Donald L. Miller, "Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy" (Simon and Schuster, 2019)

New Books in the American South

#Books #Arts #History #Marshall Poe

1:14:43

Artificial intelligence is evolving at an unprecedented pace—what does that mean for the future of technology, venture capital, business, and even our understanding of ourselves? Award-winning journalist and writer Anil Ananthaswamy joins us for our latest episode to discuss his latest book Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI . Anil helps us explore the journey and many breakthroughs that have propelled machine learning from simple perceptrons to the sophisticated algorithms shaping today’s AI revolution, powering GPT and other models. The discussion aims to demystify some of the underlying mathematical concepts that power modern machine learning, to help everyone grasp this technology impacting our lives–even if your last math class was in high school. Anil walks us through the power of scaling laws, the shift from training to inference optimization, and the debate among AI’s pioneers about the road to AGI—should we be concerned, or are we still missing key pieces of the puzzle? The conversation also delves into AI’s philosophical implications—could understanding how machines learn help us better understand ourselves? And what challenges remain before AI systems can truly operate with agency? If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Sign up for our newsletter at techsurgepodcast.com for exclusive insights and updates on upcoming TechSurge Live Summits. Links: Read Why Machines Learn, Anil’s latest book on the math behind AI https://www.amazon.com/Why-Machines-Learn-Elegant-Behind/dp/0593185749 Learn more about Anil Ananthaswamy’s work and writing https://anilananthaswamy.com/ Watch Anil Ananthaswamy’s TED Talk on AI and intelligence https://www.ted.com/speakers/anil_ananthaswamy Discover the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship that shaped Anil’s AI research https://ksj.mit.edu/ Understand the Perceptron, the foundation of neural networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron Read about the Perceptron Convergence Theorem and its significance https://www.nature.com/articles/323533a0…

acum un an 1:27:45

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In Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Donald L. Miller explains in great detail how Grant ultimately succeeded in taking the city and turning the tide of the war in favor of the Union. Miller begins his tale with events in Cairo and leads the reader through all the important events that lead to success at Vicksburg. He also discusses Grant’s background, personal characteristics, and the influential people surrounding General Grant during this crucial time.

Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Emeritus Professor of History at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Miller’s work includes books on World War II, the war in the Pacific, America’s air war against Germany, studies of Chicago and Jazz Age Manhattan.

Jessica Moloughney is a graduate student in history and library science at Queens College in New York

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474 episoade

Donald L. Miller, "Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy" (Simon and Schuster, 2019)

New Books in the American South

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Jessica Moloughney is a graduate student in history and library science at Queens College in New York

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474 episoade

#Books #Arts #History #Marshall Poe

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1
"Steadfast Democrats" Five Years Later: A Conversation with Chryl N. Laird 1:04:26

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Today I’m speaking with Chryl Laird, Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. We are discussing her co-authored book with Ismail White, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior . Published in 2020, this book remains highly relevant for understanding American political behavior. While Trump did make significant gains among black voters in 2024, particularly male voters, African American voters still overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party. Chryl has appeared on the NBN in the past, so while we will discuss the book, we will also discuss it in the context of today. Chryl Laird is Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

1
Andrew C. Isenberg, "The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790-1850" (UNC Press, 2025) 1:07:40

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Most US history textbooks contain a familiar map: shaded colors stretch across North America, clearly and neatly demarcating the extent of US expansion from 1776 thru the late nineteenth century. In The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limites of Manifest Destiny (UNC Press, 2025), University of Kansas distinguished historian Andrew Isenberg asks us to rethink the clean lines and simple borders of the North American past. By examing the stories of escaped enslaved people, Christian missionaries, government vaccination campaigns, anti-slavery schemes, and even well worn historical events like Lewis and Clark and the Lousiana Purchase, Isenberg shows that American power at its borders fell far short of expectations in Washington, and often doesn't match up to historical interpretations in our present day. Rather, American hegemony in the borderlands was contingent, weak, and anything but assured, until well into the nineteenth century. Rather than Manifest Destiny, Isenberg argues that American expansion both west and south should be viewed as one of just many possible outcomes of the boistrous mess that was early North American politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

