New Books in African American Studies

For three years in the early 1900s, a serial killer zigzagged across the rice belt region of the United States, using an everyday ax to slaughter Black families living within a mile of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Sunset Route. The similarities among the murders were uncanny, yet lawmen in early twentieth-century America had neither the technology nor the vocabulary to identify the serial killer in their midst. Instead, regional authorities worked the cases as individual homicides. This approach led to seemingly contradictory realities: the unknown killer was dubbed “the axman,” and a young Black woman named Clementine Barnabet was arrested as a suspect. She offered questionable confessions and swiftly gained international recognition, as the press reimagined Clementine as a cult-leading, ax-wielding, sacrifice-driven serial killer. But there was a problem: Clementine was already in jail by the time more than half of the murders occurred. In Inquisition for Blood: The Making of a Black Female Serial Killer in the Jim Crow South with Lauren Nicole Henley (LSU Press, 2026), Lauren Nicole Henley examines this conundrum as she describes how axman madness consumed an entire region for years. She unpacks these crimes and their aftermaths to show how Black communities responded to incomprehensible violence, how the state criminalized Blackness, and how a young Black woman ultimately came to be understood as a serial killer. Drawing on more than three thousand newspaper articles, hundreds of pages of court records, prison ledgers, death certificates, censuses, city directories, and more, Henley tells a historical narrative that is as intriguing as any true crime novel, challenging our assumptions about who has the ability to get away with murder. Dr. Lauren Henley is an assistant professor in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on violent crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She investigates how age, race, gender, and religion contribute to perceptions of criminality in the South and West, and her articles have appeared in the Journal of African American History and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. You can find her at the University of Richmond website. Following this conversation, Lauren and Sullivan went over to the Additions to the Archive Substack to continue their conversation about writing historical figures who, like Clementine Barnabet, don’t neatly fit the respectable boxes we would like for them. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

The Centrality of Slavery : Empire and Enslavement in Colonial Illinois and Missouri (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) examines how French and American colonizers used the powers of various imperial regimes to create slave societies in present-day Missouri and Illinois from the 1720s through the 1820s. The first book-length study of slavery and empire in both Illinois and Missouri, it begins with the origins of Native American and African American enslavement in the region. It then traces how successive French, Spanish, British, and American regimes shaped the development of slavery over the course of a century, examines the significance of the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery in Illinois, and then analyzes the diverging histories of slavery in Illinois and Missouri in the early 1800s. The book concludes with an analysis of the Missouri Crisis and the compromise of 1820, along with the Middle Mississippi Valley’s significance in the road towards disunion and civil war in the late 1850s. More broadly, The Centrality of Slavery argues that the Middle Mississippi Valley sat astride the crossroads of imperial North America. The practices of empire and enslavement forged and fought over there exerted an outsized influence on the history of slavery in North America and the United States. Rather than treating the region’s eighteenth-century past as a prologue to the rise of the United States, John Craig Hammond analyzes the colonial history of the region on its own terms, through the European colonizers, American settlers, and enslaved people of Indigenous and African descent who shaped the development of slavery in the Middle Mississippi Valley.

A powerful, unsettling, and unflinching exploration that forces readers to confront lynching as a devastating legacy of white childhood conditioning, and to reckon with the corrupting force of a system that trained children to become its willing executioners, Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children with Stacey Patton (Beacon Press, 2026) examines how the lynching of Black children became not an aberration, but a normalized feature of American racial violence. Drawing on meticulous archival research and vivid narrative storytelling, Strung Up traces how white supremacy trained itself socially, culturally, and psychologically to tolerate and ritualize the destruction of Black childhood, including the unborn. Nationally recognized child advocate Dr. Stacey Patton locates the roots of this violence not solely in the United States, but in Europe’s long history of anti-child brutality. She reveals how centuries of public executions, corporal punishment, religious spectacle, and sanctioned cruelty exposed white children to extreme violence early and often. This violence, she argues, conditioned them to associate pain, domination, and death with moral order. Patton traces this desensitization across the Atlantic where white children raised within these traditions became adults primed to reproduce racial terror, transforming inherited practices of child cruelty into instruments of white supremacy in the post-emancipation United States. Blending history with developmental psychology, neuroscience, epigenetics, and research on adverse childhood experiences, Strung Up shows how violence is not only taught, but biologically and psychologically embedded across generations. Patton demonstrates how racial terror functioned as a system of socialization that shaped perception, behavior, and moral reasoning long before it produced the mob, the rope, or the fire. Dr. Stacey Patton is a research associate at the Institute for Urban Research, an award-winning journalist, and a nationally recognized child advocate whose research focuses on the intersections of race and childhood. She is the author of That Mean Old Yesterday: A Memoir (Simon and Schuster) and Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America (Beacon Press). Her reporting on issues of child welfare, race relations, and higher education has appeared in multiple outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC News, Al Jazeera and the Chronicle of Higher Education. You can find her on Facebook and Substack. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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.

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.