Description

A collective history of how Americans experienced, navigated, commemorated, and ignored mass death and loss during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Inspired by the writers who documented American life during the Great Depression and World War II for the Works Progress Administration, the editors of After Life asked renowned historians and legal experts—including Keith Ellison, Robin D. G. Kelley, Heather Ann Thompson, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, and many more—to reflect on the parallels, convergences, and differences between the “long 2020” and earlier eras in US history.

After Life illustrates how COVID-19 and America’s long history of inequality, combined with a corrupt and unconcerned federal government, produced one of the darkest times in our nation’s history. Tying together the history and experiences of public health, immigration, white supremacy, elections, mass uprisings, and epidemics, the book documents how Americans have dealt with grief, pain, and loss—both individually and communally—and how we endure and thrive.

RHAE LYNN BARNES is an assistant professor at Princeton University and the author of the forthcoming book Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface.

KERI LEIGH MERRITT is a historian, writer, and activist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South and the coeditor of Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power.

YOHURU WILLIAMS is Distinguished University Chair and professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. He is the author of several books, including Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven.

978-1-64259-829-2  • 360 pages