Please send suggestions for future Brown 2026 Reads to brown2026democracy@brown.edu. 

Fall Reading 2025

Mark Blyth and Nicolo Fraccaroli, Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (Norton, 2025)
Prominent economists Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli reveal why inflation happens, how we combat it and how it affects our lives. With accessible and engaging commentary and a good dose of humor, Blyth and Fraccaroli bring the complexities of economic policy and inflation indices down to earth. They argue that 2021 marked the end of an era of relative price stability around the world. Inflation is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the forces shaping our economy. 

Kwame Dawes, Sturge Town: Poems (Norton, 2024)
In this stunning volume, acclaimed poet Kwame Dawes explores the mythic ancestral, and spiritual journeys that make up a life. The site of the ruined ancestral home of Kwame Dawes’s family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica, and to the United States. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement, and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry. 

Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (Norton, 2019)
Floating Coast is the first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. The unforgiving territories along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Iñupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before American and European colonization. Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, Bathsheba Demuth presents a profound tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that human ambition has brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet.

Rebecca Brenner Graham, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Kensington, 2025)
Frances Perkins was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. Yet beyond these celebrated accomplishments there is another dimension to Frances Perkins’s story. Without fanfare, and despite powerful opposition, Perkins helped save the lives of countless Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Based on extensive research, including thousands of letters housed in the National Archives, Dear Miss Perkins adds new dimension to an already extraordinary life story, revealing at last how one woman tried to steer the nation to a better, more righteous course.

Winter Reading 2025

Keisha Blain, Wake Up America: Black Women on the Future of Democracy (Norton, 2024)
A galvanizing anthology for those seeking to build an inclusive democracy. Keisha N. Blain's latest volume, Wake Up America: Black Women on the Future of Democracy, brings together the voices of major progressive Black women politicians, grassroots activists, and intellectuals to offer critical insights on how we can create a more equitable political future. In addressing our most pressing issues and providing key takeaways, Wake Up America serves as a blueprint for the steps we can take right now and in years to come.

Corey Brettschneider, Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It (Norton, 2024)
American presidents have often pushed the boundaries established for them by the Constitution; this is the inspirational history of the people who pushed back. Corey Brettschneider shows that these presidents didn’t have the last word; citizen movements brought the United States back from the precipice by appealing to a democratic understanding of the Constitution and pressuring subsequent reform-minded presidents to realize the promise of ‘We the People.’ This is a book about citizens – Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Daniel Ellsberg, and more – who fought back against presidential abuses of power. Their examples give us hope about the possibilities of restoring a fragile democracy.

Seth Rockman, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (The University of Chicago Press, 2024)
An eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor. Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the nineteenth century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Seth Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.

Melvin Rogers, Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023)
In The Darkened Light of Faith, Melvin Rogers provides a bold new account of African American political thought through the works and lives of individuals who built this vital tradition—a tradition that is urgently needed today. The book reexamines how figures as diverse as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin thought about the politics, people, character, and culture of a society that so often dominated them. An ambitious account of the profound ways African Americans have reimagined democracy, The Darkened Light of Faith offers invaluable lessons about how to grapple with racial injustice and make democracy work.

Noliwe Rooks, A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune (Penguin Press, 2024)
An intimate and searching account of the life and legacy of one of America’s towering educators, a woman who dared to center the progress of Black women and girls in the larger struggle for political and social liberation. When Mary McLeod Bethune died, tributes in newspapers around the country said the same thing: she should be on the Mount Rushmore of Black American achievement. Indeed, Bethune is the only Black American whose statue stands in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol, and yet for most, she remains a marble figure from the dim past. Now, seventy years later, Noliwe Rooks turns Bethune from stone to flesh, showing her to have been a visionary leader with lessons to still teach us as we continue our journey toward a freer and more just nation.

Jonathan Schroeder, United States Governed by 600,000 Despots (The University of Chicago Press, 2024)
For one hundred and sixty-nine years, a first-person slave narrative written by John Swanson Jacobs—brother of Harriet Jacobs—was buried in a pile of newspapers in Australia. Jacobs’s long-lost narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, is a startling and revolutionary discovery. A document like this—written by an ex-slave and ex-American, in language charged with all that can be said about America outside America, untampered with and unedited by white abolitionists—has never been seen before. The second half of the book contains a full-length, nine-generation biography of Jacobs and his family by literary historian Jonathan Schroeder. To truly reckon with the lives of John Jacobs is to see with new clarity that in 1776, America embarked on two experiments at once: one in democracy, the other in tyranny.

Eleni Sikelianos, Your Kingdom (Coffee House Press, 2023)
Our shoulders and hips were invented by salamanders. Hidden motives bind us to cuckoos and caterpillars. Our faces form biological maps while our organs trace the shapes of our animal ancestors. From the cellular to the celestial, Your Kingdom inquisitively and energetically investigates our notion of biological kingdoms, calling us to “let the body feel all its own evolution inside.”