The first full and definitive narrative of one of the most shocking and largely unknown events of racial injustice in US history: the execution of nineteen Black soldiers in Texas

On the sweltering, rainy night of August 23, 1917, one of the most consequential events affecting America’s long legacy of racism and injustice began in Houston, Texas. Inflamed by a rumor that a white mob was arming to attack them, and after weeks of police harassment, more than 100 African American soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, took their weapons without authorization and, led by a sergeant, marched into the largely Black San Felipe district of the city. Violent confrontations with police and civilians ensued and nineteen lives were lost.

The Army moved quickly to court-martial 118 soldiers on charges of mutiny and murder, even though a majority of the soldiers involved had never fired their weapons. Inadequately defended en masse by a single officer who was not a lawyer and had no experience in capital cases, in three trials undermined by perjured testimony and clear racial bias, and confronted by an all-white tribunal committed to a rapid judgment, 110 Black soldiers were found guilty—despite the fact that no mutiny had, in fact, taken place. In the predawn darkness of December 11, thirteen of them were hanged at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio—hastily and in secret, without any chance to appeal. News of the largest mass execution in the Army’s history outraged the country and inspired preventive legislation; and yet six more Black soldiers were executed in early 1918 and the rest were sentenced to life in prison.

The Houston Incident, as it became known, has remained largely untold, a deep stain on the Army’s record and pride. Award-winning historian and Army veteran John A. Haymond has spent six years researching the events surrounding the Incident and leading the efforts that ultimately led, in November 2023, to the largest act of retroactive clemency in the Army’s history when the verdicts were overturned and honorable discharges awarded to all the soldiers involved. His dramatic chronicle of what transpired—situated amongst the rampant racism in Texas and the country—is a crucially important and harrowing reminder of our racially violent past, offering the promise that justice, even posthumously, can prevail.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 14, 2026

• Author: John A. Haymond

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 400 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0802167594

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0802167590

Explores the intersection of racial thought and reproductive science and policy across the British Empire.

In Generating Difference, Andrew Wells traces the entwined histories of race, sex, and reproduction in Britain and its empire during the long eighteenth century. Challenging the assumption that the concept of race evolved in the modern era solely through new forms of biological science, Wells argues that older ideas of lineage, sexual reproduction, and bodily difference remained central to how race was understood, categorized, and enforced well into the nineteenth century.

From the pages of Enlightenment science to colonial policy in the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Pacific, Wells shows how reproductive sex served as a primary framework for defining human differences. Concepts of identity were written onto bodies—especially those marked as non-white or non-male—through perceived differences in anatomy, fertility, and sexuality, albeit never unproblematically. Whether in debates about slavery, interracial relationships, embryology, or population policy, the reproductive body became the crucible in which ideas about race and sex were forged and maintained.

Offering a global scope beyond the Atlantic, including South Asia and the Pacific, and drawing from a wide range of sources—from satire to scientific treatises—Generating Difference brings the scholarship of race and sexuality into direct and compelling conversation. Wells uncovers how deeply reproduction structured imperial ideologies and how the policing of bodies helped naturalize hierarchy, control, and exclusion. At its core, the book reconsiders what made difference "visible" in a period before the dominance of the idea of racial biology.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Johns Hopkins University Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 13, 2026

• Author: Andrew Wells

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 390 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1421453606

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1421453606

Publishers Weekly • Best Books of 2025 [Nonfiction]
Foreign Policy • Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“Howard French’s The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head.” ―David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

From the acclaimed author of Born in Blackness comes an extraordinary account of Africa’s liberation from colonial oppression, a work that fundamentally reshapes our understanding of modern history.

The Second Emancipation, the second work in a trilogy from best-selling author Howard W. French about Africa’s pivotal role in shaping world history, underscores Adam Hochschild’s contention that French is a “modern-day Copernicus.” The title―referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom―positions this liberation at the center of a “movement of global Blackness,” with one charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), at its head.

That so few people today know about Nkrumah is an omission that French demonstrates is “typical of our deliberate neglect of Africa’s enormous role in the birth of the modern world.” Determined to re-create Nkrumah’s life as “an epic twentieth-century story,”The Second Emancipationbegins with his impoverished, unheralded birth in the far-western region of Ghana’s Gold Coast. But blessed with a deep curiosity, a young Nkrumah pursued an overseas education in the United States. Nowhere is French’s consummate style more vivid than in Nkrumah’s early years in Depression-era America, especially in his mesmerizing portrait of a culturally effervescent Harlem that Nkrumah encountered in 1935 before heading to college. During his student years in Pennsylvania and later as an activist in London, Nkrumah became steeped in a renowned international Black intellectual milieu―including Du Bois, Garvey, Fanon, Padmore, and C.L.R. James, who called him “one of the greatest political leaders of our century”―and formed an ideology that readied him for an extraordinarily swift and peaceful rise to power upon his return to Ghana in 1947.

