Parsing American Education
Jarvis R. Givens’ American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation details the interconnected stories of race in the history of U.S. education.
An Uncommon Childhood
In Destroy This House, Amanda Uhle, executive director of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, takes readers inside her 1980s childhood with a hoarder mom and an entrepreneur-turned-preacher father. Uhle will appear at the 2025 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 18-19.
“Who Do You Think You Are?”
In The Trouble of Color, Martha S. Jones interrogates how her Kentucky ancestors negotiated the “color line” and what it has meant in her own life.
A Piercing Wail
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Reckoning by V (formerly Eve Ensler) asks readers to understand what violence does to women and anyone who is marginalized.
Grassroots Revolution
Elaine Weiss’ Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement details the network of unofficial schools aimed at helping Black citizens pass literacy tests before the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Weiss will discuss her book at the Nashville Public Library on March 6 and the East Tennessee History Center in Knoxville on May 20.
A Light on in the Mica Windows
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Blending poetry and prose, Joy Harjo’s second memoir, Poet Warrior, braids her story of becoming an accomplished poet and modern Native woman — always guided by her ancestors in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation — into the larger context of Native history.
