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Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Paul Barba, "Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
Description: Most of what people think they know about Texas history is wrong, argues Bucknell University history professor Paul Barba in Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery in the Texas Borderlands (U Nebraska Press, 2021). Setting out to write a book on Texas history that didn't mention The Alamo, Barba instead views the region's past through the lenses of borderlands analysis, slavery and captivity, and anti-Blackness, to paint a very different picture than the Texas of popular memory. From the sixteenth century onwards, Texas was defined by captivity and kinship, two mutually constitutive sides of the same story. In a...