African American Intellectual History Society

10/14/2026

What can Mary Church Terrell’s experiences with reproductive loss reveal about the intersections of Black women’s activism, motherhood, and grief?

In this new piece for the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), historian
Elizabeth Gonzalez explores Terrell’s deeply personal struggles with miscarriage, infant loss, and infertility—and how these experiences shaped her understanding of motherhood and her commitment to the well-being of Black children and future generations.

Mary Church Terrell provides us with a unique glimpse into the struggles of infertility for a Black woman at the turn of the twentieth century. Though infertility is a modern term, the effects of the challenges surrounding conception, pregnancy, and childbirth have been felt by women throughout hist

10/08/2026

👉🏾 In a new piece, "Black Ivy in the Classroom: How Black Teachers Used Style as Pedagogy," Professor Derrick P. Alridge explores the sartorial style of Black teachers from the 1950s through the 1980s—and argues that their clothing was about much more than appearance.

The piece also offers a beautiful reflection on the teachers who shaped Professor Alridge's own understanding of style, intellect, and what it meant to be a Black educator.

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I viewed Black teachers as icons of fashion and style. Mr. Willie Cain, a high school teacher and principal, always wore a starched white shirt and tie, smoked a pipe, and carried a briefcase. Ms. Atchison, my third-grade teacher, wore fashionable, neatly pressed d

09/22/2026

✨In today’s post, Mickell Carter, an editorial assistant at Global Black Thought, interviews Vanessa Charlot about her new article, “In the Shadow of Cotton and Blood: Black Women, Photography, and the Echoes of Slavery." The article examines Black women’s photography as a form of intellectual history, ethical practice, and visual sovereignty through a close analysis of Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s Daufuskie Islandand the author’s own photographic series Down in the Delta.

In today’s post, Mickell Carter, an editorial assistant at Global Black Thought (the official journal of AAIHS), interviews Vanessa Charlot about her new article, "In the Shadow of Cotton and Blood: Black Women, Photography, and the Echoes of Slavery," which examines Black women’s photography as...

09/15/2026

✨In today’s post, Mickell Carter interviews Keidrick Roy about his article, “‘The Wrong End of the Telescope’: Anna Julia Cooper’s Concrete Universalism,” which conceptualizes “concrete universalism” and “individual self-determination” in Anna Julia Cooper’s writings. The theory of concrete universalism recognizes that an individual’s experience as part of a subjugated group can cultivate greater sensitivity to the ethical development of universal values usually associated with the rationalistic abstractions of Enlightenment liberal ideas.

In today’s post, Mickell Carter, an editorial assistant at Global Black Thought (the official journal of AAIHS), interviews Keidrick Roy about his article, "'The Wrong End of the Telescope': Anna Julia Cooper’s Concrete Universalism," which conceptualizes “concrete universalism” and “indiv...

09/07/2026

✨In today’s post, Mickell Carter interviews Jaimie D. Crumley about her article, “‘And Then Forget’: Charlotte (“Lottie”) Forten and the Nineteenth-Century Black Feminist Project to be Remembered,” which examines how Antebellum Black abolitionist women were proto-race women. They were moral leaders of the biracial abolitionist cause. They were productive writers and helped form mutual aid and anti-slavery societies. However, their contemporaries often overlooked them and their contributions to abolitionism.

Freeborn author, activist, and educator Charlotte L. Forten (1837–1914) was a proto-race woman. She served as a personal, intellectual, and relational bridge between antebellum abolitionist women and the race women born during and after the Civil War era. This article situates Forten within the historiography of nineteenth-century race women whose private, semi-private, and public writings, activist pedagogy, and relationship-building demanded that Black women and their ideas be remembered.

In today’s post, Mickell Carter, an editorial assistant at Global Black Thought (the official journal of AAIHS), interviews Jaimie D. Crumley about her article, “'And Then Forget': Charlotte (“Lottie”) Forten and the Nineteenth-Century Black Feminist Project to be Remembered," which examines...

