Needham Author Chad Williams - in Conversation with Abigail Cooper

The Book: The Wounded World - W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World WarT

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 The surprising story of this unpublished book offers new insight into Du Bois’s struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race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Drawing on a broad range of sources, most notably Du Bois’s unpublished manuscript and research materials, Williams tells a sweeping story of hope, betrayal, disillusionment, and transformation, setting into motion a fresh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.

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).

Abigail Cooper is Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University, where she teaches courses on the 1619 Project, Slavery and Emancipation, Civil War and Reconstruction, Migration and Refugees, and new methods for writing history. Her work has received recognition from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Virginia Historical Society, among others. Find her article “Away I Goin’ to Find My Mamma” on family reunion and Black migration in the Journal of African American History. She earned her B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University, her Masters of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School, and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. She is finishing her first book, a cultural history of emancipation in America, which she hopes will be on bookshelves soon.

This event is sponsored by the Needham Free Public Library  and the Needham Diversity Initiative and will be a live event in the Community Room of the Needham Free Public Library. Registration is required , as we have a current capacity limit of 100.

Books will be available for purchase at this event, courtesy of Wellesley Books.