Kristin Waters's Maria Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought is the latest monograph dedicated to the severely understudied life and work of Maria Stewart. The work joins only two previous book-length discussions of Stewart: Marilyn Richardson's seminal Maria W. Stewart, America's First Black Woman Political Writer (1987) and Valerie C. Cooper's Word, Like Fire (2012). Waters's welcome intervention includes a new, meticulously researched, biography of Stewart's early years, which features imaginative microhistorical reconstructions of key moments in her life. That biography is firmly situated within a cultural history of African American life, with a particular focus upon community events and celebrations, and is combined with a close analysis of a selection of Stewart's texts and Black radical political and social philosophy. The book is complemented by Waters's engagement with an impressive array of secondary material from the rich, yet inchoate, field of Stewart studies, much of which was published after Richardson and Cooper's monographs. That far-reaching engagement establishes Waters's work as a vital update to those earlier books, and places it as a waypoint in the current landscape of research on Stewart for those new to the subject, though it does not displace Richardson's text as the essential introduction to Stewart's life and work.

Like anyone researching Stewart, Waters was clearly faced with the combined difficulties of the paucity of primary sources relating to her life and the deep complexity of her writing and speeches; for the biographer, there is very little to work with; for the analyst, there is almost too much. Waters's diligent archival research sees her partially overcome the former difficulty and uncover some new and fascinating details – some certain and some still speculative – about Stewart's early life and parentage. Those archival successes are augmented by the aforementioned discussions of nineteenth-century African American cultural history, which can be divided into two main strands. The first strand is the analysis of Black community events that Stewart would probably have participated in, such as Election Day and Training Day in Hartford, Connecticut and Bunker Hill Day and African Day in Boston, Massachusetts. The second strand is the examination of Stewart's biographical, political, and philosophical predecessors and contemporaries in the Black community and their connections with her. In the case of her contemporaries, it will be no surprise for students of Stewart that David Walker is given substantial room, but Waters also discusses Jarena Lee, Sojourner Truth, and Anna Julia Cooper as she establishes Stewart's place in the Black radical tradition. The discussions of the Black culture that surrounded Stewart are joined by Waters's imaginative microhistorical reconstructions. It is those reconstructions where the text is likely to draw criticism from some quarters, as Waters balances the need to accurately tell Stewart's story with the limited archival evidence available to her, and it will be a matter of personal taste whether that balance is achieved. What can be said for certain is that Waters only employs imagination where the archive falls silent, and she very clearly signposts that she will be taking that imaginative approach in order to complete the biography (15).