And rate us on iTunes! Our theme music was composed by Nathan Prillaman. Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast theamericanscholar org. Follow us on Twitter on Facebook.ĭownload the audio here (right click to “save link as …”) Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs reports on cutting-edge works in progress long-form narratives and compelling excerpts from new books. He once told Tony Blair: “Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.” “War is organized murder, and nothing else,” Harry Patch maintained the last surviving British soldier in World War I died in 2009 at the age of 111.With difficulty, he overcame these temptations and went on to study and qualify as an Episcopalian priest. Read Williams’s reflection on the centenary of Du Bois’s 1920 book Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil Born to a free black family in early-19th-century New York City, Crummell was faced with three temptations while growing up in a racist world: Hate, Despair, and Doubt.Williams, a professor of history and African-American studies at Brandeis University, joins the podcast to talk about his new book, The Wounded World: W. As the historian Chad Williams puts it, this manuscript-called The Black Man and the Wounded World-was “Du Bois’s most significant work to never reach the public,” and the struggle to write it would irrevocably shape his politics. He would soon regret his decision, and he spent the next two decades of his life grappling with the complex legacy of the war, and African Americans’ experience of it. Moreover, he pushed for African Americans to join the ranks, in the hopes of accelerating the fight for freedom at home. Du Bois is less remembered for his support for America’s entry into the First World War, an endorsement that surprised many of his Black and radical allies. Du Bois is best known for his seminal collection of essays on the African-American experience, The Souls of Black Folk, and his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction in America, which reframed the story of freed slaves in the Civil War and the brief window of political promise that followed. Du Bois, second from left, with Black officers in Le Mans, France, 1919 ( The Crisis, June 1919)

From the souls of black folk