Review followed by an editor Q&A.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), an African American novelist, scholar, and filmmaker, was born to a Baptist minister and a schoolteacher in Alabama. In 1894, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, where her father was elected mayor, and she discovered an early love for literature. The first of her family to attend college, she attended Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., where she became active in the student newspaper and in the literary club. After earning her associate’s degree, she was offered a scholarship to Barnard College of Columbia University, the first Black student to attend (Chen 2025). While there, she took classes in anthropology from Franz Boas and worked alongside fellow students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. She received a Bachelor of Arts in 1928 but continued to study at Columbia for two more years. During this time, Hurston published short stories and essays, becoming a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance alongside other African American scholars and artists, such as Alain Locke, Duke Ellington, and Langston Hughes, all challenging negative stereotypes of African Americans and celebrating their traditional cultures (see Charles Rivers Editors 2018; Murrell 2024). In 1937, she published her now-acclaimed novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, set in Florida, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship to do research on voodoo in Haiti and Jamaica, resulting in the ethnography Tell My Horse ([1938] 1990). In 1942, Hurston published her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, and during the 1940s lived in Honduras, where she researched the cultures of mixed Indigenous and African communities like the Garifuna and Miskito. Hurston went on to publish an impressive number of empirical studies and ethnographic fictions; she also wrote plays like Color Struck ([1926] 2022) and (with Langston Hughes [1931] 2008) Mule Bone; and she made films to capture African American life in her hometown of Eatonville. Though these works attracted some attention during her lifetime, her later years found her in financial difficulty, and by the 1950s she supported herself by freelance writing, substitute teaching, and working as a maid and public assistant. After Hurston’s death in 1960, the quality of her work went largely unnoticed until Alice Walker published her article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in Ms. Magazine (1975), stimulating new appreciation of her many contributions to both anthropology and literature. 

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In August 2019, the New York Times Magazine published the first pieces of “The 1619 Project,” a collaborative work of long-form journalism in which Nikole Hannah-Jones and others argued that structural, or systemic, racism—a social arrangement built upon the subordination of people of color by Whites—was a foundational part of American history starting from the arrival in Jamestown of the first enslaved Africans in 1619. More recently, an important new work by Robert P. Jones pushes the genesis of systemic racism back much further, to 1493, the year that, in response to news of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, Pope Alexander XI issued a series of Papal bulls that came to be known as the Doctrine of Discovery. That doctrine declared that “European civilization and western Christianity are superior to all other cultures, races and religions” (Jones 2023, 13) and therefore that it was not only proper, but also desirable, for some people to occupy and exploit lands belonging to others, so long as the occupiers were White Christians and those they occupied were non-Christian people of color. 

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Editor’s note: This newest addition to HAR Reviews pairs a review essay with a brief author Q&A. Our reviewer, Karen Field, drafted the essay first and then brought some questions to the author. We thank Karen for suggesting this format and Patrick Schmidt for his participation, and we welcome more experiments with HoA writing and conversation.

Maya Angelou once said, “you can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.” If she was right, then everyone with a stake in the social sciences today should read and reflect upon Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science, a new work by Patrick L. Schmidt that traces the rise and fall of Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations, a department whose founders strove to unite sociology, anthropology, and psychology into a single discipline dedicated to the understanding of human behavior. 

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