Exploring 500 years of protest and resistance in US history—and how its force is foundational and can empower us to navigate our chaotic world

In this timely new book in Beacon’s successful ReVisioning History series, professor Gloria Browne-Marshall delves into the history of protest movements and rebellion in the United States. Beginning with Indigenous peoples’ resistance to European colonization and continuing through to today’s climate change demonstrations, Browne-Marshall sheds light on known and forgotten movements and their unsung leaders, revealing how protest has shaped our nation and remains a vital force for change today.

Drawing upon legal documents, archival material, memoir, government documents and secondary sources, A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2026) gives voice to those who pushed back against the mistreatment of others, themselves, and in some instances planet Earth. Browne-Marshall highlights stories of individuals from all walks of life, backgrounds, and time periods who helped bring strong attention to their causes. Those stories include those of:

Regardless of whether these protests accomplished their end goals, Browne-Marshall reminds us that dissent is always meaningful and impactful. In fact, reading this book is an act of protest.

Find Professor Gloria J. Browne-Marshall at her website and on Instagram.

And find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack where she and Gloria continued their conversation.

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They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom.

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash.

Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.

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From hip-hop moguls and political candidates to talk radio and critically acclaimed films, society communicates that Black girls don’t matter and their girlhood is not safe. Alarming statistics on physical and sexual abuse, for instance, reveal the harm Black girls face, yet Black girls’ representation in media still heavily relies on our seeing their abuse as an important factor in others’ development. In this provocative new book, Aria S. Halliday asserts that the growth of diverse representation in media since 2008 has coincided with an increase in the hatred of Black girls.
Dr. Halliday uses her astute expertise as a scholar of popular culture, feminist theory, and Black girlhood to expose how we have been complicit in the depiction of Black girls as unwanted and disposable while letting Black girls fend for themselves. She indicts the way media mistreats celebrity Black girls like Malia and Sasha Obama as well as fictional Black girls in popular shows and films like A Wrinkle in Time. Our society’s inability to see or understand Black girls as girls makes us culpable in their abuse. In Black Girls and How We Fail Them (UNC Press, 2025), a revelatory book for political analysts, hip-hop lovers, pop culture junkies, and parents, Dr. Halliday provides the critical perspective we need to create a world that supports, affirms, and loves Black girls. Our future depends on it.

Our guest is: Dr. Aria S. Halliday, who is the Marie Rich Endowed Professor in Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and program in African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Halliday specializes in cultural constructions of black girlhood and womanhood in material, visual, and digital cultures in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has won numerous awards and fellowships, and her articles and chapters have been published in The Black Scholar, Cultural Studies, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Girlhood Studies, Palimpsest, and SOULS, as well as in edited volumes. She is the author of Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture, and Black Girls and How We Fail Them. She is co-founder of Digital Black Girls, a digital humanities archive celebrating Black girls' cultural production and innovation.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach, grad student coach, and developmental editor. She is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas (U Michigan Press, 2024) offers a new lens for examining diaspora and borderlands texts and performances that considers the inseparability of race, ethnicity, and gender in imagining and enacting social change. Theresa Delgadillo crosses interdisciplinary and canonical borders to investigate the interrelationships of African-descended Latinx and mestizx peoples through an analysis of Latin American, Latinx, and African American literature, film, and performance.

Not only does Delgadillo offer a rare extended analysis of Black Latinidades in Chicanx literature and theory, but she also considers over a century’s worth of literary, cinematic, and performative texts to support her argument about the significance of these cultural sites and overlaps. Chapters illuminate the significance of Toña La Negra in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, reconsider feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in revising exclusionary Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, delve into the racial and gender frameworks Sandra Cisneros attempts to rewrite, unpack encounters between African Americans and Black Puerto Ricans in texts by James Baldwin and Marta Moreno Vega, explore the African diaspora in colonial and contemporary Peru through Daniel Alarcón’s literature and the documentary Soy Andina, and revisit the centrality of Black power in ending colonialism in Cuban narratives. Geographies of Relation demonstrates the long histories of networks and exchanges across the Americas as well as the interrelationships among Indigenous, Black, African American, mestizx, Chicanx, and Latinx peoples. It offers a compelling argument that geographies of relation are as significant as national frameworks in structuring cultural formation and change in this hemisphere.

Theresa Delgadillo is a Vilas Distinguished Professor of English and Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also Director of the Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies Program. She is a founder and editor for the online publication Latinx Talk.

Shodona Kettle is a PhD candidate at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. Website here

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Sarah Derbew’s new book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) asks how should articulations of blackness from the fifth century BCE to the twenty-first century be properly read and interpreted? This important and timely book is the first concerted treatment of black skin color in the Greek literature and visual culture of antiquity. In charting representations in the Hellenic world of black Egyptians, Aithiopians, Indians, and Greeks, Derbew dexterously disentangles the complex and varied ways in which blackness has been co-produced by ancient authors and artists; their readers, audiences, and viewers; and contemporary scholars. Exploring the precarious hold that race has on skin coloration, the author uncovers the many silences, suppressions, and misappropriations of blackness within modern studies of Greek antiquity. Shaped by performance studies and critical race theory alike, her book maps out an authoritative archaeology of blackness that reappraises its significance. It offers a committedly anti-racist approach to depictions of black people while rejecting simplistic conflations or explanations.

Get 20% off a copy of Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity using promo code UBGA2022 at Cambridge University Press (valid until February 2023).

