What We’re Reading

Click each category heading to see lists of texts.

On Slavery, Racism, History, and Memory

Ana Lucia Araujo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History, 2nd ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2023).

—. Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021).

Anne C. Bailey, The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Michael T. Benson, Daniel Coit Gilman and the Birth of the American Research University (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).

Mary Frances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations (New York: Random House, 2006).

David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.)

Alfred L. Brophy, University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Adam H. Domby, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020).

P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al. “Writing about Slavery/Teaching About Slavery: This Might Help” community-sourced document, accessed August 2, 2022, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A4TEdDgYslX-hlKezLodMIM71My3KTN0zxRv0IQTOQs/ .

Nicholas Guyatt, “Rethinking Colonization in the Early United States,” in New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization, ed. Beverly C. Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017): 329-350.

Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, eds., Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019).

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14.

James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).

Ryan P. Jordan, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820-1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

Ethan J. Kyle and Blain Roberts, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (New York: New Press, 2018).

William Lee Miller, Arguing about Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Knopf, 1996).

Maurie D. McInnis and Louis P. Nelson, Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019).

Simon P. Newman, Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (London, UK: University of London Press, 2022).

Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Call My Name, Clemson: Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020).

Adam Rothman and Elsa Barraza Mendoza, eds., Facing Georgetown’s History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2021).

Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2021).

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995).

George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Celeste Winston, How to Lose the Hounds: Maroon Geographies and a World beyond Policing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023).

On Racism, Slavery, Indenture, and Manumission in Baltimore and Maryland

Dan Bailey, Anne Sarah Rubin, et al., “Slave Streets, Free Streets: Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore,” digital map, accessed August 2, 2022.

Jean H. Baker and Charles W. Mitchell, ed., The Civil War in Maryland Reconsidered (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2021).

David S. Bogen, “Precursors of Rosa Parks: Maryland Transportation Cases Between the Civil War and the Beginning of World War I,” Maryland Law Review 63 (2004): 721-751.

Lawrence T. Brown, The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).

Penelope Campbell, Maryland in Africa: The Maryland State Colonization Society, 1831- 1857 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).

Matthew A. Crenson, Baltimore, A Political History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).

Mariana L.R. Dantas, Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Americas (New York: Palgrave-McMillan, 2008).

Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).  

Bettye J. Gardner, “Ante-bellum Black Education in Baltimore,” Maryland Historical Magazine 71, no. 3 (1976): 360-366.

Bettye J. Gardner, “William Watkins: Antebellum Black Teacher and Anti-slavery Writer,” Negro History Bulletin 39, no. 6 (1976): 623-625.

Paige Glotzer, How the Suburbs were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2020).

Leroy Graham, Baltimore, the Nineteenth Century Black Capital (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982).

Dennis Patrick Halpin, A Brotherhood of Liberty: Black Reconstruction and Its Legacies in Baltimore, 1865-1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

—. “‘Manufacturing Criminals’: The Historical Roots of Baltimore’s Racialized Criminal Justice System,” Perspectives on History, July 1, 2015, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/summer-2015/manufacturing-criminals-the-historical-roots-of-baltimores-racialized-criminal-justice-system .

Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum (New York: Legacy Lit, 2024).

Lawrence Jackson, “Frederick Bailey of Baltimore” digital map, accessed May 6, 2021.

Ida Jones, The Heart of the Race Problem: The Life of Kelly Miller (Littleton, MA: Tapestry Press, 2011).

Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Adam Malka, The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

Jessica Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015).

Tony C. Perry, “In Bondage when Cold was King: The Frigid Terrain of Slavery in Antebellum Maryland,” Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 1 (2017): 23-36.

Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

Ousamane K. Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 

Anne Sarah Rubin, “Slave Streets, Free Streets: Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore,” Current Research in Digital History 4 (2021): https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v04-01-slave-streets-free-streets/, accessed August 2, 2022.

Gordon H. Shufelt, The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2021).

Sarah Thomas, “A Message of Inclusion, A History of Exclusion: Racial Injustice at the Peabody Institute,” Johns Hopkins University, 2019.

William G. Thomas III, A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020).

T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Freedom in Baltimore and Early National Maryland (New York: Routledge, 1999).

Jennie K. Williams, “Trouble the Water: The Baltimore to New Orleans Coastwise Slave Trade, 1820-1860,” Slavery & Abolition 41, no. 2 (2020): 275-303.