Open research questions in Race, History, and American Society
103 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 10,627 Race, History, and American Society papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
The present study has a few limitations worth highlighting. First, we only captured Black mothers’ hopes and visions for a future in which Kamala Harris was president. In asking what mothers wanted in a Trump Administration, we might have gathered different information that would have reflected their perspectives on what the world would look like under a different president than Kamala Harris. Future studies should continue to ask Black mothers what they want to see at the beginning (as well as throughout) any presidential administration. Second, we did not provide specific counts of how many Black mothers endorsed each theme because mothers frequently mentioned more than one theme. With a bigger sample size, future research could disentangle the most important issues areas Black mothers would like to see addressed. Third, although our study begins to paint a picture of political engagement and revolutionary mothering among Black mothers who made, on average, between $100,000 - $149,000 and live on the East Coast, future research would benefit from asking more mothers across the United States to share their experiences. While the goal of our work was not to generalize to all Black mothers, we believe that the level of transferability would increase even more with a bigger sample size that includes even more voices and perspectives. Although federal governments play a critical role in addressing the key issues outlined, states and communities can also greatly shape Black families’ access to and utilization of key resources (e.g. community based, culturally grounded prenatal and postpartum care, universal Pre-K, reproductive healthcare). Moreover, access and opportunities may not equally distributed across mothers of different socioeconomic statuses. Future research should broaden the scope of research to ask about state and community based initiatives that may be working in opposition to and/or in partnership with the federal government.
“The moms all Agree on one Thing:” Black Women’s Perspectives on Key Agenda Items for the Next President of the United States · 2026 · DOIIn this article, I argue that even with the presence of solid roots such as military service and contributions to UK culture, these are insufficient in producing a stable and acceptable national identity for mixed-heritage children.
First, we demonstrate that neighborhoods are a widespread yet understudied site of Confederate commemoration through an inventory of 297 southern United States neighborhoods commemorating the Confederacy (NCCs) with neighborhood or street names.
Confederates in the Cul de Sac: exploring race and neighborhood names in the southern United States · 2025 · DOIThe article concludes with suggestions for how these fields can engage with each other to develop academic approaches that account for but do not privilege the position of Black Americans within diasporic exchanges in the North Atlantic region, which is currently an underexplored area in diaspora studies.
Historians describe the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) as an urban movement, but the reasons for its urban focus have not been adequately explored.
An “urban voluntary association” in the rural South? Urbanity, race, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1910–1930 · 2021 · DOIUsing new research and fresh analysis to unpack the history of the painting, and particularly the British context of its creation, I argue that the painting’s active role in propagating the conflicted racial politics of the period has been underrecognized as scholars focused only on its US reception.
This theoretical paper presents a discourse on the importance of hair to the identity of Black people and will add to the limited literature by providing Canadian and Québécois institutions with a greater appreciation of the prominence of Black hair and hairstyles to the identity and well-being of Black people.
To them, the Native experience in this era was limited to the Plains Wars, and to an allotment policy intended to integrate Native-held property into the US economy.
Allotment, Jim Crow, and the State: Reconceptualizing the Privatization of Land, the Segregation of Bodies, and the Politicization of Sexuality in the Native South · 2017 · DOIThe archival resources for Alice Dunbar-Nelson, born Alice Ruth Moore in 1875, provide a striking exception to the general rule that the personal papers of black women born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are scarce, thanks to the careful preservation of her papers by her niece Pauline A.
To write a biography of “any person of color, or a woman of any stratum,” notes Sojourner Truth biographer Nell Irvin Painter, one “cannot stick to convention, for conventional sources mostly are lacking” (289).
ABSTRACT This rhetorical analysis investigates Martin Delany's (1861) innovative yet understudied Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party as a significant instance of nineteenth-century African American generic transformation and constitutive pan-Africanism.
Transforming the African Missionary Narrative: Rhetorical Innovation in Martin Delany's<i>Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party</i> · 2013 · DOIIn conceptualizing Black Politics, Nelson contends that the passage of policies such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were insufficient for achieving full political incorporation.
Drawing on a variety of unstudied and understudied materials, this essay seeks to contextualize the lives of nineteenth-century Black residents of Sackville, Westmorland County, New Brunswick, as a means of considering their lives and what factors may have motivated their choice to leave in the late 1860s.
Through this discussion, the reader is presented with how this lack of consensus on identity, both internally and externally, has been the basis upon which federal recognition has been denied, yet it led to the establishment of community-based Indian schools, churches, and business and the ability of Lumbee to vote, at a time when African Americans were being disenfranchised.
<i>Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation</i> (review) · 2011 · DOIEver-shifting ideas of racial difference shaped the labor patterns not only of people of African descent but also of all other groups as well, including whites; and further, it is clear that social categories such as black, white, and Indian are insufficient to understand fully the complex dynamics of labor deployment throughout the South.
