An enthralling, eye-opening portrayal of this barrier-breaking American hero as a lifelong, relentlessly proud fighter for Black justice and civil rights. According to Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackie Robinson was “a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the Freedom Rides.” According to Hank Aaron, Robinson was a leader of the Black Power movement before there was a Black Power movement. According to his wife, Rachel Robinson, he was always Jack, not Jackie—the diminutive form of his name bestowed on him in college by white sports writers. And throughout his whole life, Jack Robinson was a fighter for justice, an advocate for equality, and an inspiration beyond just baseball. From prominent Robinson scholars Yohuru Williams and Michael G. Long comes Call Him Jack, an exciting biography that recovers the real person behind the legend, reanimating this famed figure’s legacy for new generations, widening our focus from the sportsman to the man as a whole, and deepening our appreciation for his achievements on the playing field in the process.

Although the Creeks constitute a sovereign nation today, the concept of the nation meant little to their ancestors in the Native South. Rather, as Steven Peach contends in Rivers of Power, the Creeks of present-day Georgia and Alabama conceptualized rivers as the basis of power, leadership, and governance in early America. An original work of Indigenous ethnohistory, Peach’s book explores the implications of this river-oriented approach to power, in which rivers were a metaphor for the subregional provinces that defined the political textures of Creek country. The provinces nurtured leaders who worked to mitigate dangers across the Native South, including intertribal war, trade dependence, settler intrusion, and land erosion. Rivers of Power describes a system in which these headmen forged remarkably malleable coalitions within and across provinces to safeguard Creek country from harm—but were in turn directed, approved, and contested by local townspeople and kin groups. Taking a unique bottom-up approach to the study of Native Americans, Peach reveals how local actors guided and thwarted Indigenous headmen far more frequently and creatively than has been assumed. He also shows that although the Creeks traced descent through the maternal line, some became more comfortable with bilateral kinship, giving weight to both the paternal and maternal lineages. Fathers and sons thus played greater roles in Creek governance than Indigenous scholarship has acknowledged. Weaving a new narrative of the Creeks and outlining the contours of their riverine mode of governance, this work unpacks the fraught dimensions of political power in the Native South—and, indeed, Native North America—in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By privileging Indigenous thought and intertribal history, it also advances the larger project of Native American history.

Appendix 42 in the report of the minister of agriculture for 1874 consists of a Report of proceedings connected with Canadian archives in Europe, by H.A.J.B. Verreau.

Uncovers how the Civil Rights Movement and Vatican II affected African American Catholics in Atlanta The history and practices of African American Catholics has been vastly understudied, and Black Catholics are often written off as a fringe sector of the religious population. Yet, Catholics of African descent have been a part of Catholicism since the early days of European exploration into the New World. In the Shadow of Ebenezer examines how the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Vatican Council affected African American Catholics in Atlanta, Georgia, focusing on the historic Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in the Old Fourth Ward. Our Lady of Lourdes is a neighbor of major historic Black Protestant churches in the city, including Ebenezer Baptist Church, a block away, which during the Civil Rights era was the pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. Featuring archival and oral history sources, the book examines the religious and cultural life of the parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, showing how this Black Catholic congregation fit into the overall religious ecology of the neighborhood. Examining Our Lady of Lourdes in relation to these larger Black Protestant congregations helps to illuminate whether and how they were shaped by their place at a center of the civil rights struggle, and how religious change and social change intersect.