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Mar 24, 2025 | 
chapter16.org | Clay Risen |Sara West |Aram Goudsouzian |Maria Browning
Almost two years ago, Yolanda Pierce moved to Nashville to become dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School. This was and is intensely good news. In Dr. Pierce, Nashville is met by an activist scholar who is also an accomplished administrator and a renowned public intellectual.
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Feb 21, 2025 | 
chapter16.org | Aram Goudsouzian |Ed Tarkington |Kashif Andrew Graham |Clay Risen
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This review was originally published on September 5, 2018. ***The young woman and the old man shared clingstone peaches. She brought him a Virginia ham and a ripe watermelon. Once they feasted on a “marvelous mess of blue crabs.” When the old man felt like it, he told her stories of his life—of Africa, of the Middle Passage, of slavery and freedom, of resilience and heartache. Nearly a century later, we have Barracoon, his remarkable and painful memoir.
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Feb 14, 2025 | 
chapter16.org | Aram Goudsouzian |Melinda Baker |Bradley Hartsell |Maria Browning
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: This interview originally appeared on October 15, 2018. ***Even a seasoned historian might not recognize the names of Amy Ashwood, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, Celia Jane Allen, and Amy Jacques Garvey. But as Keisha Blain demonstrates in Set the World on Fire, these women shaped the discourse of black nationalism in the era before Black Power. With creativity and pragmatism, they altered the trajectory of American politics.
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Jan 30, 2025 | 
chapter16.org | Aram Goudsouzian |Maria Browning
Every year, the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis bestows an award for a nonfiction book that best furthers understanding of the American Civil Rights Movement and its legacy. This year’s winner is Tanisha Ford’s Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement, an engrossing story of a Black socialite who raised the funds that fueled grassroots struggles for racial justice.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
chapter16.org | Aram Goudsouzian |Maria Browning
In the 1990 hip-hop anthem “Fight the Power,” Chuck D of Public Enemy slammed Elvis Presley. Elvis may have been “a hero to most,” but for the militantly conscious rapper, that “sucker” was a “straight-up racist,” lumped with the conservative icon John Wayne. The lyrics evoked the long, complicated debate over Presley’s legacy: Did his music bridge a racial chasm, or did he steal from Black artists? In Before Elvis, Preston Lauterbach flips the frame on this question.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
chapter16.org | Aram Goudsouzian |Maria Browning
In the recent presidential election, immigration across the Mexican border was a hot-button issue. InImmigration, Policy and the People of Latin America, Bryce Ashby and Michael LaRosa seek to understand migration into the United States from the perspective of Latin Americans. Combining history, policy, and personal profiles of migrants, they illuminate the diverse experiences of migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Colombia.
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
washingtonpost.com | Aram Goudsouzian
(Penguin Press)Review by Aram GoudsouzianSeptember 18, 2024 at 8:30 a.m. EDTWhy are we still haunted by the ghost of Emmett Till? He died in 1955 and we keep revisiting his tale, reckoning with its tormented history. Is it because his murder was so monstrous? Till, a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta, had some kind of encounter with a White woman named Carolyn Bryant in the grocery store Bryant’s family owned.
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
chapter16.org | Aram Goudsouzian
In 2016, PolitiFact identified “fake news” as its lie of the year. It was no accident that 2016 was an election year. As Joseph Hayden explains in A History of Disinformation in the U.S., the media has perpetrated periodic lies on issues that shape the evolution of American democracy. Hayden is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Strategic Media at the University of Memphis. He is the author of four previous books on journalism history, as well as writing guides on style and grammar.
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
psrmemphis.org | Aram Goudsouzian
The candidate for president of the United States of America exuded a cocky energy. He presided over rallies that dangled on the edge of violence. He attracted white working-class people who reveled in how he defied the norms for public behavior. He encouraged an “us-against-them” mentality. The candidate for president of the United States of America blasted liberal elites and snobby media types. He said racist stuff and then insisted that he was not racist.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
chapter16.org | Aram Goudsouzian
Many years ago, I invited Joe B. Scott, a former star on the Memphis Red Sox, to visit my class on U.S. sports history. In his presence, the students marveled. They relished this living, breathing connection to the bygone Negro Leagues. Mr. Scott passed away in 2013, but his team and era live on in a new book by Keith Wood, The Memphis Red Sox: A Negro Leagues History.
