in Mississippi and Alabama, King's tormented alliance with Lyndon Johnson, his painful break with Stokely Carmichael over black power, and persecution by Hoover's FBI.
Death Blow to Jim Crow: the National Negro Congress and the rise of militant civil rights by Call Number: E185.61 .G278 2012ISBN: 9780807835319Publication Date: 2012-02-01Availability: Print
During the Great Depression, black intellectuals, labor organizers, and artists formed the National Negro Congress (NNC) to demand a "second emancipation" in America. Over the next decade, the NNC and its offshoot, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, sought to coordinate and catalyze local antiracist activism into a national movement to undermine the Jim Crow system of racial and economic exploitation. In this pioneering study, Erik S. Gellman shows how the NNC agitated for the first-class citizenship of African Americans and all members of the working class, establishing civil rights as necessary for reinvigorating American democracy.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by ISBN: 9780345350688Publication Date: 1987-10-12Availability:Print
In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement.
Cold War Civil Rights: ace and the image of American democracy by Call Number: E185.61 .D85 2002ISBN: 9780691095134Publication Date: 2002-02-17Availability: Print & eBook
Mary Dudziak interprets postwar civil rights as a Cold War feature. She argues that the Cold War helped facilitate key social reforms, including desegregation.
Stokely: a life by Call Number: E185.97.C27 J63 2014ISBN: 9780465013630Publication Date: 2014-03-04Availability: Print
In Stokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael, using his life as a prism through which to view the transformative African American freedom struggles of the twentieth century.
Freedom Rights: new perspectives on the civil rights movement by Call Number: E185.615 .F735 2011ISBN: 9780813134482Publication Date: 2011-11-26Availability: Print
In Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement, editors Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer follow Lawson's example, bringing together the best new scholarship on the modern civil rights movement.
