Matt Delmont

Matthew F. Delmont (born December 15, 1977)^[1] is an American professor of history and author. He is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College and former Professor of History at Arizona State University (ASU) and Scripps College.

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.^[2]

Upon earning his PhD, Delmont accepted a position as assistant professor of American studies at Scripps College.^[3] While teaching there, he received the 2011 Professor of the Year Award,^[4] and authored The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (University of California Press, 2012).^[5] In the book, he discredits claims by American Bandstand's host and producer Dick Clark that the show was a pioneer of on-air racial politics and integration in the late 1950s.^[6] Instead, Delmont found through his interviews of Philadelphia natives who had attended, watched, or protested American Bandstand,^[5] that there was systematic marginalization of local African-American fans and musicians throughout the show's running.^[6]

By June 2014, Delmont left Scripps College and accepted a position at Arizona State University (ASU) as a professor in their history department.^[7] During his tenure at ASU, Delmont published his second book titled Making Roots: A Nation Captivated (The University of California Press, 2016). The book explores the history and creation of the 1977 miniseries Roots.^[8][9] 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 school busing aimed at desegregation, and overall educational equality policy.^[10] Following publication of these two books, Delmont was promoted to Director of ASU's School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies^[11] and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue his research on African-American racial struggles in America.^[12]

Delmont left ASU to become the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College in 2019.^[13] In his first year at Dartmouth, the Stanford University Press published Delmont's multi-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 key moments of black resistance in American history.^[14] Beyond the archive, he published Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers, which won the Garfinkel Prize.^[15] The digital book drew from the collected archived source material and integrated it into a scholarly context.^[16]

In the September 2022 issue of Smithsonian magazine, Delmont published an article on the 1944 Port Chicago disaster entitled "A Deadly World War II Explosion Sparked Black Soldiers to Fight for Equal Treatment",^[17] which he expanded that same year into a critically acclaimed book, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad.^[18] The book covers the Port Chicago incident in detail, as well as the larger struggle by African Americans for equality and respect while fighting overseas in WWII, and when returning home after the war.^[19]

Matt Delmont publications indexed by Google Scholar

• "We Return Fighting": The Black Freedom Struggle During World War II, from the "Teach the Black Freedom Struggle" online class in the Zinn Education Project.