Race and Place: School Desegregation in Prince George's County, Maryland (Rutgers University Press, 2025) considers the everyday experiences of community members throughout the process of school desegregation and how race, place, and truth came to matter in this process in Prince George's County, Maryland from 1945 through 1973. Organized around several successive policies that emerged in this time: school equalization, school choice, neighborhood schools, school construction, school closure, busing for racial integration, and school discipline, Dougherty shows how these policies contained and reinforced assumptions about place and created new racial truths about people and schooling.

Dierdre Mayer Dougherty is an Associate Professor of Educational Studies at Knox College.

Max Jacobs is a PhD student in Education at Rutgers Universty.

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Unwelcome Shores: Black Refugees in America (Rutgers University Press, 2025) is an ethnographic study of the Liberian refugee community in Staten Island, New York, home to the largest per capita concentration of Liberians in the U.S., that sheds light on the racialization of Black refugees and the racism they have experienced at every step of their migration journey. In this pioneering study, sociologist Bernadette Ludwig explores how Liberians have responded to such racist exclusions, noting how members of this community reject the informal refugee label once they are resettled in the United States. Liberian migrants often view the label as a liability since the larger general public, the media, and the U.S. government tend to regard Black refugees as an economic and social burden unworthy of assistance. Indeed, Black refugees’ humanity is often ignored, Ludwig contends, in favor of overemphasizing presumed barbaric violence, endemic wars, cultural backwardness, and diseases. By detailing the lack of aid and support for Black refugees and describing how Liberian refugees in particular have had to overcome various struggles and barriers in coming to the U.S. and while living here, Unwelcome Shores highlights the overarching role of race and anti-Black racism in American society.

Dr. Bernadette Ludwig is a Sociologist and the Assistant Dean of the Macricostas School of Arts and Sciences at Western Connecticut State University. She is also an Affiliated Faculty with The New School's Zolberg Institute on Migration & Mobility. 

Host: Michael L. Rosino is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Molloy University, studying racial politics, media, and democracy. His most recent book, Democracy Is Awkward: Grappling with Racism Inside Grassroots Political Organizing, is now available with the University of North Carolina Press.

In this episode, Dr. Ludwig mentioned an opportunity to get involved in asylum and deportation cases. Here is the link for scholars to submit their information or attend trainings to become country conditions experts.

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In New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centauries, Nathan Straus was famous as a co-owner of the Macy’s and Abraham and Straus department stores. He was also a leading Zionist and briefly, in 1894, a Democratic nominee for mayor of New York.

Yet his greatest achievement, Andrew Fisher argues in Nathan Straus: From Macy’s Magnate to International Humanitarian, was his work in public heath—particularly for the pasteurization of milk. Straus, as Fisher shows, worked with serious scientists and used the knack for promotion that he acquired in his business life to promote research and educate the public.

Nathan Straus, published by Rutgers University Press, restores to history a man who was prominent in his time but is almost forgotten today. The book illuminates philanthropy, public health, German Jewry in New York, Zionism, and the history of department stores and retailing.

Fisher is a historian and the retired founding executive of the Lavelle Fund for the Blind. For thirty-five years he worked for charitable foundations in New York City.

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