Keep up with Sarah’s work on Twitter @BlackAntiquity and on her website.

@amandajoycehall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies.

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Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life (FSG, 2023) is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.--and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family's origins as well as MLK's complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father--as well as the nation's most mourned martyr.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history's greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

Jonathan Eig is a former senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including two highly acclaimed bestsellers, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. Visit him at JonathanEig.com.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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H. C. C. Astwood: minister and missionary, diplomat and politician, enigma in the annals of US history. In Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation (Duke UP, 2024), Christina Cecelia Davidson explores Astwood’s extraordinary and complicated life and career. Born in 1844 in the British Caribbean, Astwood later moved to Reconstruction-era New Orleans, where he became a Republican activist and preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. In 1882 he became the first Black man named US consul to the Dominican Republic. Davidson tracks the challenges that Astwood faced as a Black politician in an era of rampant racism and ongoing cross-border debates over Black men’s capacity for citizenship. As a US representative and AME missionary, Astwood epitomized Black masculine respectability. But as Davidson shows, Astwood became a duplicitous, scheming figure who used deception and engaged in racist moral politics to command authority. His methods, Davidson demonstrates, show a bleaker side of Black international politics and illustrate the varied contours of transnational moral discourse as people of all colors vied for power during the ongoing debate over Black rights in Santo Domingo and beyond.

Kiana M. Knight is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Kiana’s Webpage

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At the center of 1970s New York's most iconic clubs—from the celebrity-studded Studio 54 to the premiere lesbian discotheque Sahara—stood a queer Black woman on the turntables: Sharon White. With a sound she describes as "edgy, deep, aggressive, tech, synthy, percussive and lush," White became the first woman resident DJ at the Saint and the only woman to ever play Paradise Garage, breaking barriers in spaces where women were told they didn't belong. Her five-decade career didn't just challenge disco's male-dominated DJ culture; it redefined it, paving the way for future generations of women behind the decks. In this season finale, we explore how one visionary artist carved out space in disco's inner sanctum and what her trailblazing journey reveals about women—especially queer Black women—who shaped the sound and culture of an era from behind the booth.

In the Season 2 Finale, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares talk with legendary DJ Sharon White. Born in West Babylon, New York, White studied music at the New York School of Music before becoming a radio disc jockey. In 1975, she transitioned to club DJing, finding near-instant success at legendary venues including Studio 54, the Saint, Paradise Garage, Sahara, Limelight, and the Warehouse. She has been credited by several other women DJs, including Lizzz Krizer and Wendy Hunt, for helping them break onto the scene. White is still DJing today, and you can find her mixes on SoundCloud and Mixcloud.

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Western democracies are haunted. Michael Hanchard suggests that the specter of race is what haunts our democracies, but it may be more accurate to suggest that they are haunted by their own racialized death machines—by racialized premature death. If this haunting is not adequately attended to, democracies cannot fulfill their function. Even W. E. B. Du Bois, whose lynching-as-crucifixion stories are important among the stories of Black peoplehood and represent an important attempt to reckon with death in democracy, did not attend to the haunting. But many innovative Black female democrats did. Black women face a crisis of premature death. They are 10 percent of the US female population yet represent 59 percent of women murdered. Their deaths are most often instances of intimate partner violence and occur in private, whereas most large-scale Black political mobilization centers on deaths that are “spectacular.” The centrality of spectacular death has functioned to marginalize Black women in the stories of Black peoplehood and has ensured that they are not the main beneficiaries of large-scale Black political mobilization. But the dearth of mobilization around the deaths of women has not stopped Black women from attending to that which haunts our democracy. Moreover, it is not simply Du Bois’s abolition democracy toward which the women have worked. Their work has involved experimentation with novel democratic forms, and we should think about that work—their methods and the substance of their contributions—within the framework of “Morrisonian truant democracy,” which provides the solution to the problem of mobilization. Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy (Oxford UP, 2025)

Professor Shatema Threadcraft is the Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Shatema continued their conversation.

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Wilberforce, Clarkson, Wesley. Britain’s great abolitionist activist Granville Sharp. Each of these consequential figures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world were galvanized by the moral power of a modest Quaker teacher who never ventured more than a few miles from his home in Philadelphia: Anthony Benezet. While Benezet was buried in an unmarked grave, his fingerprints are all over the extinction of the Atlantic slave trade and the gathering strength of America’s own burgeoning abolitionist movement. He was a figure of global importance, “a saint,” Garry Wills called him, a great bearer to the rest of the world of the American ideals (no matter how compromised) of equality and liberty.
Anthony Benezet lived, by chance, at the nexus of radical Christianity and revolutionary democracy, and he fused the power of those two streams of morality in a way that changed lives and challenged political institutions so compellingly that the world became a different place because of him. But for all the magnitude of Benezet’s impact, he is largely unknown outside scholars of the period. He does not exist in any meaningful way in the widely read histories and biographies that define and amplify America’s historical consciousness.
In Anthony Benezet: Quaker, Abolitionist, Anti-Racist (U Georgia Press, 2025), preeminent biographer Dr. David Chanoff tells Benezet’s story—who he was, what he did, how he did it, and why it was that William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” of Pennsylvania provided the matrix for the historic transformation the abolitionist educator brought about. Indeed, Dr. Chanoff carves out a place for this forgotten American hero as a pioneering figure among those who launched American ideals onto the world stage.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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