Carla Peterson Publishes a new book!

Peterson's new book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City, comes out this month.

Carla Peterson has published a new book this month through Yale University Press. The book, entitled Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York, traces Peterson’s unfolding of her family history. Between preexisting fragments of knowledge and hard detective work, Peterson uncovers an extensive family tree. The story also projects a great national narrative of “nineteenth century black Americans.” While discovering her family through the framework of a highly racially charged period in American history, Peterson challenges linear conceptions of nineteenth-century African American culture. While her narrative acknowledges and deals with socio-historical racism, Black Gotham demonstrates that “members of this early elite achieved remarkable success in their public activism, trades, and professions,” according to the publisher.

Black Gotham follows Peterson’s last book, Doers of the Word, which also traces lineages of Northern black Americans, in this case activists. Doers situates women-activists within the urban North, widening the historical lens on civil rights. Black Gotham follows up that widening, but with a personal history woven in. Congratulations, Carla Peterson!