1
Jeffrey Thomas Perry, "Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022) 45:24

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Most Americans today would not think of their local church as a site for arbitration and would probably be hesitant to bring their property disputes, moral failings, or personal squabbles to their kin and neighbors for judgment. But from the Revolutionary Era through the mid-nineteenth century, many Protestants imbued local churches with immense authority. Through their ritual practice of discipline, churches insisted that brethren refrain from suing each other before "infidels" at local courts and claimed jurisdiction over a range of disputes: not only moral issues such as swearing, drunkenness, and adultery but also matters more typically considered to be under the purview of common law and courts of equity, including disputes over trespass, land, probate, slave warranty, and theft. In Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022), Jeffrey Thomas Perry explores the ways that ordinary Americans--Black and white, enslaved and free--understood and created law in their local communities, uncovering a vibrant marketplace of authority in which church meetinghouses played a central role in maintaining their neighborhoods' social peace. Churches were once prominent sites for the creation of local law and in this period were a primary arena in which civil and religious authority collided and shaped one another. When church discipline failed, the wronged parties often pushed back, and their responses highlight the various forces that ultimately hindered that venue's ability to effectively arbitrate disputes between members. Relying primarily on a deep reading of church records and civil case files, Perry examines how legal transformations, an expanding market economy, and religious controversy led churchgoers to reimagine their congregations' authority. By the 1830s, unable to resolve doctrinal quibbles within the fellowship, church factions turned to state courts to secure control over their meetinghouses, often demanding that judges wade into messy ecclesiastical disputes. Tracking changes in disciplinary rigor in Kentucky Baptist churches from that state's frontier period through 1845, and looking beyond statutes and court decrees, Law in American Meetinghouses is a fresh take on church-state relations. Ultimately, it highlights an oft-forgotten way that Americans subtly repositioned religious institutions alongside state authority. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

1
Benjamin Heber Johnson, "Texas: An American History" (Yale UP, 2025) 1:10:21

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There's more to Texas than hats, oil, and BBQ, writes Benjamin Johnson in his sweeping new synthesis, Texas: An American History (Yale UP: 2025) - though, those all matter too. The state's reach has traveled globally, Johnson argues, influencing everything from how people around the world eat, to how they pray, to the music they listen to. In his new book, Johnson describes the long history of the Lone Star State, from its thousands of years of Indigenous habitation up through the present day. Along the way, he makes some surprising detours, including explaining how Indigenous Texas was anything but a backwater to Mesoamerica, and demonstrating the long progressive legacy in a state known today for its ardent conservatism. Texas is a book as big as its topic, trekking through centuries of history via noteworthy anecdotes which provide a window into a place that defies stereotypes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

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The Soundworld of Harriet Tubman 45:15

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Just in time for Black History Month, we share an episode we’ve been excitedly working on for a number of months now. Ethnomusicologist Maya Cunningham brings us “The Sound World of Harriet Tubman.” Maya Cunningham is an activist and jazz singer currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in Afro-American studies with a concentration in ethnomusicology. We first came across Maya’s work last year as part of The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project , an online initiative from Ms. magazine honoring the 200th anniversary of Harriet Tubman’s birth in 1822. It’s a remarkable package that adds many dimensions of understanding of the underground railroad conductor and feminist icon: Her experience of disability due to a blow to the head by a white overseer; her creation of a home for the aged; her love of the natural world; and much more. And to us, the richest of these essays was Maya’s the “Sound World of Harriet Tubman,” which used field recordings, historical research, and ethnomusicological research to explore the roles of sound and music, and voice in Tubman’s life and leadership. The piece included a Spotify playlist so you could listen as you read. Today, we’re thrilled to bring you what we hope will be an even more immersive experience: Maya Cunningham reading her essay, and thanks to the editing and mixing skills of Phantom Power producer Ravi Krishnaswami , her field recordings and playlist selections are mixed into the story. And just a quick note, you’re going to hear about the American Christian revival known as the Second Great Awakening, which stirred both Black and white people from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s. You’ll also hear about the Invisible Church, where enslaved African Americans were able to worship secretly and autonomously and through the singing of folk spirituals, which differed greatly from white religious music at the time, but would go on to influence not only gospel music but pretty much every form of popular music we know today. If you want to learn more about this history, a great place to start is a book edited by two professors Mack studied with at Indiana University, Drs. Mellonee V. Burnim and Portia K. Maultsby. It’s called African American Music: An Introduction . And today, we share our Patrons-only segment, “What’s Good,” in our main feed. Maya will recommend something good to read, listen to, and do. Today’s musical selections and soundscapes are by Maya Cunningham . The show was mixed and edited by Ravi Krishnaswami. The Harriet Tubman image was created by Maddie Haynes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

