By A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. (NHC Fellow, 1993–94) Few individuals have had as great an impact on the law–both its practice and its history–as A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. A winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, he has distinguished himself over the decades both as a professor at Yale, the … Continued
By Ashraf H. A. Rushdy (NHC Fellow, 1998–99) The End of American Lynching questions how we think about the dynamics of lynching, what lynchings mean to the society in which they occur, how lynching is defined, and the circumstances that lead to lynching. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy looks at three lynchings over the course of the … Continued
By Claudia Koonz (NHC Fellow, 1993–94) The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders. Claudia Koonz’s latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and … Continued
By Dan T. Carter (NHC Fellow, 1990–91) Combining biography with regional and national history, Dan T. Carter chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of George Wallace, a populist who abandoned his ideals to become a national symbol of racism, and later begged for forgiveness. In The Politics of Rage, Carter argues persuasively that the four-time … Continued
By W. Fitzhugh Brundage (NHC Fellow, 1995–96) Since the Civil War whites and blacks have struggled over the meanings and uses of the Southern past. Indeed, today’s controversies over flying the Confederate flag, renaming schools and streets, and commemorating the Civil War and the civil rights movement are only the latest examples of this ongoing … Continued
By Winifred Breines (NHC Fellow, 2001–02) Inspired by the idealism of the civil rights movement, the women who launched the radical second wave of the feminist movement believed, as a bedrock principle, in universal sisterhood and color-blind democracy. Their hopes, however, were soon dashed. To this day, the failure to create an integrated movement remains … Continued
By Rita Dove (NHC Fellow, 1988–89) When a woman returns to her Midwestern hometown as an artist-in-residence to teach puppetry to schoolchildren, her homecoming also means grappling with artistic ambition, memories of rejected love, and shocking truths about her family.
By Mab Segrest (NHC Fellow, 2017–18) Today, 90 percent of psychiatric beds are located in jails and prisons across the United States, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans. After more than a decade of research, the celebrated scholar and activist Mab Segrest locates the deep historical roots of this startling fact, turning her … Continued
Edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (NHC Fellow, 1995–96)
By Michael K. Honey (NHC Fellow, 1995–96) The labor of black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States. Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. Spanning the 1930s to the present, Black Workers Remember tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words. It provides striking … Continued