Category: African American / Black Studies

April 9, 2014

Video: Mary Helen Washington on African American and the Communist Party

In the following video, Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, explains how her Catholic upbringing in the 1950s led to an interest in the relationship between African Americans...

April 8, 2014

Interview with Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

“I’m trying to restore that tradition of mid-century black left radical resistance, so that we don’t remember the 1950s only as the era of ‘integration’ but as the era of black civil rights radicalism. I’m restoring the other blacklist, the...

November 19, 2012

A Soul Food Thanksgiving

As the recent and wildly successful university press week reminded us, university presses provide readers with a wide range of new ideas and intellectual perspectives. However, as a university press with a list in food studies, Columbia University Press also...

July 23, 2012

Frederick Douglass Opie on Sylvia Woods and Sylvia's in a Changing Harlem

On the occasion of Sylvia Woods’s death last week, Frederick Douglass Opie, author of Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America, looked back on her life and the important role her restaurant Sylvia’s played in the life of...

July 6, 2011

History News Network Reviews Reds at the Blackboard

With the recent efforts to weaken teachers’ unions and corporate-led “school reform,” Clarence Taylor’s recently published Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union has taken on a new relevance. The book was recently...

April 4, 2011

Manning Marable

Columbia University Press mourns the loss of Manning Marable, who died over the weekend. Marable, a leading scholar of black history and a leftist critic of American social institutions and race relations, was a valued member of the Columbia University...

November 8, 2010

Jeffrey Perry Interviewed by Laura Flanders on GRITTV

Jeffrey Perry’s biography Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 is now available in paperback. Here is an interview with Jeffrey Perry on Grittv.com with Laura Flanders.

October 12, 2010

Award Winner! The African Diaspora, by Patrick Manning

Congratulations to Patrick Manning, whose book The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture was recently named the winner of the 2010 Association of Third World Studies Toyin Falola Africa Book Award. Here’s what the judges of the book had to...

December 31, 2009

Food traditions for New Year's

On his blog Frederick Douglass Opie, author of Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America, looks at the history of some culinary traditions observed among African Americans on New Year’s Day and also provides some recipes! Opie explains...

August 28, 2009

Columbia University Press editor on the politics of Black hair

We were all very excited to see that “Black Hair, Still Tangled in Politics,” an article from yesterday’s New York Times featured a quote from our colleague Afua Adusei-Gontarz, an assistant editor Columbia University Press (pictured). The article discussed the...

July 22, 2009

Houston Baker on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates

The following post is by Houston Baker, Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University and the author of many books, most recently Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era. The surreal arrest of Professor Henry...

July 7, 2009

Jeffrey Perry on GRITtv with Laura Flanders

Jeffrey Perry, author of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, was recently on GRITtv with Laura Flanders to discuss his new book. (Please note, the embedded video is not showing up on some version of IE. Click here...