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The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn 1:12:17

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Our book is: The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) by award-winning historian Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers. Dr. Myers has recovered the riveting, troubling, and complicated story of Julia Ann Chinn (ca. 1796–1833), the enslaved wife of Richard Mentor Johnson. Johnson was the owner of Blue Spring Farm, a veteran of the War of 1812, and the US vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson never freed Chinn, but during his frequent absences from his estate, he delegated to her the management of his property, including Choctaw Academy, a boarding school for Indigenous men and boys on the grounds of the estate. This meant that Chinn, although enslaved herself, oversaw Blue Spring's slave labor force and had substantial control over economic, social, financial, and personal affairs within the couple's world. Chinn's relationship with Johnson was unlikely to have been consensual since she was never manumitted. What makes Chinn's life exceptional is the power that Johnson invested in her, the opportunities the couple's relationship afforded her and her daughters, and their community's tacit acceptance of the family—up to a point. When the family left their farm, they faced steep limits: pews at the rear of the church, burial in separate graveyards, exclusion from town dances, and more. Johnson’s relationship with Chinn ruined his political career but as Dr. Myers compellingly demonstrates, it wasn't interracial sex that led to his downfall but his refusal to keep it—and Julia Chinn—behind closed doors. Our guest is: Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, who is the Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of History and gender studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston , and The Vice President's Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn . Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler , who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Listeners may enjoy this playlist: Never Caught The Story of President Lincoln, from No Way They Were Gay We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance Running From Bondage How Girls Achieve Remembering Lucille Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

1
Hiroshi Motomura, "Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair, Realistic, and Sustainable Immigration Policy" (Oxford UP, 2024) 1:08:09

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Immigration is now a polarizing issue across most advanced democracies. But too much that is written about immigration fails to appreciate the complex responses to the phenomenon. Too many observers assume imaginary consensus, avoid basic questions, or disregard the larger context for human migration. In Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2025), Hiroshi Motomura offers a complex and fair-minded account of immigration, its root causes, and the varying responses to it. Taking stock of the issue's complexity, while giving credence to the opinions of immigration critics, he tackles a series of important questions that, when answered, will move us closer to a more realistic and sustainable immigration policy. Motomura begins by affirming a basic concept—national borders—and asks when they might be ethical borders, fostering fairness but also responding realistically to migration patterns and to the political forces that migration generates. In a nation with ethical borders, who should be let in or kept out? How should people forced to migrate be treated? Should newcomers be admitted temporarily or permanently? How should those with lawful immigration status be treated? What is the best role for enforcement in immigration policy? To what extent does the arrival of newcomers hurt long-time residents? What are the "root causes" of immigration and how can we address them? Realistic about the desire of most citizens for national borders, this book is an indispensable guide for moving toward ethical borders and better immigration policy. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

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Anthony E. Kaye, "Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History" (FSG, 2024) 53:04

