CARCERAL HISTORY is back! This spring semester has been busy — lots of peer review, running graduate admissions for the first time, commuting out to Storrs to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in carceral history, and very excitingly, The Cambridge Companion to American Carceral History is nearing completion.
I'll be at OAH in Philadelphia for a panel I organized, "Carcerality and Corporality in the Twentieth Century United States: New Historical Approaches to Critical Prison Studies." It is on Friday at 10:30am and covers segregation, health policy, pregnancy, and blood selling in prisons.
OAH includes tracks for panels on the topics of "Carceral State/Mass Incarceration" and "Crime and Violence" that will keep you busy for basically every panel.
Also related to OAH, Stuart Schrader is having a book launch event at Wooden Shoe for his new book, Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, out with Basic Books tomorrow. My graduate student Robert Dubovy gave it a very favorable review over at The Metropole.
Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves
A few new books and pre-orders to check out:
Pulitzer Prize winner and my #1 dissertation advisor Heather Ann Thompson published Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage with Pantheon. Catch her on tour in a city near you or on Fresh Air.
From University of Michigan Press, musicologist David Metzler's Prison Song: Music and Incarceration in the United States "reveals how musicians have confronted the prison system by telling the life stories of imprisoned individuals, creating empathetic bonds between listeners and those individuals, and critiquing the racial and social inequalities that incarceration preys upon."
From UNC Press, pre-orders are open for Chin Jou's Captive Consumers: Hunger, Violence, and Inequality in American Prison Food, which comes out August 4, right in time for fall syllabi. Of this book, one reader (me) said this book is “Elegantly constructed, carefully researched, and at the cutting edge of carceral history and prison studies research. Chin Jou has accomplished something special.”
From Beacon Press, Talitha Leflouria's much anticipated Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block is available for pre-order and out August 11. Michelle Alexander called it "a paradigm-shifting account of American incarceration, tracing its roots to the domestic slave trade and the long history of racialized confinement that has shaped Black women’s lives for centuries. With extraordinary archival rigor and narrative power, she reveals mass incarceration not as a modern aberration but as a central throughline of our nation’s history."
From University of California Press's excellent American Studies Now series in January 2027, Marisol LeBrón's Policed: A Latinx History of State Violence. "Spanning the nineteenth century to the present, Policed examines how policing became a key component in the formation of Latinx identity and political consciousness, and still lies at the heart of many pressing issues confronting Latinx communities today."
If you see me at OAH, don't hesitate to say hi! This Is My Jail will be available at the Penn Press booth and is also available for paperback pre-order.
Carceral History is an always free newsletter published by a woman ready to party in Philadelphia next week. If you'd like to have your work featured here, please email carceralhistory@gmail.com.