Here is the 2024-2025 registration form. The book distribution information and meeting times will be sent with your registration confirmation. 

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

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.”