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In August 1831, a group of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, rose up to fight for their freedom. They attacked the plantations on which their enslavers lived and attempted to march on the county seat of Jerusalem, from which they planned to launch an uprising across the South. After the rebellion was suppressed, well over a hundred people, Black and white, lay dead or were hanged. As news of the revolt spread, it became apparent that it was the idea of a single man: Nat Turner. An enslaved preacher, he was as enigmatic as he was brilliant. He was also something more—a prophet, one who claimed to have received visions from the Spirit urging him to act. Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History (FSG, 2024) is the fullest recounting to date of Turner’s uprising, and the first that refuses to tame or overlook his divine visions. Instead, it takes those visions seriously, tracing their emergence from the world of nineteenth-century Methodism, with its revivals, camp meetings, interracial churches, and Black preachers. The rebellion and its aftermath would hasten the end of this world, as Southern states further restricted the personal freedoms of the enslaved, even as the ongoing threat of revolt shaped the country’s politics. With this work of narrative history, the late historian Anthony E. Kaye and his collaborator Gregory P. Downs have given us a new understanding of one of the nineteenth century's most decisive events. Nat Turner, Black Prophet was named a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year and one of Literary Hub 's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

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Derek W. Black, "Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy" (Yale UP, 2025) 41:58

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Few have ever valued literacy as much as the enslaved Black people of the American South. For them, it was more than a means to a better life; it was a gateway to freedom and, in some instances, a tool for inspiring revolt. And few governments tried harder to suppress literacy than did those in the South. Everyone understood that knowledge was power: power to keep a person enslaved in mind and body, power to resist oppression. In the decades before the Civil War, Southern governments drove Black literacy underground, but it was too precious to be entirely stamped out. Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy (Yale UP, 2025) describes the violent lengths to which southern leaders went to repress Black literacy and the extraordinary courage it took Black people to resist. Derek W. Black shows how, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of Reconstruction, literacy evolved from a subversive gateway to freedom to a public program to extend citizenship and build democratic institutions—and how, once Reconstruction was abandoned, opposition to educating Black children depressed education throughout the South for Black and white students alike. He also reveals the deep imprint those events had on education and how this legacy is resurfacing today. Omari Averette-Phillips is a PhD student in the History department at UC Davis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

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Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, "America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) 44:09

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As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) follows this ubiquitous but largely overlooked institution to reveal how, across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, price became an accepted expression of value. From the earliest days of colonial conquest, auctions put Native land and human beings up for bidding alongside material goods, normalizing new economic practices that turned social relations into economic calculations and eventually became recognizable as nineteenth-century American capitalism. Starting in the eighteenth century, neighbors collectively turned speculative value into economic “facts” in the form of concrete prices for specific items, thereby establishing ideas about fair exchange in their communities. This consensus soon fractured: during the Revolutionary War, state governments auctioned loyalist property, weaponizing local group participation in pricing and distribution to punish political enemies. By the early nineteenth century, suspicion that auction outcomes were determined by manipulative auctioneers prompted politicians and satirists to police the boundaries of what counted as economic exchange and for whose benefit the economy operated. Women at auctions—as commodities, bidders, or beneficiaries—became a focal point for gendering economic value itself. By the 1830s, as abolitionists attacked the public sale of enslaved men, women, and children, auctions had enshrined a set of economic ideas—that any entity could be coded as property and priced through competition—that have become commonsense understandings all too seldom challenged. In contrast to histories focused on banks, currencies, or plantations, America Under the Hammer highlights an institution that integrated market, community, and household in ways that put gender, race, and social bonds at the center of ideas about economic worth. Women and men, enslaved and free, are active participants in this story rather than bystanders, and their labor, judgments, and bodies define the resulting contours of the American economy. Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America , also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

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Leonne M. Hudson, "Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln" (Southern Illinois UP, 2024) 1:15:34

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On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth carried out the first presidential assassination in United States history. The euphoria resulting from General Lee's surrender evaporated at the news of Abraham Lincoln's murder. The nation--excepting many white Southerners--found itself consumed with grief, and no group mourned Lincoln more deeply than people of color. African Americans did not speak with a monolithic voice on social or political issues, but even Lincoln's Black contemporaries who may not have approved of him while he was alive mourned his death, understanding its implications for their future. Beginning with the assassination itself and chronicling Lincoln's three-week-long national funeral, historian Leonne M. Hudson captures the profound sadness of Black Americans as they mourned the crafter of the Emancipation Proclamation and the man they thought of as their earthly Moses, father, friend, and benefactor. Hudson continues the narrative by detailing the postwar efforts of African Americans to gain citizenship and voting rights. Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Southern Illinois UP, 2024) includes the tributes of prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Elizabeth Keckley, who raised their voices to honor Lincoln, as well as formal expressions of grief by institutions and organizations such as the United States Colored Troops. In a triumph of research, Hudson also features the voices of lesser-known Black people who mourned Lincoln across the country, showing that the outpouring of individual and collective grief helped set the stage for his enduring glorification. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

