Event Details

End: May 15, 2023
Contact: rwheatley@historians.org

This event is part of the Washington History Seminar series. It is cosponsored by the AHA and the Woodrow Wilson Center and features author Chad Williams and commentators Michelle Moyd and David Blight. Register here. 

For more than two decades W. E. B. Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished. Chad Williams offers the previously untold account of Du Bois’s failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. In doing so, Williams sheds new light on Du Bois’s struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race and democracy for Black people in the twentieth century.

Chad Williams is the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. He earned a BA in History and African American Studies from UCLA, and both his MA and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. He is author of the award-winning book Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (2010, University of North Carolina Press) and The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War (2023, Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, joining that faculty in January, 2003. He previously taught at Amherst College for thirteen years. As of June, 2004, he is Director, succeeding David Brion Davis, of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. Blight’s newest books include annotated editions, with introductory essay, of Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (Yale Univ. Press, 2013), Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro, (Yale Univ. Press, 2014), and the monograph, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Harvard University Press, published August 2011), which received the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book in non-fiction on racism and human diversity. 

Michelle Moyd is currently a Red Cedar Distinguished Faculty member at Michigan State University. She is a historian of eastern Africa who studies the region’s histories of soldiering and warfare. Her first book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014) explores the social and cultural history of African soldiers (askari) in the colonial army of German East Africa, today’s Tanzania. She is at work on a book entitled Africa, Africans, and the First World War, which examines the spectrum of African experiences in the war, especially as soldiers and workers.