Calvin Schermerhorn
@calscherm.bsky.social
Author of The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made (2025) @yalepress. From Southern Marylandđ. Teaches history in Arizona đ”
Why do Latina/o households have just 22 cents on the dollar compared to white ones? "The project demonstrates how wealth inequality is the cumulative result of systems that have limited access to opportunity across generations." #racialwealthgap latino.ucla.edu/research/his...
Sueño Incompleto: A History of the Latino Wealth Gap in the U.S.
This report traces how Latino wealth has been shaped and constrained by five major interlocking policy systems that govern immigration, land and housing, labor markets, public benefits, and education.
latino.ucla.edu
@larryglickman.bsky.social writes, "For Trump and a group of conservative legal scholars and politicians to demand now that courts ignore the legal consensus of the past century-plus is...to command Americans to collectively engage in an act of historical amnesia" www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Americans Once Understood Birthright Citizenship
Newspaper columnists instructed generations of citizens about the Fourteenth Amendment. Today, the country seems to have forgotten how clear the law is.
theatlantic.com
@larryglickman.bsky.social writes, "For Trump and a group of conservative legal scholars and politicians to demand now that courts ignore the legal consensus of the past century-plus is...to command Americans to collectively engage in an act of historical amnesia" www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Americans Once Understood Birthright Citizenship
Newspaper columnists instructed generations of citizens about the Fourteenth Amendment. Today, the country seems to have forgotten how clear the law is.
theatlantic.com
Check out âUntil the Last Gun is Silentâ by @mattdelmont.bsky.socialâa brilliant,searing history of Black soldiers & anti-war activists struggling against racism & charges of betrayal to highlight the battle for justice at the heart of Americaâs Vietnam War www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736800...
Check out âUntil the Last Gun is Silentâ by @mattdelmont.bsky.socialâa brilliant,searing history of Black soldiers & anti-war activists struggling against racism & charges of betrayal to highlight the battle for justice at the heart of Americaâs Vietnam War www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/736800...
The First Black-Owned Bookstore and the Fight for Freedom Black abolitionist David Ruggles opened the first Black-owned bookstore in 1834, pointing the way to freedomâin more ways than one. daily.jstor.org/the-first-bl...
The First Black-Owned Bookstore and the Fight for Freedom - JSTOR Daily
Black abolitionist David Ruggles opened the first Black-owned bookstore in 1834, pointing the way to freedomâin more ways than one.
daily.jstor.org
Thanks @ashleyrparker.bsky.social for the requiem of The Washington Post. I too grew up reading it-and delivering it-in MD as a kid. My Dad would read aloud the Style invitational, book reviews & animal stories. I'll miss what Bezos wasted but treasure what it was www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...
The Murder of The Washington Post
Todayâs layoffs are the latest attempt to kill what makes the paper special.
theatlantic.com
Check out this blog post from Plunder of Black America author, Calvin Schermerhorn. Read this and more on our website!Â
When Canada was the Promised Land: What Canada Taught America about Freedom and Inclusive Democracy - Yale University Press
Calvin Schermerhornâ âI felt no real safety South of Canada,â Henry Goings recalled as he gazed at Canada across the Detroit River, âfor there is none to the colored man... READ MORE
yalebooks.yale.edu
Idrees Kahloon, @wsj.com reviews the Plunder of Black America by Calvin Schermerhorn
What We Miss When We Talk About the Racial Wealth Gap
Six decades of civil-rights efforts havenât budged it, and the usual prescriptionsâincluding reparationsâoffer no lasting solutions. Have we been focussing on the wrong things?
newyorker.com
Historian Calvin Schermerhorn traces four hundred years of Black dispossession and decapitalization, telling of the quiet heroism of those who worked to overcome obstacles and defy the plunder. Learn more at yalebooks.com.
The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made Hardcover by Calvin Schermerhorn www.amazon.com/Plunder-Blac...
The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made
The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made [Schermerhorn, Calvin] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made
amazon.com
Last was âThe Plunder of Black Americaâ by @calscherm.bsky.social, who uses individual cases across US history as a lens into the economic repression of Black people - with every gain by being quickly met with systemic subversion. Highly recommend Full review: bookwyrm.social/user/bwaber/... (5/5)
The Plunder of Black America
The long history of the racial wealth gap in America told through the stories of seven Black families who struggled to build wealth over multiple generations...
yalebooks.yale.edu
Thank you @joelegoza.bsky.social for a brilliant review in the L.A. Review of Books: lareviewofbooks.org/article/raci...
