This journal publishes literature reviews exclusively. Recent examples include:
Samantha Seeley
"Beyond the American Colonization Society"
March 2016
Abstract: This article offers a critical review of scholarship on black colonization and emigration beyond the United States between the 1770s and the 1850s. In 1816, a group of elite white men founded the American Colonization Society (ACS), an organization committed to sending free African Americans outside the bounds of the nation. By 1821, the ACS had secured federal funding for the project and purchased land for the new black colony of Liberia in West Africa. Historians have long disagreed about the aims of the ACS beyond its prejudicial presumption that African Americans did not belong within the nation. This founding debate has obscured the much longer and more diffuse history of colonization thought across the American colonies and the new United States. Well before and after 1816, both black and white activists planned alternative black colonies outside the bounds of the United States in West Africa, Florida, Haiti, Canada, Texas, Mexico, and the American West. This essay briefly reviews the major arguments in the scholarship on the ACS before turning to examine work that has looked beyond Liberia to embrace creative approaches to the scattered field of black colonization and emigration across the Anglo-Atlantic world. This growing body of scholarship demonstrates ever more forcefully that removal and migration were at the center of conceptions of race, citizenship, and freedom in the early United States.
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.
Margaret M. R. Kellow
"Women and Abolitionism in the United States: Recent Historiography"
November 2013
Abstract:The past 20 years have seen substantial developments in the historiography on women and abolitionism in the United States. These include a focus on the experience of African American women both as activists and as objects of the abolitionist movement. Recent studies explore the ways in which religion inspired and shaped American women's commitment to ending slavery. Important work has been done on the ways in which antislavery women functioned as political actors and the ways in which their efforts influenced antebellum American politics. Abolition historiography has benefitted from the Atlantic perspective as studies have explored the transnational networks created by British and American women and comparisons highlight new aspects of American women's experience in abolitionism. Lastly, studies of women and abolition from each of these perspectives have complicated and problematized the grand narrative of 19th-century American women's history which enshrined a “path from antislavery to feminism” as a critical consciousness-raising experience which inspired American women to take up the quest for their own rights.
The Cambridge Guide to African American History by 
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The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship, 1865-Present by 
The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature by 
A Political Companion to W. E. B. du Bois by 