Finalist, 2026 Leticia Woods Brown Book Prize - Association of Black Women HistoriansThe story of one of the most influential labor leaders of the twentieth century reveals powerful lessons that still resonateAt the dawn of the twentieth century, Black girls and women faced a harsh career landscape. Domestic labor and sharecropping—which were the least regulated and lowest paying occupations for women in the US economy—were the few availabl...

Winner of the 2020 Sarah A. Whaley Book Prize from the National Women's Studies AssociationPutting Their Hands on Race offers an important labor history of 19th and early 20th century Irish immigrant and US southern Black migrant domestic workers. Drawing on a range of archival sources, this intersectional study explores how these women were significant to the racial labor and citizenship politics of their time. Their migrations to northeastern cities chal...

In 1964, the task of racial desegregation of public schools hung over the country. In Denton, North Texas town, a remarkable alliance transcended racial divides, ignited a city-wide grassroots civil rights movement. Denton Women’s Interracial Fellowship: Leading a Texas City’s Desegregation by Annetta Ramsay is a vital historical account chronicling the extraordinary journey of courageous Black and White women. Driven by a shared desire to prepare their children for desegregation,...

The forces that shaped the institution of slavery in the American South endured, albeit in altered form, long after slavery was abolished. Toiling in sweltering Virginia tobacco factories or in the kitchens of white families in Chicago, black women felt a stultifying combination of racial discrimination and sexual prejudice. And yet, in their efforts to sustain family ties, they shared a common purpose with wives and mothers of all classes.In Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow...

Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? Are the humanities coming to an end? What, exactly, is higher education good for?In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university—in states from Calif...

Through an analysis of women’s reform, domestic worker activism, and cultural values attached to public and private space, Vanessa May explains how and why domestic workers, the largest category of working women before 1940, were excluded from labor protections that formed the foundation of the welfare state. Looking at the debate over domestic service from both sides of the class divide, Unprotected Labor assesses middle-class women’s reform programs as well as household workers'...

In the 1910s, both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington praised the black community in Durham, North Carolina, for its exceptional race progress. Migration, urbanization, and industrialization had turned black Durham from a post–Civil War liberation community into the “capital of the black middle class.” African Americans owned and operated mills, factories, churches, schools, and an array of retail services, shops, community organizations, and race institutions. Using interviews, nar...

The award-winning Revisioning American History series continues with this “groundbreaking new history of Black women in the United States” (Ibram X. Kendi)—the perfect companion to An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and An African American and Latinx History of the United States.An empowering and intersectional history that centers the stories of African American women across 400+ years, showing how they are—and have alway...

**From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women.“Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard.”—**The New York TimesAngela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates h...

**An essential history of African American women’s pursuit of political power—and how it transformed America“Elegant and expansive.” —New York TimesWinner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for HistoryNamed a Best Book of the Year by Ms. • Time • Foreign Affairs • Smithsonian**In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha S. Jones offers a new history of African American women’s political lives in Ame...

An incisive history of self-serving white feminists and the inspiring women who’ve continually defied themWomen including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Sheryl Sandberg are commonly celebrated as leaders of feminism. Yet they have fought for the few, not the many. As award-winning scholar Kyla Schuller argues, their white feminist politics dispossess the most marginalized to liberate themselves.In The Trouble with White Women, Schulle...

At the greatest moments and in the cruelest times, black women have been a crucial part of America's history. Now, the inspiring history of black women in America is explored in vivid detail by two leaders in the fields of African American and women's history.A Shining Thread of Hope chronicles the lives of black women from indentured servitude in the early American colonies to the cruelty of antebellum plantations, from the reign of lynch law in the Jim Crow South...