Racialized Economic Piracy | Los Angeles Review of Books
Joel Edward Goza dives into Calvin Schermerhornâs new study of American history, tracing a financial pattern of racial exploitation thatâs woven into the nationâs fabric.
lareviewofbooks.org
Thank you @joelegoza.bsky.social for a brilliant review in the L.A. Review of Books: lareviewofbooks.org/article/raci...
Racialized Economic Piracy | Los Angeles Review of Books
Joel Edward Goza dives into Calvin Schermerhornâs new study of American history, tracing a financial pattern of racial exploitation thatâs woven into the nationâs fabric.
lareviewofbooks.org
"The stories hit on almost all of the factors that contribute to our nationâs imbalance in racial wealth....this list takes on the flesh and blood of family lifeâstats become stories, & we must reckon not simply with what happened but also with the real people it happened to"-@joelegoza.bsky.social
Out now, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World by @rickbell.bsky.social A wide angle view of a global event that never loses focus on the Revolution itself. Check it out! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/752265...
My article shows how we can use postcolonial lenses to navigate something we as yet don't know how to acknowledge or talk about well: premodern, non-European people doing things that look a lot like what we now call blackface. read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/articl...
Performing Blackness in the Medieval Muslim Metropolis: Arabic Literature and Tropicalization
This essay aims to chart a path between premodern blackface performance and postcolonial theory that escapes colonial teleologies. It analyzes moments from the Abbasid through Mamluk era (ca. 750â1517...
read.dukeupress.edu
Out now, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World by @rickbell.bsky.social A wide angle view of a global event that never loses focus on the Revolution itself. Check it out! www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/752265...
Now out! Without Fear: Black Women & the Making of Human Rights â Keisha Blainâs brilliant new book tells a 200-year history of Black women who fought for human rights from enslavement through the activists against police violence in our time. Check it out: wwnorton.com/books/978039...
Without Fear
“<em>Without Fear</em> tells the stories of Black women who, like Deborah in the Bible, have engaged in social justice agitation, refusing to simply suffer by engaging in the redemptive work of ...
wwnorton.com
Congratulations and happy Pub Day to @ktgerbs.bsky.social "Archival Irruptions" tells a new history of Obeah, an Afro-Caribbean religion that was criminalized in 1760 after the largest slave revolt in the 18th century British Empire www.dukeupress.edu/archival-irr...
Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica
dukeupress.edu
Congratulations and happy Pub Day to @ktgerbs.bsky.social "Archival Irruptions" tells a new history of Obeah, an Afro-Caribbean religion that was criminalized in 1760 after the largest slave revolt in the 18th century British Empire www.dukeupress.edu/archival-irr...
Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica
dukeupress.edu
The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made by Calvin Schermerhorn www.amazon.com/Plunder-Blac...
The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made
The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made [Schermerhorn, Calvin] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made
amazon.com
"Both books excel at showing how disproportionately Black wealth has suffered from both racist policy and financial shocks." @newrepublic.com reviews The Plunder of Black America by Calvin Schermerhorn
Racism Isnât the Only Cause of the Racial Wealth Gap
Widening the lens to capitalism itself could yield insights on how to close the gap.
newrepublic.com
"the only way to understand this countryâthe only way to love this countryâis to tell the truth....that chattel slavery,which lasted in the British American colonies & then the American nation for nearly 250 years, was indeed quite bad" @clintsmithiii.bsky.social⏠www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad
The presidentâs latest criticism of museums is a thinly veiled attempt to erase Black history.
theatlantic.com
"the only way to understand this countryâthe only way to love this countryâis to tell the truth about it. . . . chattel slavery, which lasted in the British American colonies and then the American nation for nearly 250 years, was indeed quite bad." -Clint Smith www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad
The presidentâs latest criticism of museums is a thinly veiled attempt to erase Black history.
theatlantic.com
âevery apparent step forward is matched by a quiet reversionâeach gain followed by a new, more elusive form of loss. Redlining gives way to âpredatory inclusionââŠ.School desegregation in the cities sparks white flightâ -Idrees Kahloon on The Plunder of Black America www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
What We Miss When We Talk About the Racial Wealth Gap
Six decades of civil-rights efforts havenât budged it, and the usual prescriptionsâincluding reparationsâoffer no lasting solutions. Have we been focussing on the wrong things?
newyorker.com
One reason so many American hospitals are struggling? Investors buy them up, then suck them dry, charging such high rents that services are gutted. Reveal explores what happened to one Louisiana hospital when Medical Properties Trust came to town. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
The landlord gutting Americaâs hospitals
Medical Properties Trust buys up hospitals and then leases them back to health care systems. Dozens of its hospitals have gone belly up.
motherjones.com