In his 32 years of teaching at NKU, Dr. Eric Jackson, associate dean of the College of Arts and Science and history professor, has never come across a book that gives its readers every bit of information there is to know about a topic. His book, “An Introduction to Black Studies,” doesn’t reach that implausible mark either, but it’s a good place to start learning about black studies, he said.

“There’s never going to be a definitive book on nobody or no subject at no time. So it just speaks to people at different places, and I don’t see the course being the end all, and I don’t see my book being the end all. What I see my book and the course is opening up a door that’s been close to people. It’s like, open up that door and see what’s in there, investigate what’s going on and have a curiosity,” said Jackson. 

“An Introduction to Black Studies” is designed for undergraduates and the general public to get acquainted with the concepts and history of Black Studies. With this audience in mind, Jackson flipped a recent squabble between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the College Board into a marketing foothold for the book, he said about the book’s slogan, “No AP Class Required.”

In 2022, College Board–an organization that offers Advanced Placement classes for high school students to earn college credit–released the outline for the new AP African American Studies course. DeSantis rejected the course, claiming it included polarizing critical race theory tenets in its curriculum. 

Jackson said with the politics surrounding the AP course complicating its future, he wanted to frame the book as a way for anyone to get the crux of the information one would learn in a Black Studies course without taking a formal class. 

“We’re in a climate now where people want to feel good about history, and me, I’m a historian that just wants to articulate the entire story. The good, the bad, the ugly all of it. Just tell the entire story. This history of understanding is not about feelings, it’s about the facts,” said Jackson. “If you don’t want to take the AP course, if you think it’s controversial, just buy the book,” he went on. 

The eight disciplines of black studies–history, sociology, psychology, religion, feminism, education, political science and art–are folded into the book’s covers. It spans 17 chapters packed in with information about events, social movements and figures from the beginning of African American history into the 21st century.

The project took Jackson seven years to complete–a process that was snarled by one publisher backing out of the initial contract. Jackson said the original publisher decided they wanted to change directions with their publishing roster by reducing the number of humanities books they produce. He ended up working out an agreement with The University Press of Kentucky, which is his favorite publishing partner yet and is also slated to publish his next work.

“An Introduction to Black Studies” has spurred several firsts in Jackson’s career. It earned Jackson his first book award, the 2023 Thomas D. Clark Medallion Award, which is awarded every year to a University Press of Kentucky title and author that demonstrates literary and scholarly merit. 

It was also the first time Jackson was asked by his own students to sign a book. 

“One of my first couple of days in class this semester, I had a couple of students want me to sign a textbook for a course. Because it was the book that I was teaching from,” said Jackson. “That was kind of humbling. I’m like, ‘wow, that’s never happened in my 30 something years of teaching,’” he added.