Four years later, in a political landslide he engineered while imprisoned, Nkrumah stunned Britain by winning the first general election under universal franchise in Africa, becoming Ghana’s first independent prime minister in 1957. As leader of a sovereign nation, Nkrumah wielded his influence to promote the liberation of the entire continent, pushing unity as the only pathway to recover from the damages of enslavement and subjugation. By the time national military and police forces, aided by the CIA, overthrew him in 1966, Nkrumah’s radical belief in pan-African liberation had both galvanized dozens of nascent African states and fired a global agenda of Black power.

In its dramatic recasting of the American civil rights story and in its tragic depiction of a continent that once exuded all the promise of a newly won freedom,The Second Emancipationbecomes a generational work that positions Africa at the forefront of modern-day history.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Liveright

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 6, 2026

• Author: Howard W. French

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 512 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1324099372

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1324099376

From one of America's most venerable politicians, the powerful, untold story of the pioneering Black congressmen from South Carolina who were elected in the aftermath of the Civil War, revealing why it took nearly a century before the ninth, James Clyburn, was elected.

Today, South Carolina congressman James E. Clyburn is renowned as a Democratic kingmaker and our nation's most august Black political leader. But behind him stand eight other remarkable men: the first Black politicians to go to Congress from his home state, and who blazed a path for his own ascent. Since his own arrival in Congress in the early nineties, Congressman Clyburn has been guided by the wisdom and example of these men, and also instructed by their struggles—especially with the demon of American racism. South Carolina's first eight Black congressmen all rose to office following the Civil War and emancipation, but then the dark veil of Jim Crow fell across the South. It would take nearly a century before the ninth Black representative, Clyburn himself, was elected.

In The First Eight, Congressman Clyburn shares these men's stories, and their message of liberty, with the nation they served. Among them are Joseph Rainey, the first Black politician to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in our nation's history, who was born enslaved in 1832; Robert Smalls, iconic for his heroism during the Civil War, when he fled the Confederacy, stole a ship, and fought for the Union Army; and Richard Cain, who ran a widely read newspaper for Black South Carolinians and is associated with the Emanuel AME Church, one of the oldest and most distinguished Black churches in America, and where neo-Nazi Dylan Roof killed nine Black congregants in a mass shooting in 2015. Through the trials, tribulations, triumphs, and challenges that all nine men faced, Congressman Clyburn reveals a whole new way of understanding the period between the Civil War and the present.

A unique blend of history and memoir, The First Eight is both a monument to the legacies of these eight trailblazing Americans, and also a clear-eyed appraisal of how far we've come, and how far we have left to go, in our nation's ongoing struggle for true democracy.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 11, 2025

• Author: Jim Clyburn

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 304 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316572748

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316572743

From The New York Times–bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson’s writings on race that every American should read

Among America’s Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controversially entangled with race and slavery than Thomas Jefferson. The man whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal” enslaved more than 600 people of African descent even as he acknowledged the injustice of slavery, saw himself as its opponent, and condemned it in his writings. How is this possible? In Jefferson on Race, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed gathers Jefferson’s most revealing writings about African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, enabling readers as never before to directly explore his complex and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and decisions on these subjects—the most hotly debated aspect of his legacy.

These selections come from Jefferson’s public and private writings, letters, and plantation records, as well as accounts by contemporaries, including his son Madison Hemings and three other people formerly enslaved at Monticello. The book documents Jefferson’s ideas about—and self-image in relation to—African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, as well as his conduct, including interactions with individual Black and Native people. The writings show how Jefferson responded to living in a multiracial slave society while professing progressive ideals, and how his views on race and slavery were shaped by his experiences with enslaved Black people.

Jefferson on Race is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Jefferson’s conflicted attitudes—and the impact of race and slavery on American history.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 31, 2026

• Author: Thomas Jefferson

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 416 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691122067

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691122069

The preeminent historians of the founding era speak their mind on the anniversary of the United States’ birth

In these powerful and personal essays, some of the most celebrated historians of the American Revolutionary era reflect on the meaning of 1776 to the nation in 2026, offering fresh insights and food for thought on every page. They tackle the most pressing topics that Americans debated in 1776 and continue to debate today: the meaning of democracy; the nature of information wars; immigration and the rights and obligations of citizenship; race and slavery; public health; the various and conflicting legacies of the founders; and the shifting nature of commemoration itself. Like the Revolutionary generation they know so well, on some issues these scholarly authorities find themselves largely in accord; on others they vehemently disagree. This is historical debate at its most urgent.