Matt Delmont

Delmont earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University before enrolling in Brown University for his Master's degree and Ph.D. in American Studies.[1]

Upon earning his PhD, Delmont accepted a position as an Assistant professor of American studies at Scripps College.[2] During his short tenure at Scripps, he was the recipient of the 2011 Professor of the Year Award[3] and published his book The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia through the University of California Press.[4] In his book, he discredits claims by the late Dick Clark, host and producer of American Bandstand, that the show was a pioneer of on-air racial politics and integration.[5] As part of his research into the discontent of the show around racial politics, he interviewed 21 Philadelphia natives who had attended, watched, or protested the TV show.[4] He published historical accounts of American Bandstand incorporating and encouraging systematic marginalization of local African American fans and musicians throughout its running.[5]

By June 2014, Delmont left Scripps College and accepted a position at Arizona State University (ASU) as a professor in their history department.[6] During his tenure at ASU, Delmont published his second book titled Making Roots: A nation captivated through the University of California Press. The book explored the history and creation of the 1977 miniseries Roots.[7][8] In the same year, he also published Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation, a historical review of America's desegregated school bussing and overall educational equality policy.[9] Following the publication of his second and third books, Delmont was promoted to Director of ASU's School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies[10] and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue his research on African-American racial struggles in America.[11]

Delmont eventually left ASU to become the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College in 2019.[12] In his first year at Dartmouth, the Stanford University Press published Delmont's mutli-year project Black Quotidian. The goal of the project was to create an open-access multimedia free archive that featured 1,000 media objects from African-American newspapers, audio clips, and videos during historical moments in of black resistance in American history.[13] Beyond the archive, he published Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers, which won the Garfinkel Prize.[14] The digital book drew from the collected archived material and media and applied it into a scholarly context.[15]

In the September 2022 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine Delmont wrote an article on the World War II Port Chicago disaster entitled A Deadly World War II Explosion Sparked Black Soldiers to Fight for Equal Treatment,[16] that he later expanded that article into his critically-acclaimed 2022 book, Half American – The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, which covers this incident in detail; as well as the African-American struggle for equality and respect during their participation in the conflict .

Matt Delmont publications indexed by Google Scholar