Trending this Year: 2023

Looking for your next read? Check out this list of the most-viewed books from our website this year!

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#1

Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South by Barbara Krauthamer

“In this compelling study Krauthamer successfully demonstrates black Americans’ struggle for their liberation and subsequent rights as citizens.” —Southern Historian

“An important overview of the lives of African and African American peoples who played relevant, active roles in United States affairs, adeptly navigated tribal and United States federal bureaucracy, and effectively articulated their views on race and identity.” —Ohio Valley History

#2

From Here to Equality, Second Edition: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century by William A. Darity Jr. & A. Kirsten Mullen

2021 Lillian Smith Book Award
2021 Association for the Study of African American Life and History Book Prize
2020 Ragan Old North State Award for Nonfiction, North Carolina Literary and Historical Association
2021 Best Book Awards in Social Change Category, American Book Fest
2023 Outstanding Book Award, Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility, American Sociological Association

“Simply put: The best historical, conceptual, and empirical case for reparations for Black Americans.”—Ibram X. Kendi

#3

I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar ibn Said’s America by Mbaye Lo & Carl W. Ernst

“Drawing on scrupulous close readings of Said’s work, Lo and Ernst make a worthy contribution to the scholarship on slavery in America and testify to the importance of evidence left behind by enslaved people themselves. This edifies.”—Publishers Weekly

#4

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Finalist, 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History
2019 National Book Award Finalist
2020 Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians
2020 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award, Organization of American Historians
2020 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians
2020 Pauli Murray Book Prize, African American Intellectual History Society
A 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

“Details bungling mismanagement, gross corruption, distorted incentives, civil rights regulations that went unheeded and unenforced — what Taylor calls a system of “predatory inclusion” that was distinct yet not entirely free from the racist system of exclusion that preceded it.” —The New York Times

#5

White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea Butler

A 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

“Show[s] how evangelicals’ contemporary embrace of right-wing politics is rooted in its centuries-long problem with race. This scathing takedown of evangelicalism’s ‘racism problem’ will challenge evangelicals to confront and reject racism within church communities.”—Publishers Weekly

“A concise history of the racism that structures white evangelical Christianity in America. . . . [The] clear and forceful synthesis provides a useful entry point for evangelicals and non-evangelicals alike seeking to learn the history and contemporary reality of white evangelical political power in the United States.”—Library Journal

#6

Black Marxism, Revised and Updated Third Edition: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric J. Robinson with a foreword by Robin D. G. Kelle and preface by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard & Damien Sojoyner

“A towering achievement. There is simply nothing like it in the history of black radical thought.”—Cornel West, Monthly Review

“Black Marxism has become an unlikely handbook for a new generation of radicals and activists.”—London Review of Books

#7

Vodou En Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States by Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha

“Nwokocha’s superb work offers a much-needed corrective to previous scholarship that presents Vodou as a religion defined by poverty and precarity. Her skillful observations and thoughtful descriptions of the thoughts, desires, and delights of deities and devotees reveal the rich thought-world of Vodou as it is practiced today.” —Dianne M. Stewart, Emory University

“This exciting and important book breaks new conceptual ground by linking one’s manner of dress and bodily adornment to the formation of religious belief and community. Nwokocha’s idea of ‘spiritual vogue’ centers on Vodou and other African-derived spiritual systems, but the implications of her work extend broadly into fields such as Africana studies, religious studies, gender and sexuality studies, and fashion studies.”—Judith Casselberry, Bowdoin College

#8

A New History of the American South edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Laura F. Edwards,Jon F. Sensbach

“An important book for anyone interested in Southern history. . . . The book’s contributors brilliantly integrate the contents of their separate chapters, each on a distinct era, into a taut, analytical narrative. Throughout, their voices and styles cohere in striking fashion. . . . To learn of the South’s past as it is viewed today by leading historians, this is the book to read.”—Kirkus Reviews(STARRED review)

“A multifaceted narrative of the Southern United States, from histories of the African diaspora and Indigenous Americans to cultural, economic and environmental trends.”—New York Times Book Review

#9

Hammer and Hoe, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression by Robin D. G. Kelley

Elliott Rudwick Prize, Organization of American Historians
Outstanding Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America
Francis Butler Simkins Award, Southern Historical Association

“A fascinating and indispensable contribution to the history of American radicalism and to black history.”—Nation

#10

Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors by Carolyn Finney

“Makes a clear case for the dominant culture’s habitual (though, sometimes unwitting) rejection of African Americans.”—Library Journal, starred review

“Weaving scholarly analysis with interviews of leading black environmentalists and ordinary Americans, Finney traces the environmental legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, which mapped the wilderness as a terrain of extreme terror and struggle for generations of blacks—as well as a place of refuge.”—Boston Globe