From the late 17th century to the abolition of the slave trade in the Atlantic, Almost Dead (University of Georgia Press, 2022) is an account of the lives, sufferings, and resistances of thousands of enslaved people in the Black urban Atlantic, and how the survival of those captives led to the formation of unique and dynamic communities. Dr. Michael L. Dickinson explores a network of commercially linked cities to reveal commonalities, differences, and connections between urban communities of enslaved Black people across the Atlantic: both in the mainland United States and the Caribbean. As Dr. Dickinson reveals through the adoption of the perspectives of the enslaved, the similarities far outweighed the difference, and cities continued to be key sites for both Black subjugation and resilience. These similarities root themselves in the all-too-similar environments of oppression and a shared transnational need of enslaved Black people to resist social death and maintain their humanity.

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While the American Revolution is the agreed-upon beginning of our nation’s origins, the meaning of that revolution has never achieved anywhere near the same degree of consensus. For almost as long as the United States has existed, a wide range of political and social actors have narrativized and reimagined the Revolution to match their current climates and personal agendas. Through revealing the Revolution’s singular presence as an American national myth, Dr. Hattem reveals the ever-changing nature of the Revolution’s meaning, how the nation’s founding is used far more often as a divisive tool than a unifying one, and how reinventing the past is a central and long-lived American sociopolitical pastime.

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In the first twenty-five years after its founding, the United States experienced an extreme wave of land speculation, so intense that people referred to it as a “mania” both then and now. Dr. Michael A. Blaakman’s Speculation Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) traces the revolutionary origins of this real-estate fanaticism in a catalogue of ambition, corruption, capitalism, and politics that spanned millions of acres and was intrinsically tied to Native American land dispossession. Dr. Blaakman follows the schemes of these speculators from boom to bust, and in doing so creates a picture of the economic realities that underpinned (and underpin) U.S. settler colonialism: a frontier defined by profit first, and land second, where the conventions of the era firmly rooted land theft as an axiom of the American republic and made speculative capitalism intrinsic to the land of the free.

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