HIST 399: Active History: History of Black Lives Matter (HC)

This journal publishes literature reviews exclusively. Recent examples include:
Jennifer Dominique Jones
"Finding Home: Black Queer Historical Scholarship in the United States Part II"
April 2019
Abstract: This essay surveys the extant historical and historically minded scholarship about the political, social, and cultural life of African American/black LGBT/queer. Characterizing this area of inquiry as “black queer historical studies,” this essay addresses scholars' diverse approaches to the challenge of archival research, current scholarship about the intersecting histories of blackness and queerness in the United States, and four key topical concerns: black “lesbian” histories, gender transgression, class, and community formation/politics.

Imaobong D. Umoren
"From the Margins to the Center: African American Women's and Gender History since the 1970s"
December 2015
Abstract: African American women's and gender history emerged at the turn of the 20th century and developed in the wake of the civil rights, black power, and women's movements. Over the past five decades, the field has moved from the margins to the center of American history. This illustrative rather than exhaustive article examines the literature on African American women's and gender history since the 1970s. It argues that there have been two overlapping phases of African American women's and gender history. The first recovery phase focused on histories of slavery, black feminism, work, and activism. Many of these themes remained part of the second phase in African American women's and gender history that widened to focus on new themes, some of which emerged out of earlier methodologies. Moreover, this essay argues that emerging work is helping to connect the field to a wide array of topics, which promises to develop this increasingly interdisciplinary area of research.

Kathleen Belew
"Lynching and Power in the United States: Southern, Western, and National Vigilante Violence"
January 2014
Abstract: Lynching has shaped U.S. history and identity from the colonial era to the present. Recent scholarship has expanded the periodization and geographical definition of lynching to encompass not only the South from 1880 to 1930, but also acts of vigilante violence in the West that span a much longer history. New scholarship treats the terrorizing and regulatory functions of lynching, but also the work that such violence does in creating and upholding different kinds of power. Such attention to the constitutive power of violence signals a momentous turn in the historiography, one that promises to connect histories of vigilantism with those of empire, torture, war, rape, and other kinds of violence.

David Ponton III
"A Protracted War for Order: Police Violence in the Twentieth Century United States"
May 2018
Abstract: Although a formal historiography of police violence has yet to develop, historians have had much to say about police brutality. Building on the insights of race theorists from critical legal, critical race, and sociological studies on racial formation and the law, they have argued that police violence has been constitutive to racial formation in the United States, that is has been a primary means through which crime is socially constructed, that is has always been employed in the interest of preserving “order,” that it has inspired sustained movements of resistance, and that its militarization and sustained patterns of brutality are a collective telltale sign of the failures of Great Society liberalism and the fragility of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. This article synthesizes the scattered historical literature to plainly articulate these prevailing arguments about the form, function, and consequences of police violence, much of which has been produced by scholars of Black American and labor histories, but which is also appearing more frequently in other ethnic histories as well as queer and gender histories. Historians can continue to take an interdisciplinary approach to shaping research questions and producing a body of work that attends specifically to the history of police violence. We will need to borrow sources from other disciplines and re‐imagine data as evidence; create new archives, even as we rediscover old ones as we face the near‐insurmountable challenge of extracting police misconduct information from police department archives; and consider that the challenge for developing a police brutality historiography is not in determining the magnitude of violence, but rather in teasing out the political and legal apparatuses that make such violence immune to reform.

This series provides extensive annotated bibliographies on specific topics in many different fields. They are written by scholars with the aim of introducing students to important issues and key authors. The different subject sections are all under development with new essays added twice a year. Relevant annotated bibliographies include:
"The Black Press in the United States" in the African American Studies Section
"Black Radicalism in 20th-Century United States" in the African American Studies Section
"Civil Rights Movement" in the African American Studies Section
"Death and Political Action in "African American Deathways" in the African American Studies Section
"Lynching" in the African American Studies Section
"The Lynching of Emmett Till" in the African American Studies Section
"Race and Violence" in the Sociology section
"Settler Colonialism and African Americans" in the African American Studies Section
"Social Science and Civil Rights" in the African American Studies section

This service provides full text of many recent dissertations written at British universities. Some are available for immediate download, while others take a day or two for delivery.