08/31/2026

✨ In today’s post, Mickell Carter, an editorial assistant at Global Black Thought, interviews John Frederick Bell about his article, “Speaking of Learning: Education, Epistemology, and the Discourse of the Female Talented Tenth,” which examines the role of education as a heuristic in late 19th-century Black feminist thought as expressed by the six Black women speakers at the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women.

Against the backdrop of Jim Crow’s rise, these leading members of the “Female Talented Tenth” used ideas and experiences of learning to define their character, demonstrate their potential, and articulate their visions of reform. While prior scholarship emphasizes education as a source of Black women’s empowerment, this article considers the tension between liberal education and racial retrenchment and analyzes how the Female Talented Tenth navigated this conflict in their discourse.

In today’s post, Mickell Carter, an editorial assistant at Global Black Thought (the official journal of AAIHS), interviews John Frederick Bell about his article, "Speaking of Learning: Education, Epistemology, and the Discourse of the Female Talented Tenth," which examines the role of education a...

08/13/2026

We are excited to announce the publication of the Fall 2026 issue of Global Black Thought! 📖✨

This issue brings together original research, interviews, a dynamic book forum, and reviews exploring Black intellectual traditions across time, place, and political context.

Highlights include conversations with Barbara D. Savage and Carole Boyce Davies, essays by John Frederick Bell, Keidrick Roy, Jaimie D. Crumley, and Vanessa Charlot, and a special forum on Mary Frances Phillips’s groundbreaking new book on Ericka Huggins, featuring LaShawn Harris, Joshua L. Crutchfield, Casey D. Nichols, Yohuru Williams, Zinga A. Fraser, and Stefan M. Bradley.

📖 Read the new issue:
https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/57432

Please read, share, and spread the word!

08/05/2026

👉🏾 Discover how music has long served as a powerful language of identity, memory, and resistance across the African diaspora.

In "Rhythms of Resistance in Afro-Latino Identity, Music, and Culture," Kayla Becknuss (Baylor University) explores the rich cultural and political significance of Afro-Latino musical traditions and the ways they have shaped struggles for freedom, belonging, and self-definition across generations.

The opening beats from the bombas de pellejo at Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime show came from an instrument brought over by enslaved Africans to Puerto Rico. Bad Bunny then displays a sugar plantation, signaling to the enslaved people who helped build what Puerto Rico is today and the island’s ...

08/03/2026

Today on Black Perspectives, Russell Crosthwait (Baylor University) explores the Black intellectual traditions that shaped Frederick Douglass—and argues that Douglass's greatest rhetorical lessons emerged not simply from books, but from the intellectual and spiritual worlds created by enslaved communities.

"What Douglass argued is a different question from how he argued it. Where did he learn to time a silence, work a pronoun, and drop a Bible verse on a crowd that did not see it coming? Not in any library in New York. He learned it earlier—on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and in the streets of Baltimore among people whose names the country does not remember."

Read the essay: https://www.aaihs.org/the-black-intellectual-traditions-that-shaped-frederick-douglass/

The United States recently marked 250 years since the adoption of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. For this occasion, a quote has been circulating from Frederick Douglass: "This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn." Most Americans will hear it as proof that the Republi

07/31/2026

📚Our online roundtable on Christopher Tounsel.'s 'Bounds of Blackness' concludes with a response by the author. Click the link below to read Tounsel’s essay, "African Americans, , and the Politics of Solidarity."

"How, then, did African Americans articulate solidarity with an African context that did not experience the more legible type of exclusively white colonial domination experienced by most African nations? How, furthermore, did Black Americans practically learn about an African context beyond the register of race-based transatlantic slavery?"

This post is part of our online roundtable on Christopher Tounsel’s Bounds of Blackness. In April 2023, civil conflict erupted in Sudan between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). While numbers alone never convey a war’s human toll, the statistic