New Books in African American Studies

Kelly Lytle Hernández joins Michael Stauch to discuss how the US immigration system has always been “racist by design.” Many Americans’ understanding of the immigration system begins with the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late nineteenth century. In Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control (Norton, 2026), Lytle Hernández expands that history by a full century, showing how the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s inspired not only America’s first immigration bans (to prevent news of a free Black republic from reaching our shores) but also its first refugee resettlement program (to welcome and support Haiti’s evicted enslavers.) She explains how Chinese Exclusion led the Supreme Court to disconnect immigration laws from the constitution. She reveals how eugenicists and Jim Crow segregationists built much of our current immigration regime as expressly "whites-only," and shows how during the Civil Rights Movement, Congress amended this system but never abolished it, leaving many of the regime’s racist rules and rituals intact today.
Highlights include:
- How an “Exclusion Quartet” of rulings by the Supreme Court in the late 19th century “unhinged” the Constitution from immigration policy;
- How the “family reunification” clause of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, meant to favor European migrants, combined with global instability in the 1970s and ‘80s to create an enormous wave of non-white immigrants to the United States;
- What changed (and didn’t change) in immigration policy during World War II and the Cold War;
- How guestworker programs, asylum restrictions, and the US “visa dome” contribute to the racist-by-design immigration regime;
- How immigrants and their advocates have long used cracks and loopholes in immigration legislation to create space for themselves in the United States.
Guest: Kelly Lytle Hernández is a Professor in the Departments of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she also holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair of History. She is one of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, and the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W. W. Norton, 2022).
Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Lilyanna D'Amato speaks with Rahim Kurwa about his book Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing (U California Press, 2025), which examines the policing of housing in Los Angeles' northernmost suburb, Antelope Valley. Kurwa traces the suburbs' relationship with Los Angeles from post WWII to the early 2000s and 2010s, when the region saw increased Black migration as result of the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program, the largest rental assistance program for low-income families in the nation. Kurwa contextualizes the adoption and reception of the voucher system in Los Angeles at the end of the 20th century, and explores the participatory policing and criminalization practices used to evict Black residents and re-segregate the region.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David N. Gellman interviews Nicholas P. Wood on Let the Oppressed Go Free: Abolitionism in Colonial and Revolutionary America
In Let the Oppressed Go Free, Nicholas P. Wood presents the opponents of slavery who sustained and expanded the antislavery movement during the American Revolution in the face of widespread hostility. These early abolitionists were inspired by antislavery theology: the view that slavery was a sinful form of oppression that would provoke God’s wrath against slaveholding societies. These principles were first advanced by a handful of Quakers and Puritans as early as the 1600s, but they did not become widespread until the second half of the eighteenth century. Quakers embraced antislavery theology during the French and Indian War, which they interpreted as divine chastisement for the sin of colonial slavery. Citing the prophet Isaiah, they pledged to please the Lord by letting the oppressed go free.

Antislavery theology became even more prominent during the American Revolution. When Parliament provoked an imperial crisis in the 1760s, abolitionists argued it was further evidence of God’s anger over slavery. The outbreak of war in 1775 made these arguments increasingly persuasive. Let the Oppressed Go Free demonstrates that antislavery activism during the Revolution by Quakers, African Americans, and evangelical patriots was more sophisticated and influential than historians have recognized. The northern states that began abolishing slavery during the Revolution did so in response to tenacious agitation and generally described their actions as designed to earn God’s blessing.

Let the Oppressed Go Free challenges many common assumptions about abolitionism and the American Revolution. Wood demonstrates that religion remained central to abolitionism rather than being displaced by “secular” arguments about natural rights. And whereas some have argued that the Revolutionary War hindered antislavery progress and fueled racism, Wood shows that the war accelerated reform.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There is no shortage of footage immortalizing the men who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when 250,000 Americans gathered beneath the Lincoln Memorial to call for an end to segregation. There were reverends and rabbis, activists and Rat-Pack icons—and of course the day’s headliner, whose prophetic dream of a post-Jim Crow world has forever defined the Civil Rights Movement. But there is no “class photo” of the Black women who helped organize the march, performed on its main stage, or were honored during its “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom.”

In How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington (Pantheon, 2026), Pulitzer Prizing-winning author Marcia Chatelain weaves a gleaming group portrait of these singular women. Among this cohort were several household names: vaudeville icon Josephine Baker; civil rights activist Rosa Parks gospel legend Mahalia Jackson, and Daisy Bates, champion of the Little Rock Nine. But many were relative unknowns, including Eva Jessye, the choir director who designed the day’s musical program, and Anna Hedgeman, the coordinator who pushed in the eleventh hour for a tribute to Black women’s work.

How Bright the Path Grows is a scintillating group biography, rendering the lives of thirteen Black women visionaries—some famous, others soon to be—in novelistic detail and like never seen before.
Dr. Marcia Chatelain a Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of South Side Girls and Franchise, which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History, the James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing, the Hagley Prize for Business History, and the Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians. An active public speaker and educational consultant, Chatelain has received awards and honors from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. You can find her on Instagram and TikTok.
Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Shows how apocalypticism helped drive anti-slavery abolitionism and inspire progressive social reform in nineteenth-century America In March 1844, Melissa Botsford of Meriden, Connecticut, defiantly left her local Methodist church because it supported slavery and other “sins” that permeated America. Botsford was among one hundred thousand other abolitionists who abandoned their evangelical churches throughout the decade. These protesters came out with a stern apocalyptic warning: God would soon judge America—and its churches—for the sins of slavery and race prejudice. It has long been assumed that apocalypticism is antithetical to social reform. Yet in Apocalyptic Abolitionism: How Millennialists Helped Abolish Slavery and Reform America (NYU Press, 2026), Kevin M. Burton uncovers the untold story of how apocalypticism shaped the abolitionist cause and helped destroy slavery in the United States. Contrary to popular opinion, the revival fires of the Second Great Awakening did not drive most evangelicals to progressive social reforms like abolitionism. Neither were the denominational schisms during that period a fight between northern abolitionists and southern slaveholders. Rather, before the Methodist and Baptist denominations split along sectional lines, most abolitionists, particularly members of the Adventist movement, had already left their churches in what was likely the largest mass exodus from mainstream evangelicalism in American history, precisely because most evangelicals opposed radical social reform movements. This volume makes the case that evangelicals receive undeserved credit for antislavery, and that it was apocalyptic abolitionists who led the way. Drawing from rare and overlooked sources to create a database of biographies of nearly 2000 people to track their religious affiliations and activism over time, Burton offers invaluable data to develop a robust framework for understanding apocalypticism, evangelicalism, and social reform politics of the nineteenth century. Kevin M. Burton is Assistant Professor of Church History, Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, Andrews University, where he also directs the Center for Adventist Research. to American religious history." ~John Corrigan, author of The Feeling of Forgetting: Christianity, Race, and Violence in America

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.