Beryl Satter

Beryl Satter is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. She received a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship to work on her latest book, Cash on the Block: The Broken Promise of Reinvestment in Black Urban Neighborhoods (Harvard University Press, 2026). Satter’s second book, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (Metropolitan Books, 2009), was listed as one of the top ten books of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Family Properties won the Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Award for best book in civil rights history and the Jewish Book Council’s National Jewish Book Award in History. It was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and for the Ron Ridenhouer Book Prize, awarded to “those that persevere in acts of truth-telling.”

Satter has published articles on U.S. religious history, urban history, African American history, and women’s history. Her first book, Each Mind A Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement (University of California Press, 1999), explored relationships among late nineteenth and early twentieth-century women’s rights activism, alternative religion, the Progressive Era beliefs about gender, race, sexuality and political morality. She is a cofounder, with Darnell Moore and Christina Strasburger, of the Queer Newark Oral History Project, and has received several awards for her work on behalf of LGBT youth. She is regularly interviewed by media outlets on topics including housing discrimination, police brutality, LGBTQ history, and alternative religions in the U.S.