Matthew Delmont: “I wrote this book because I think this is the history more Americans need to understand. I’m a historian. I’m a professional historian, and I teach history at Dartmouth College. And I’ve taught about this history for more than a decade. But as I was going through archival sources, going through Black newspapers, I kept coming across stories of average Black Americans who were drafted, volunteered to serve in the Army, the Navy, and Marines. And these were not famous people. These are just average Americans from Pittsburgh, from Cleveland, from Chicago. And I was blown away by how many of these stories I saw. […]