Richard S. Newman

Newman's work has reshaped both African-American History and Early American History by unpacking the ways in which revolutionary era blacks, in particular AME Church founder Richard Allen, contributed as "founding fathers."[2] The major thrust of his biography of Richard Allen was to describe how Allen was able to create lasting black institutions, initiate a tradition of black prophetic leadership and precipitate civic institutions that came to define the Early American Republic. This historiographical emphasis coincides with a resurgence in scholarly interest in the white founders—those figures normally associated with the founding of the United States of America—challenging assumptions about the role of blacks in that process.[3] Alan Taylor praised Freedom's Prophet for rescuing black agency and casting "African Americans as active makers of the American republic."[4] On top of receiving high praise in reviews, Freedom's Prophet won ForeWord’s Book of the Year Gold Award for Biography in 2009.[5]

• Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present, Oxford University Press, 2016[6]
• Freedom’s Prophet: Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers, New York University Press, 2008
• The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic, University of North Carolina Press, 2002
• Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900, University of Georgia Press, series 2007–present, with Patrick Rael and Manisha Sinha
• Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature, 1790-1860, Routledge, 2001, with Phillip Lapsansky and Patrick Rael
• "The Palgrave Environmental Reader", Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, with Dan Payne.

• "Black Founders in the New Republic: Introduction", The William and Mary Quarterly, 2007, with Roy E. Finkenbine.

• http://www.rit.edu/cla/history/facultystaff - Faculty Directory - Rochester Institute of Technology, Department of History
• Appearances on C-SPAN