The Wounded World: Chad Williams on W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World World


Author: Andrew Keen June 2, 2023 Duration: 37:54
Podcast episode
The Wounded World: Chad Williams on W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World World

EPISODE 1511: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Chad Williams, the author of THE WOUNDED WORLD, about W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World World

Chad Williams is the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. Chad earned a BA with honors in History and African American Studies from UCLA, and received both his MA and Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. He specializes in African American and modern United States History, African American military history, the World War I era and African American intellectual history. His first book, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era, was published in 2010 by the University of North Carolina Press. Widely praised as a landmark study, Torchbearers of Democracy won the 2011 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the Organization of American Historians, the 2011 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History and designation as a 2011 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. He is co-editor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016) and Major Problems in African American History, Second Edition (Cengage Learning, 2016). Chad has published articles and book reviews in numerous leading academic journals and collections, as well as op-eds and essays in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Time, and The Conversation. He has earned fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Ford Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. His latest book, The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and World War I (2023), is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.


More episodes

Duration: 36:29
Can Swiftynomics save America? That’s the intriguing thesis at the heart of Misty Heggeness’ new book about Swift’s impact on the American economy. Entitled Swiftynomics, it’s as much about Taylor Swift’s fans as it is a…

Duration: 47:03
The Music Man was a 1957 Broadway show written by Meredith Willson, a musician from the small Iowa town of Mason City. The popular play (and later movie) featured a con man called Harold Hill who ripped off the naive peo…

Duration: 54:43
Few biographers can claim to know what it feels like to be Thomas Jefferson more than the Charlottesville-based historian Andrew Burstein. The author of many books about Jefferson, Burstein’s latest, Being Thomas Jeffers…

Duration: 39:13
There was a time in the mid 20th century, the literary historian Gayle Feldman reminds us, when the book business was cool. Back then, New York publishing resembled Silicon Valley tech and the Mark Zuckerberg of his day…

Duration: 47:31
Trump’s Gazan dream is to overlay the complex human history with his own narcissistic real-estate fantasy. But for Maia Carter Hallward, co-author of a new contemporary history of Gaza, this once vibrant Mediterranean en…

Duration: 45:53
The great John Maynard Keynes explained it a century ago. In his 1930 essay, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," Keynes predicted that the future would be defined by economic abundance rather than scarcity. B…

Duration: 31:58
WTF will happen in 2026? Over the last week, we’ve been running a series of interviews about the promise and peril of the new year. And in this new weekly magazine-style KEEN ON AMERICA show, we feature highlights of con…

Duration: 45:18
If Darwin’s evolutionary theories couldn’t kill America’s faith in God, then what could? That’s the message in Daniel K. William’s new book, The Search for a Rational Faith. Americans, Williams argues, have always sought…

Duration: 55:15
Happy New Year everyone! As the final show of 2025 and first for 2026, we turned the tables and had me interviewed by the formidable David Masciotra. As you will see, my reading of 2025 is more optimistic than many of my…

Logo
Select station
VOL