Captive Nation

“Thanks to Dan Berger’s illuminating book . . . we can no longer tell the history of the black freedom struggle — and the 20th-century United States more broadly — without taking into account the organizing tradition inside prisons.” — Elizabeth Hinton, The Nation

“Multidimensional analysis that takes into account feminist, queer, and multiethnic lenses.” — Journal of American History

“An impressive account of black prison activism.” — Public Books

“Helps connect the broader scholarship on black freedom struggles with a largely taken for granted segment of the activist population, prisoners.” — Journal of Social History

“Demonstrates convincingly that historians in diverse areas and fields must reckon with [incarceration as a] defining feature of American life.” — American Historical Review

“Berger undoubtedly achieves his overarching goal: to tell the story of the ‘multifaceted rebellions that occurred in and through America’s prisons.’” — Punishment and Society

“Captive Nation is a bold reconsideration of the role of prisons and African-American prisoners spanning the southern Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, Black Power and the New Left, and the Black Nationalist renaissance of the 1970s.” — Against the Current

“Dan Berger’s analysis offers an opportunity to consider the ways that incarcerated African Americans, primarily during the 1970s, insisted that we consider the ways that prisons implicated state power in the production of racial inequality.” — Black Scholar

“Finally affords the civil rights era the attention it deserves as a critical point on the historical arc of race and incarceration in America.” — The Sixties

“An important history.” — Truthout