David Levering Lewis joined the NYU faculty this fall and is the immediate past president of the Society of American Historians. His work reflects the mutual dependence of African and African-American history, as well as the utility of biography in the exploration of American race, class, and politics. He is the recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Parkman Prize, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, his two volumes on the life of W.E.B. DuBois won the Pulitzer Prize, the only time in the history of the award that both volumes of a biography have won. He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, his M.A. from Columbia University, and his B.A. from Fisk University.

Essay
In the final year of the nineteenth century, the American Historical Association (AHA) convened in Boston and Cambridge during the last week of December The Association then numbered fifteen hundred members and was presided over by James Ford Rhodes, successful Ohio businessman and even more successful author of the arbitral, multi-volume History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850.  At this 1899 meeting, there were no Jews, no Negroes, no women to speak of, and all the gays were in the closet. Ten years later, W.E.B. Du Bois would address the AHA; his would be the first and last appearance of an African American on the program until 1940.   More...

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