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Lost in Translation: Black 92nd Infantry Division Soldiers, Italian Partisans, and the Politics of Liberation in World War Two Europe

Robert F. Jefferson, Jr
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
4:00-5:30 PM
1014 Tisch Hall Map
This presentation will explore the face-to-face interactions between black GIs and Italian civilians in the Apennines Mountains of Italy and how their perceptions of race, international affairs, and Civil Rights were fundamentally altered as a result of their encounters with German fighting forces during the winter and spring months of 1944 and 1945.


Robert F. Jefferson, Jr. is an Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Jefferson holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Michigan. He is the author of Fighting for Hope: African Americans and the Ninety-third Infantry Division in World War II and Postwar America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), Brothers in Valor: The Battlefield Stories of the 89 African Americans Awarded the Medal of Honor (Lyons Press, 2018), and Black Veterans, Politics, and Civil Rights in Twentieth Century America: Closing Ranks (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019). Dr. Jefferson is currently working on Color and Disability: Vasco Hale and Twentieth Century America. His articles on the relationship between African American GIs and their communities during the Second World War have appeared in Representations dans le monde anglophone (2018), The Routledge Handbook of the History of Race in the American Military (Routledge, 2016), Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), the Journal of Family History, the Annals of Iowa, Quaderni Storici (Bologna), Contours: A Journal of the African Diaspora, and the Historian. Dr. Jefferson is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Most recently, he has been selected by the J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board to serve as the Danish Distinguished Chair in American Studies for the 2019-2020 academic year.
Building: Tisch Hall
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Lecture
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Comparative Literature, The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Department of History, Program in Transcultural Studies