Toby Green. The Heretic of Cacheu: Struggles Over Life in a 17th Century West African Port. Penguin/Allen Lane, 2025.
“The Herectic of Cacheu is an extraordinary act of historical recovery. It is the story of a seventeenth-century West African woman, but also of the shifting, sophisticated world in which she lived – its beliefs, values and people.”
Martha S. Jones. The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir. Basic Books, 2025.
“Journeying across centuries, from rural Kentucky and small-town North Carolina to New York City and its suburbs, The Trouble of Color is a lyrical, deeply felt meditation on the most fundamental matters of identity, belonging, and family.”
Marlene L. Daut. The First and the Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe. Penguin/Knopf, 2025.
“The essential biography of the controversial rebel, traitor, and only king of Haiti. Henry Christophe is one of the most richly complex figures in the history of the Americas, and was, in his time, popular and famous the world over.”
Julia Gaffield. I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom. Yale University Press, 2025.
“A moving and humane portrait of the abolitionist revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who led Haiti’s fight for independence from French colonial rule.”
Roquinaldo Ferreira. Worlds of Unfreedom: West Central Africa in the Era of Global Abolition. Princeton University Press, 2025.
“With Worlds of Unfreedom, Ferreira shows how multiple actors, including Africans, built anti–slave trade politics from the margins. His nuanced, Africa-centered perspective on abolition highlights the resilience and contributions of enslaved Africans in shaping the course of history.”
James H. Sweet. Mutiny on the Black Prince: Slavery, Piracy, and the Limits of Liberty in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. Oxford University Press, 2025.
“The dramatic story of a mutiny aboard an eighteenth-century British ship and how its owners effectively rallied the power of the British Crown to protect their investment and expand their wealth and political power across multiple generations.”
Marcus Rediker. Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea. Penguin/Viking, 2025.
“A definitive, sweeping account of the Underground Railroad’s long-overlooked maritime origins, from a pre-eminent scholar of Atlantic history and the award-winning author of The Slave Ship.”
Chloe Ireton. Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
“Ireton explores how Africans and their descendants reckoned with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people and the varied meanings of freedom across legal jurisdictions. Their intellectual labor reimagined the epistemic worlds of slavery and freedom in the early modern Atlantic.”
Calvin Schermerhorn. The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made. Yale University Press, 2025.
“Historian Calvin Schermerhorn traces four hundred years of Black dispossession and decapitalization—what Frederick Douglass called plunder—through the stories of families who have strived to earn and keep the fruits of their toils. Their struggles reveal that the ever-evolving strategies to strip Black income and wealth have been critical to sustaining a structure of racialized disadvantage. These accounts also tell of the quiet heroism of those who worked to overcome obstacles and defy the plunder.”
Natanya Duncan. An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. University of North Carolina Press, 2025.
“The book demonstrates how UNIA women orchestrated and activated the organization from the bottom up while influencing and informing men and each other. By focusing on how women of the UNIA created an activist framework, Duncan reveals a model of organizing that has endured into the present day.”
Hilary Green. Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War. Fordham University Press, 2025.
“Unforgettable Sacrifice brings to light the untold stories of ordinary African Americans who took extraordinary steps in remembrance and resistance. By refusing to accept diluted narratives and lies, they have ensured the legacy of the Civil War includes the end of slavery, the valor of Black soldiers and civilians, and the ongoing struggle for democracy and full citizenship.”