Keisha Blain. Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights. W.W. Norton, 2025.
“Without Fear highlights the words and actions of the most marginalized women in society, whose insistence on the natural, universal, and equal rights of all human beings have made them an inspiring example to the world.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, author of On Juneteenth
Roquinaldo Ferreira. Worlds of Unfreedom: West Central Africa in the Era of Global Abolition. Princeton University Press, 2025.
“Africans take center stage in this fresh and original masterwork. Ferreira builds on an astonishing research effort that took him to archives in half a dozen countries, telling fine-grained stories about individuals navigating the vast and turbulent currents of world history.” —Vincent Brown, author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
Shantel A. George. The Yoruba Are on a Rock: Recaptured Africans and the Orisas of Grenada. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
“No student of the wider Black Atlantic should overlook this important ‘infra-Atlantic’ case.” —J. Lorand Matory – Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Collection, Duke University
Katharine Gerbner. Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica. Duke University Press, 2025.
“Archival Irruptions is a new model for how scholars can read colonial archives in order to update, complicate, and expand the historical narratives they construct about the past and make available to their readers.” —Dianne M. Stewart, author of Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa
Toby Green. The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2025.
“A stunning global history of West Africa … with this new tour de force, Green confirms himself as the most innovative historian, writer, and thinker of his generation.” —Ana Lucia Araujo, author of Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery
Chloe L. Ireton. Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
“Ireton guides the reader through the early-modern archive pointing to sources that bring into focus themes long held to be unimaginable. The narrative before us is a testament to archival presence engendered by the thoughts and actions of enslaved Africans and their early-modern descendants. She charts new ground in this brilliant study of slavery and freedom.” —Herman Bennett, author of African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic.
Martha S. Jones. The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir. Basic Books, 2025.
“The Trouble of Color is an astonishing literary feat by an author who combines the scholarly brilliance of a professional historian with the fearless curiosity of a memoirist determined to unlock the family story inscribed in her very being.“―Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
Marcus Rediker. Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea. Viking, 2025.
“Marcus Rediker has done more than any other historian to chronicle the history of what he calls ‘maritime radicalism’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” —Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize−winning author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
Jessica Reuther. The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey: Portraits of West African Girlhood 1720-1940. Indiana University Press, 2025.
“This is an engaging history through which to understand traditions of child dependency in coastal West African kingdoms profoundly affected by global transformations from the 18th through the 20th centuries.—Sarah J. Zimmerman, author of Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire.
Miranda Spieler. Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories. Harvard University Press, 2025.
“By showing how captives angled for advantage and elites worked to keep them at the threshold of liberty, Slaves in Paris transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in French history.”—Lauren Benton, author of They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence