The Journal of African American History is planning a special issue for 2027. Titled “Black Women’s History in the Twenty-First Century: Engaging the Future,” the issue will provide an opportunity to reflect seriously on the state of scholarship on Black women in the United States as well as to reshape thinking about Black women’s impact on US society. Guest editors Karen Cook Bell and Hettie V. Williams invite article manuscripts that analyze the lives, labors, war time experiences, and legal battles of Black women and their self-making practices, which allowed them to navigate slavery, freedom, Jane and Jim Crowism, and both civil and human rights labyrinths. The 2027 special issue not only will examine dominant narratives in the historiography of Black women’s history that have emerged during the twenty-first century but also will contain articles that will break ground for new explorations in the field.
Foundational texts such as editors Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978), which was the first volume of historical essays on Black women; Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985); the multivolume Black Women in America: A Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hine (1994); “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women’s His tory, edited by Hine, Wilma King, and Linda Reed (1995); Hine and Kathleen Thompson’s A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (1998); and White’s Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in the Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (1999) have guided generations of scholars of Black women’s his tory as they examined or reexamined the complex interweaving of politics, labor, identity, and gender in American history since the colonial era. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross’s more recent study, A Black Women’s His tory of the United States (2020), re-envisioned that history in a pioneering way.
In 2004 Leslie Alexander declared there was “a compelling need to study Black women in their own right.” That need remains. Guest editors Karen Cook
Bell and Hettie V. Williams seek article manuscripts that focus on Black women’s history in the context of the following topics, among others:
- Slavery and abolition
- Black women’s resistance
- War and gender violence
- Emancipation
- Economic development
- Culture (e.g., education, religion)
- Migration and mobility
- Intellectualism
- Black internationalism
- Social and political movements (e.g., Black feminism, Black Lives Matter) • Politics
- Black women’s queer history
- Black girlhood
- Reproductive justice
- Black women’s health and wellness
Authors should submit manuscripts via the Editorial Manager® system. Including footnotes, the manuscripts should contain between 10,000 and 11,500 words, approximately 35–40 pages. “Instructions for Authors” are available on the Journal of African American History’s website. For inquiries, please contact jaah@ alasu.edu or the guest editors, Karen Cook Bell ([email protected]) and Hettie V. Williams ([email protected]). January 1, 2026, is the due date for each manuscript.
Submission deadline: January 1, 2026