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About Adam McNeil

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Adam's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Adam:

African American Studies September 22, 2023

Before Busing

A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle

Zebulon Vance Miletsky

Hosted by Adam McNeil
Listen:
In many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and busing erupted, many observers professed shock at …
African American Studies September 3, 2023

I Saw Death Coming

A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction

Kidada E. Williams

Hosted by Adam McNeil
The story of Reconstruction is often told from the perspective of the politicians, generals, and journalists whose accounts claim an outsized place in collective memory. But this pivotal era looked …
African American Studies August 20, 2023

Becoming Justice Thomas

A Discussion with Joel Anderson of Slate, Hang Up and Listen, and Slow Burn

Joel Anderson

Hosted by Adam McNeil
On today’s podcast, we are changing things up a bit. Instead of interviewing the author of a recent book, I am interviewing another podcaster about their recent narrative podcast season …
African American Studies June 4, 2023

Dark Agoras

Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place

J.T. Roane

Hosted by Adam McNeil
Listen:
In Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU Press, 2023), author J. T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent …
African American Studies April 18, 2023

The Hated Cage

An American Tragedy in Britain's Most Terrifying Prison

Nicholas Guyatt

Hosted by Adam McNeil
After the War of 1812, more than five thousand American sailors were marooned in Dartmoor Prison on a barren English plain; the conflict was over but they had been …
African American Studies April 8, 2023

My Soul Is a Witness

The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching

Mari N. Crabtree

Hosted by Adam McNeil
In My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching (Yale UP, 2023), Mari N. Crabtree traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left …
African American Studies February 2, 2023

Almost Dead

Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807

Michael Lawrence Dickinson

Hosted by Adam McNeil
Beginning in the late seventeenth century and concluding with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807 (U Georgia …
African American Studies January 31, 2023

Dismal Freedom

A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp

J. Brent Morris

Hosted by Adam McNeil
The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal …
African American Studies November 25, 2022

Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Tara T. Green

Hosted by Adam McNeil
Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer, suffragist, and educator. Until …
African American Studies November 23, 2022

Black Bodies, White Gold

Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

Hosted by Adam McNeil
In Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke UP, 2021), Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as …
African American Studies September 9, 2022

Marcus Nevius on Becoming a Historian, Marronage, Slave Resistance, and More!

Marcus Nevius

Hosted by Adam McNeil
Today's episode of "New Books in African American Studies" is special. Why, you might ask? Because today's episode marks my 100th episode on the NBN! To celebrate, I am chopping it …
African American Studies July 29, 2022

Black Majority

Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion

Peter H. Wood

Hosted by Adam McNeil
Welcome to New Books in African American Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I am your host, Adam Xavier McNeil. Today’s podcast is special, not because …
African American Studies June 23, 2022

Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions

Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education

Bianca C. Williams, Dian D. Squire, and Frank A. Tuitt

Hosted by Adam McNeil
Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education (SUNY Press, 2021) provides a multidisciplinary exploration of the contemporary university's entanglement with the history of …
African American Studies March 17, 2022

Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr

Popular Black History in Postwar America

E. James West

Hosted by Adam McNeil
Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020) reveals the previously hidden impact of Ebony magazine as a major producer and disseminator of …
African American Studies March 9, 2022

Cedric Robinson

The Time of the Black Radical Tradition

Joshua Myers

Hosted by Adam McNeil
Cedric Robinson – political theorist, historian and activist – was one of the greatest black radical thinkers of the twentieth century, whose work resonates deeply with contemporary movements such as …
African American Studies February 11, 2022

The Science of Abolition

How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress

Eric Herschthal

Hosted by Adam McNeil
In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders' scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders. Looking beyond the …
African American Studies January 28, 2022

Jumping the Broom

The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual

Tyler D. Parry

Hosted by Adam McNeil
In Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual (UNC Press, 2020), Tyler D. Parry untangles the convoluted history of the "broomstick wedding." Popularly associated with …
African American Studies November 30, 2021

Ben Fletcher

The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly

Peter Cole

Hosted by Adam McNeil
In the early twentieth century, when many US unions disgracefully excluded black and Asian workers, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) warmly welcomed people of color, in keeping with …
African American Studies November 30, 2021

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood

African American Children in the Antebellum North

Crystal Webster

Hosted by Adam McNeil
For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African American children, particularly those affected by …
African American Studies November 9, 2021

I've Been Here All the While

Black Freedom on Native Land

Alaina E. Roberts

Hosted by Adam McNeil
Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of 40 acres and a mule--the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War …
African American Studies October 26, 2021

Imani Perry on a Life in African American Studies

Imani Perry

Hosted by Adam McNeil
On today’s podcast, I am chopping it up with my dear friend and play cousin Dr. Imani Perry, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Dr. Perry …
African American Studies October 18, 2021

The Colored Conventions Movement

Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century

P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey

Hosted by Adam McNeil
P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey's edited volume The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2021) is the first to focus on the Colored Conventions movement …
African American Studies September 24, 2021

Surviving Southampton

African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community

Vanessa M. Holden

Hosted by Adam McNeil
The local community around the Nat Turner rebellion The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner involved an entire community. Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and …
African American Studies September 6, 2021

Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race

Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel

Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus

Hosted by Adam McNeil
From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness …