New Books in the American South New Books Network

Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee, and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (U Georgia Press, 2024) explores the significant contributions of African American women radical activists from 1955 to 1995. It examines the 1961 case of African American working-class self-defense advocate Mae Mallory, who traveled from New York to Monroe, North Carolina, to provide support and weapons to the Negroes with Guns Movement. Accused of kidnapping a Ku Klux Klan couple, she spent thirteen months in a Cleveland jail, facing extradition. African American women radical activists Ethel Azalea Johnson of Negroes with Guns, Audrey Proctor Seniors of the banned New Orleans NAACP, the Trotskyist Workers World Party, Ruthie Stone, and Clarence Henry Seniors of Workers World founded the Monroe Defense Committee to support Mallory. Mae’s daughter, Pat, aged sixteen also participated, and they all bonded as family. When the case ended, they joined the Tanzanian, Grenadian, and Nicaraguan World Revolutions. Using her unique vantage point as Audrey Proctor Seniors’s daughter, Paula Marie Seniors blends personal accounts with theoretical frameworks of organic intellectual, community feminism, and several other theoretical frameworks in analyzing African American radical women’s activism in this era.
Essential biographical and character narratives are combined with an analysis of the social and political movements of the era and their historical significance. Seniors examines the link between Mallory, Johnson, and Proctor Seniors’s radical activism and their connections to national and international leftist human rights movements and organizations. She asks the underlying question: Why did these women choose radical activism and align themselves with revolutionary governments, linking Black human rights to world revolutions?
Seniors’s historical and personal account of the era aims to recover Black women radical activists’ place in history. Her innovative research and compelling storytelling broaden our knowledge of these activists and their political movements.
Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com.
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Linked by declarations of emancipation within the same five-year period, two countries shared human rights issues on two distinct continents. In When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate (McFarland, 2022), readers will find a case-study comparison of the emancipation of Russian serfs on the Yazykovo Selo estate and American slaves at the Palmyra Plantation. Although state policies and reactions may not follow the same paths in each area, there were striking thematic parallels. These findings add to our understanding of what happens throughout an emancipation process in which the state grants freedom, and therefore speaks to the universality of the human experience. 
Despite the political and economic differences between the two countries, as well as their geographic and cultural distances, this book re-conceptualizes emancipation and its aftermath in each country: from a history that treats each as a separate, self-contained story to one with a unified, global framework.
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Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead.
In Death at the Edges of Empire: Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863-1921 (U Nebraska Press, 2020) Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions emerging within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials negotiating the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death as well as how they used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.
Alex Beckstrand is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Connecticut and an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves.
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In this special episode, we talk to two authors about the role of financial institutions in enslavement. Sharon Ann Murphy, associate professor of history, argues in Banking on Slavery Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (University of Chicago Press, 2023) that Southern banks’ willingness to use enslaved people as loan collateral led to the exponential growth of Southern enslavement during the 1820-30s. In filmmaker, producer, and author David Montero’s book, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations (Hatchette Book Group, 2024), he follows Wall Street bankers and large Northern banks were critical to the financing of slavery and, in turn, who massed incredible wealth from enslavement.
Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator and assistant professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.
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Justin Gardiner is the author of two nonfiction books and a collection of poetry. His most recent title is the book-length lyric essay Small Altars, published by Tupelo Press in 2024. Besides his role as Nonfiction Editor for Southern Humanities Review, Justin is also an Associate Professor at Auburn University.
Founded in 1967, SHR considers subject matter both within and beyond the South. The magazine has had Justin Gardiner as its nonfiction editor for the past half decade. Four essays are discussed in the episode, with most of all of them showing evidence of the associative qualities that Gardiner, as a poet, enjoys in whatever genre. In this case, we started with Lisa Greenwell’s essay “Your Soul Doesn’t Need You.” While ostensibly an essay about a carjacking she experienced, it goes wider to consider alike how well both more cognitively based therapy and poetry that speaks to one’s soul can aid recovery. In Leslie Stainton’s “Here with You,” an understanding of how the artist Joseph Cornell’s boxes reflect his life with a brother who suffered from cerebral palsy parallels the circumstances of the author’s own, younger sister. Delicacy is the order of the day. In Ceridwen Hall’s essay, “Submarine Reconnaissance: Bodies, Permutations, Voyages,” Hall delves into whether submarines are “female” (as her mom believes) or a “he” when in combat, along with many fascinating aspects of serving aboard a submarine and the “aquatic” nature of our memories and the way we must constantly “refit” our thinking. The other, remaining essay, Jennifer Taylor-Skinner’s “I Don’t Want Somebody in My House,” highlights the grand piano that serves as her companion, in contrast to how an esoteric French composer (Erik Satie) had two baby grand pianos stacked atop each other in his southern France villa. Again, expect the unexpected.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.
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Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (U California Press, 2024) explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake--for creators and audiences alike--in revisiting the long history of American popular music.
Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).
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