Labor and the Idea of Race in the American South · 2009Although Goldstein acknowledges the limitations of this study as representative of the community as a whole, it is an interesting source that provides information about where Gentiles and Jews came from, their education, whether they rented or owned, their income levels, and the number of their offspring.
The founding of the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race at the beginning of the twenty-first century acknowledges the continuing impact of Du Bois's prophecy, his pioneering role as one of the founders of the discipline of sociology in the American academy, and the considerable work that remains to be done as we confront the “problem” that Du Bois identified over a century ago.
From this anxiety emerged a “second wave” of Black social scientists who both offered important and under recognized critiques of the “Chicago School” outlook, while reinforcing its industrial framework of organization and civilization in ways that marked “Black” identity as maladjustment, deviance and dysfunction.
Africana ties Africana women to their ancestral homeland and womanism evokes Sojourner Truth's open challenge to an all-white women's rights convention in 1852, where she was snubbed on the basis of her race.
Reassessing Africana Womanism: Continuity and Change · 2001In the process, he analyses the ways in which various groups, from the SCLC to the Black Panthers, triedwith very mixed resultsto use Rhythm and Blues and the politics of celebrity to further their cause.
The resemblance to other script-minded novels, and the cultural (mis)representation in Spike Lee films should be examined in relation to how native culture is modified in RESERVATION BLUES.
By 1880 over 10,000 Southern black children were being taught in schools staffed by Hampton graduates; over ninety percent of Hampton's black graduates taught school, although vastly fewer Indians graduatedwith similarly usable credentials, since they returned home to reservations where teaching opportunities for native Americans were scarce.
it would 30 The Review of Black Political Economy THE SIXTH PAN AFRICAN CONGRESS - A n Announcement - Despite the strides that the black man has made in the last quarter century, both in his original home, on the continent of Africa, and in the various other parts of the world where black communities and nations exist, much remains to be done.
But while the already mountainous literature on blacks may have expanded geometri-cally (Miller and Dreger, 1973: 1), pathways potentially leading to theoretically interesting as well as socially useful results still remain to be explored.
com at MOUNT ALLISON UNIV on June 22, 2015 [144] their vision and interpretative analysis, and vigor is lacking, but despite this, the book is good, fresh, and unique.
Most-cited papers in Race, History, and American Society
- Race, beauty, and the tangled knot of a guilty pleasure · Feminist Theory · 2006 · 144 citations
- The Use of Blacks for Medical Experimentation and Demonstration in the Old South · The Journal of Southern History · 1982 · 110 citations
- Cite Black Women: A Critical Praxis (A Statement) · Feminist Anthropology · 2021 · 107 citations
- Captivity, Kinship, and Black Masculine Care Work under Domestic Warfare · American Anthropologist · 2021 · 87 citations
- Black Women in the United States and Unpaid Collective Work: Theorizing the Community as a Site of Production · The Review of Black Political Economy · 2020 · 85 citations
- Geographies of race and ethnicity 1: Black geographies · Progress in Human Geography · 2022 · 83 citations
- Black Ecologies, subaquatic life, and the Jim Crow enclosure of the tidewater · Journal of Rural Studies · 2022 · 74 citations
- Listening to Black lives matter: racial capitalism and the critique of neoliberalism · Contemporary Political Theory · 2020 · 71 citations
- Theorizing race and settler colonialism within U.S. sociology · Sociology Compass · 2020 · 71 citations
- Do Black Politicians Matter? Evidence from Reconstruction · The Journal of Economic History · 2020 · 70 citations
Most recent work
- Whiteness as property: re-assessing the convergence of race and property in U.S. history · Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2026
- Bowl By Bowl: Black Women, Food Selling, and Survival in the Antebellum North · Journal of Social History · 2026
- Rethinking racism again? Assessing conceptual deadlocks and innovations in race theory · Critical Sociology · 2026
- The Ballot, The Bullet, and the Colonial Unchanged: A Prophetic Scholar's Reading of Malcolm X's 1964 Diagnostic and Its Sixty-Year Receipt · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- Peer influence on West Point cadets’ Civil War allegiances · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2026
- The internal colony: race and the American politics of global decolonization · The Global Sixties · 2026
- The racial architecture of belonging: Du Bois and the boundaries of the nation · Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2026
- Bridging Literature and Civic Inquiry through Zora Neale Hurston: An Interdisciplinary Approach · Social Education · 2026
- Political Activism in the Harlem Renaissance · Social Education · 2026
- Intersectional Cultural Memory as Memory Activism in Michelle Cliff's Free Enterprise · American Studies in Scandinavia · 2026
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