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Greg Childs on Seditious Conspiracy (EF, JP) 34:39

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What a difference four years makes. Back in February 2021, still struggling to understand what had just happened at the Capitol, John and Elizabeth spoke with Brandeis historian Greg Childs . He is an expert in Latin American political movements and public space; his Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil is imminently forthcoming from Cambridge UP. Greg's historical and hemispheric perspective helped bring out the differences between calling an event “sedition,” “seditious conspiracy” and “insurrection,” the new “Lost Cause” that many of those attacking the Capitol seem to hold on to and the particularities of Whiteness in the United States, as compared to elsewhere in the Americas. Greg even proposes a new word for what happened January 6th, 2021: counterinsurgency . Mentioned in this episode: Legitimation Crisis (1974), Jurgen Habermas On Revolution (1963), Hannah Arendt The Machiavellian Moment (1975), J. G. A. Pocock Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004), Stephanie Camp Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834 (1998), Charles Tilly The Possessive Investment of Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (orig. 1998) 20th anniversary edition, George Lipsitz Listen and Read . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

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Andrew Gomez, "Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945" (U Texas Press, 2024) 46:17

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How Black and white Cubans navigated issues of race, politics, and identity during the post-Civil War and early Jim Crow eras in South Florida. On July 4, 1876, during the centennial celebration of US independence, the city of Key West was different from other cities. In some of post–Civil War Florida, Black residents were hindered from participating in 4th of July festivities, but Key West's celebration, “led by a Cuban revolutionary mayor working in concert with a city council composed of Afro-Bahamians, Cubans, African Americans, and Anglos,” represented a profound exercise in interracial democracy amid the Radical Reconstruction era. Constructing Cuban America: Race and Identity in Florida's Caribbean South, 1868–1945 (U Texas Press, 2024) examines the first Cuban American communities in South Florida—Key West and Tampa—and how race played a central role in shaping the experiences of white and Black Cubans. Andrew Gomez argues that factors such as the Cuban independence movement and Radical Reconstruction produced interracial communities of Cubans that worked alongside African Americans and Afro-Bahamians in Florida, yielding several successes in interracial democratic representation, even as they continued to wrestle with elements of racial separatism within the Cuban community. But the conclusion of the Cuban War of Independence and early Jim Crow laws led to a fracture in the Cuban-American community. In the process, both Black and white Cubans posited distinct visions of Cuban-American identity. Andrew Gomez is an associate professor of history at the University of Puget Sound. Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

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Jennie Lightweis-Goff, "Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) 58:51

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Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election year—centuries or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities —similarly polyglot and cosmopolitan—resist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts. Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) explores the paths of slavery in coastal cities, arguing that captivity haunts the “hospitality” cultures of Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Baltimore. It is not a history of urban slavery, but a literary reflection that argues for coastal cities as a distinct region that scrambles time, resisting the “post” in postindustrial and the “neo” in neoliberalism. Jennie Lightweis-Goff offers a cultural exploration bound by American literature, especially life-writing by the enslaved, as well as compelling reassessments of works by canonical writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. Lightweis-Goff reveals how the preserved yet fragile landscapes of these cities are haunted—not simply by the ghost tours that are signature stops for travelers in their historic districts—but by the echoes of slavery in their economies and built environments. Jennie Lightweis-Goff is a scholar, lyric essayist, and, most essentially, a New Orleans flâneur. She is the author of two scholarly books, Blood at the Root and Captive City. Her essays have appeared in the major journals of U.S. literature, including Signs, American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, minnesota review, and south. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, Liberties, and at her Substack, The Butcher's Darling, where she writes on grief, precarious labor, sobriety, and intellectual work that was "born in the back of the house." Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south…

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Joshua D. Rothman, "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America" (Basic Book, 2021) 49:55

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