Matthew Delmont

Matthew Delmont is an American historian and professor, the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He received his degrees from Amherst College and the University of California, San Diego, and has written widely on African American history, media history, and the history of the civil rights movement. His book Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (2022) tells the history of the more than one million African Americans who served in the US military during World War II while fighting simultaneously against racial segregation and discrimination within the armed forces and at home. The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction in 2023 and was praised for its narrative power, its breadth of research, and its contribution to the still-underdocumented story of African American service in World War II. Delmont is also the creator of Fifteen Million, a public history project documenting the stories of African American WWII veterans. He is a frequent contributor to major American media outlets on questions of race and history. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.