Books & Published Work

Eye-Opening

At the Dark End of the Street is one of those rare studies that makes a well-known story seem startlingly new. Anyone who thinks he knows the history of the modern civil rights movement needs to read this terrifying, illuminating book.

This gripping story changes the history books, giving us a revised Rosa Parks and a new civil rights story. You can’t write a general U.S. history without altering crucial sentences because of McGuire’s work. Masterfully narrated, At the Dark End of the Street presents a deep civil rights movement with women at the center, a narrative as poignant, painful and complicated as our own lives.

McGuire’s provocative narrative forces readers to rethink what they know about that pivotal moment in U.S. history: its time frame, its actors, its legacy.

Just when we thought there couldn’t possibly be anything left to uncover about the civil rights movement, Danielle McGuire finds a new facet of that endlessly prismatic struggle at the core of our national identity. By reinterpreting black liberation through the lens of organized resistance to white male sexual aggression against African-American women, McGuire ingeniously upends the white race’s ultimate rationale for its violent subjugation of blacks—imputed black male sexual aggression against white women. It is an original premise, and At the Dark End of the Street delivers on it with scholarly authority and narrative polish.

In this compelling book, Danielle L. McGuire excavates a tragic hidden legacy of slavery in the United States: the rape and sexual exploitation of thousands of black females (both women and girls) from the antebellum period to the present…

This collection of essays provides a very informative racial history of Detroit, ranging from slavery to the Underground Railroad, to the 1943 riot, to deindustrialization. This book is a welcome addition to the race relations literature on Detroit.

As a young African American Detroit Police officer in 1967, I witnessed the cruelty of rogue, racist police officers who had very little respect for human life. In fact, I almost lost my life to two racist white police officers who shot at me as I returned to my apartment from a long tour of duty. It's frightening that fifty years later we are still dealing with the same fears.

Detroit 1967 provides invaluable historical context for the events that exploded on July 23, 1967. It is a thoroughly researched and well-written overview of the history of race relations in the city from its founding in 1701 to today and a ‘must-read’ for all who care about Detroit and its future.

A useful teaching text and important intellectual piece. . . . From the public political acts of lowcountry freedwomen to the discovery of the real John Henry, the interrogation of suspected lesbian educators, and the Latinization of the southern landscape, Other Souths uncovers the multiple layers of southern politics, rendering obsolete the divide between public and private or between grassroots politics and more formal electoral politics. In the process, the collection offers the possibilities of comparing big questions across time and place.

This is one of the most creative and provocative southern history anthologies ever published. By bringing together the stories of former slaves, Syrian immigrants, World War I draft resisters, environmentalists, opponents of university football, civil rights activists, and New South conservatives (among others), Other Souths challenges almost every accepted truism about postbellum southern society. This book is appropriate for both scholarly and general audiences and will be an indispensable addition to courses in southern history, culture, and social change. Other Souths will set the standard in this field for years to come.

Other Souths is an insightful exploration of southern history that serves as both an incredibly helpful companion to existing scholarship and an innovative collection of essays that ask us to reconsider the southern past from new and alternative perspectives. By employing emerging areas of study like environmental policy and urban planning and uncovering obscured histories of the southern past, this collection demonstrates the exciting potential of what lies ahead for the study of the U.S. South.

This splendid collection captures the South's complex history from Reconstruction to the present. Incorporating race, class, and gender; sexuality, morality, and popular culture; immigration, environmentalism, and peace politics, Other Souths illuminates traditional issues from new and compelling perspectives.

The volume prompts a rethinking of the place of the modern South in the nation in a way that the individual articles, when they first appeared, did not. . . . As a whole, the collection confirms that the South has been and remains distinctive in its reactions to federal law but also that southerners have found themselves deeply and inextricably bound to national issues of economic development, social change, and demographic shifts.