Faculty Lecture Series- Civil War Print Culture and the First Black Public Historian

In the winter of 1887, a decade into the period historian Rayford Logan has termed the “nadir” in the lives of African Americans, author and black historian Joseph Thomas Wilson published his study of black Civil War service called “The Black Phalanx.” Wilson’s publication was only the first of nine editions of this work that appeared during the nineteenth century. What motivated Wilson to publish this work? In short, did the Civil War’s print culture produce the first black public historian to answer claims of inferiority made about his ancestry thirty years earlier? In this paper Benjamin argues that it did.

Michael Benjamin
History