June 1, 2020
This is an in-progress bibliography of work by historians and other social scientists that contextualizes and historicizes the multi-city protests and extralegal and state violence of late May and early June 2020. This list is intended as a resource for students and interested members of the general public, and I will add new resources on an ongoing basis. Note that these titles are not in alpha or date order (as a proper bibliography should be) but are listed in the order I added them. If you know of a piece of writing that is relevant, as well as other bibliographies or syllabi doing similar work, please let me know of them by emailing momara at uw dot edu, and I will add to the list. Thanks.
Margaret O’Mara, Professor of History, University of Washington
[Addition 6/2/20: section on resources, including other reading lists and syllabi]
[Addition 6/6/20: section on podcasts and other multimedia]
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Op-eds, articles, essays
Keeangha-Yamahtta Taylor, “Of Course there are Protests. The State is Failing Black People,” The New York Times, 5/29/20
Elizabeth Hinton, “The Minneapolis Uprising in Context,” Boston Review, 5/29/20
Keisha N. Blain, “Violence in Minneapolis is Rooted in the History of Racist Policing in America,” The Washington Post, 5/30/20
Robert Greene II, “We Are Living in a Red Spring,” Jacobin, May 30, 2020
Julio Capo, Jr., “The police chief who inspired Trump’s tweet glorifying violence,” The Washington Post, 6/1/20
V. N. Trinh, “Los Angeles in 1992 showed how not to respond to today’s uprisings,” The Washington Post, 6/1/20
Max Felker-Kantor, “Trump’s response to Minneapolis threatens to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s,” The Washington Post, 5/30/20
Clare Corbould, “The fury in US cities is rooted in a long history of racist policing, violence, and inequality,” The Conversation, 6/1/20
Steve Herbert, “‘The Battle of Seattle’ revisited: or, seven views of the protest-zoning state,” Political Geography 26:5 (2007), 601-619.
Kellie Carter Jackson, “The Double Standard of the American Riot,” The Atlantic, 6/2/20
Amber M. Hamilton, “Genealogy of Critical Race and Digital Studies: Past, Present, and Future,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (2020)
Ibram X. Kendi, “The American Nightmare,” The Atlantic, 6/1/20
Amanda I. Seligman, “‘But Burn--No: The Rest of the Crowd in Three Civil Disorders in 1960s Chicago,” The Journal of Urban History 37:2 (2011)
Julian Go, "The Imperial Origins of American Policing: Militarization and Imperial Feedback in the Early 20th Century," American Journal of Sociology 125, no. 5 (March 2020): 1193-1254.
Kevin Kruse, “‘Law and order’ won’t help Trump win reelection,” The Washington Post, 6/2/20
Merlin Chowkwanyun, “Cleveland Versus the Clinic: The 1960s Riots and Community Health Reform,” American Journal of Public Health 108:11 (November 2018)
Grace Mallon, “President Trump can send the military to police Americans, but is doing so wise?” The Washington Post, 6/3/20
Carol Anderson, “In 1919, the state failed to protect African Americans. It’s still failing them,” The Guardian, 6/2/20
Elizabeth Hinton, “George Floyd’s Death is A Failure of Generations of Leadership,” The New York Times, 6/2/20
Philip McHarris and Thenjiwe McHarris, “No More Money for the Police,” The New York Times, 5/30/20
Alexander Zhang, “Minneapolis Decided to Remove Police from Schools after Decades of Criticism,” Slate, 6/4/20
“It Really is Different This Time,” Politico Magazine, 6/4/20
Elizabeth Cobbs, “The Urgency of Peaceful Protest,” The Washington Post, 6/4/20
Nana Osai-Opare, “Around the World, the U.S. has long been a symbol of anti-black racism,” The Washington Post, 6/4/20
Mary Dudziak, “The Damage Trump Has Done This Week Extends Far Beyond America’s Borders,” The New York Times, 6/3/20
Deva Woodly, “An American Reckoning,” Public Seminar, 6/4/20
Charlton McIlwain, “Of course technology perpetuates racism. It was designed that way,” MIT Technology Review, June 2020
David Roediger, “White Privilege, White Advantage, White and Human Misery,” Verso blog, 2019
Matthew Countryman, “2020 uprisings, unprecedented in scope, join a long river of struggle in America,” The Conversation, June 2020
Keisha N. Blain, “The Pioneering Black Women Who Paved the Way for this Moment,” The Atlantic, 6/9/20
Kevin Levin, “Richmond’s Confederate Monuments Were Used to Sell a Segregated Neighborhood,” The Atlantic, 6/11/20
Books
Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Insurgency Transformed American Policing (California, 2019)
Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (UNC Press, 2019)
Max Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (UNC Press, 2018)
N.D.B. Connolly, A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida (Chicago, 2014)
Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (UNC Press, 2016)
Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (Pantheon, 2016)
William Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (UI Press, 1996)
Megan Ming Francis, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State (Cambridge, 2014)
Michael B. Katz, Why Don’t American Cities Burn? (Penn Press, 2011)
Christopher Parker and Matt Baretto, Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America (Princeton, 2013)
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton, 1996)
Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (Random House, 2008)
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (UNC Press, 2019)
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness (Harvard, 2010)
Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home (Harvard, 2016)
Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Bold Type, 2016)
Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain, Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence (UGA Press, 2016)
Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard, 2017)
Julillly Kohler-Hausmann, Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton, 2017)
Timothy Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics (Penn Press, 2018)
Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016)
Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of the American Right (LSU Press, 2000)
Clay Risen, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (Wiley, 2009)
Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago, 1983)
Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Basic Books, 2020)
Risa L. Goluboff, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s (Oxford, 2016)
David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago, 2007)
Paige Glotzer, How the Suburbs Were Segregated (Columbia, 2020)
Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003)
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (UNC Press, 2017)
Matthew F. Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (California, 2016)
Michael Javen Fortner, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Harvard, 2015)
Kim Philips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (Metropolitan Books, 2017)
Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press, 2018)
Leah N. Gordon, From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America (Chicago, 2015)
Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard, 2005)
Walter Johnson with Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Capitalism Justice, Boston Review (Special Issue), Winter 2017
Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War (Oxford, 2020)
Lucy Barber, Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition (California, 2002)
Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (Minnesota, 2013)
Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard, 2014)
Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Harvard, 2019)
Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (St. Martins, 2018)
Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK (Liveright, 2017)
Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning (Harvard, 2012)
Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, 2017)
Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (California, 1995)
Resources--other bibliographies, teaching syllabi, primary source collections, etc.
Trish Kahle, “Teaching in an Uprising: Readings on Race and Democracy,” Black Perspectives, June 2020
Meredith Roman, Readings from “Race ‘Riots’ in the Making of Modern America,” SUNY Brockport Department of History
Institutional Racism: A Syllabus, JSTOR Daily
WTO Seattle Collection, University of Washington Libraries
LaDale Winling, Nathan Connolly, Brent Cebul, et al., Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America, University of Richmond
Keisha N. Blain, “Eight Recommended Books by Women to Understand the Uprisings,” Ms Magazine, June 2020.
Matthew F. Delmont, “Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African American Newspapers,” Stanford University
“Race, Injustice, and Black Lives Matter: Recommended Reading from Faculty and Staff,” Williams College, June 2020
Ibram X. Kendi, “A History of Race and Racism in America, in 24 Chapters,” The New York Times, 2017
Made by History, The Washington Post
Dan Berger, Garrett Felber, Kali Gross, Elizabeth Hinton, Anyabwile Love, “Prison Abolition Syllabus 2.0,” Black Perspectives, September 2018
Dan Berger, Garrett Felber, Kali Gross, Elizabeth Hinton, Anyabwile Love, “Prison Abolition Syllabus,” Black Perspectives, November 2016
N.D.B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain, “Trump Syllabus 2.0,” Public Books, June 2016
“158 Resources for Understanding Systemic Racism in America,” Smithsonian Magazine, June 2020
Keri Leigh Merritt, Top 100 Antiracism Books
Podcasts etc.
Nicole Hemmer, A12: The Story of Charlottesville, Miller Center at the University of Virginia
“Another Burden to Bear: the History of Racial Health Disparities in America,” Backstory, June 2020
Eric Rauchway, New Deal Stories Ep. 1: The Bonus Army, June 2020
“How the Reconstruction Transformed the Constitution” (Eric Foner in conversation with Ed Ayers), Backstory, October 2019
“Seeing White,” Season Two of SceneOn Radio, Duke University
“American Police,” Throughline, NPR, June 4, 2020