The Wounded World
W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A Washington Post Notable Book of 2023
The dramatic story of W. E. B. Du Bois's reckoning with the betrayal of Black soldiers during World War I—and a new understanding of one of the great twentieth-century writers.
When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to “close ranks” and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished. In The Wounded World, Chad Williams offers the dramatic account of Du Bois’s failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. The surprising story of this unpublished book offers new insight into Du Bois’s struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race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.
Drawing on a broad range of sources, most notably Du Bois’s unpublished manuscript and research materials, Williams tells a sweeping story of hope, betrayal, disillusionment, and transformation, setting into motion a fresh understanding of the life and mind of arguably the most significant scholar-activist in African American history. In uncovering what happened to Du Bois’s largely forgotten book, Williams offers a captivating reminder of the importance of World War I, why it mattered to Du Bois, and why it continues to matter today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stirring intellectual history, Williams (Torchbearers of Democracy), an African American studies professor at Brandeis University, suggests that the failure of WWI to advance Black Americans' civil rights profoundly affected sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and fueled his "maturation into an uncompromising peace activist." Du Bois had encouraged Black men to enlist, believing that through "patriotism and military sacrifice, democracy would become a reality for African Americans." These calls, Williams notes, earned Du Bois criticism in the Black press as a "traitor," and he was proven wrong by postwar massacres of Black people across the U.S. during 1919's "Red Summer." Williams discusses how these events disillusioned Du Bois through a close reading of his manuscript The Black Man and the Wounded World, contending this unfinished account of WWI constituted Du Bois's "atonement" for supporting the conflict and that his wrestling with its legacy sharpened his critique of white supremacy and imperialism. Williams convincingly renders Du Bois as a tragic figure whose optimism was dashed by the intransigence of racism, adding poignancy to a story about the limits and fragility of American democracy. At once a moving character study and a deeply researched look at a dispiriting era from the country's past, this is history at its most vivid.
