I am currently working on three projects. The first is a one volume history of New York City from its founding to the present. The second book project is a revision in time and space of the major American movement the Underground Railroad, which I recast as Freedom Making. The third project is a memoir of my parents' families and my own life. I do this because in my mid sixties, I recognize that I need to tell these stories to my sons, who are now forty-two months old and will never know their ancestors. I continue to seek new scholarly ventures, grateful for my post as professor of history, a job bounded only by one's imagination.
David Ruggles: A Radical Black Aboliitonist and the Underground Railroad in New York City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); 2010 Annual Best Book Award, Underground Railroad Free Press; Paperback, 2012
Friends of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson, Thaddeus Kosciusko, and Agrippa Hull. A tale of three patriots, two revolutions, and the tragic betrayal that divided a nation. Co-Authored with Gary Nash. (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Polish Translation, 2009
Taxi! A Cultural History of the New York City Cabdriver. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Chinese translation, 2010.
Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
The New York City Cartmen, 1650-1860 (New York University Press, 1986); Revised Edition, 2012
Edited Books
Chains and Freedom: the Life and Adventure of Peter Wheeler: A Colored Man Yet Living, A Slave in Chains, A Sailor in the Deep, and a Sinner at the Cross. (Edited and with an introduction by Graham Russell Hodges, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009)
Ed.,
Austin Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman (Syracuse University Press, 2002)
The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile After the American Revolution (Routledge, 1996)
"Pretends to be Free": Fugitive Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey (Routledge, 1994)
Black Itinerants of the Gospel: The Narratives of John Jea and George White (Madison House Publishers, 1993)
Ed.,
Robert Roberts's House Servant's Directory (M.E. Sharpe, 1997)
More than 100 short reviews and 13 review essays in
Reviews in American History, Journal of Urban History, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Slavery and Abolition, etc.