Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchSonya Lea, "American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture" (UP of Kentucky, 2025)
Episode 540
Summer 1936: Rainey Bethea, a young Black man, is tried for the rape and murder of an elderly white woman. The all-white, all-male jury takes just fo…
9 months, 3 weeks ago
Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Episode 539
Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the O…
9 months, 3 weeks ago
W. Ralph Eubanks, "When It's Darkness on the Delta: How America's Richest Soil Became Its Poorest Land" (Beacon Press, 2026)
Episode 76
Once the powerhouse of a fledgling country’s economy, the Mississippi Delta has been consigned to a narrative of destitution. It is often faulted for…
9 months, 3 weeks ago
Robert D. Bland, "Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation" (UNC Press, 2026)
Episode 538
The promise of Reconstruction sparked a transformative era in American history as free and newly emancipated Black Americans sought to redefine their…
9 months, 3 weeks ago
Ashley Brown, "Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Episode 14
From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf caree…
9 months, 3 weeks ago
Andrew S. Curran, "Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson" (Other Press, 2026)
Episode 263
An engaging investigation of how 13 key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinkin…
9 months, 4 weeks ago
Nicholas L. Caverly, "Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Episode 1837
In this episode, Nick Caverly talks about his new book, Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Endures (Stanford UP, 2025). For decades, Detroit …
10 months ago
Trymaine Lee, "A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America" (St. Martins, 2025)
Episode 1836
A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why…
10 months ago
Brittany Michelle Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)
Episode 1835
It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in US prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of…
10 months ago
Karma F. Frierson, "Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz" (U California Press, 2025)
Episode 392
The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico.…
10 months, 1 week ago