A01=Barbara D. Savage
academia
African American history
archival silence
Author_Barbara D. Savage
black faculty
Category=DNB
Category=JN
Category=JPSD
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
international travel
political science
women faculty
Product details
- ISBN 9780300285567
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 18 Nov 2025
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A powerful and inspiring biography of Merze Tate, a trailblazing Black woman scholar and intrepid world traveler
Finalist for the Stone Book Award, sponsored by the Museum of African American History
Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.
This book revives and critiques Tate’s prolific and prescient body of scholarship, with topics ranging from nuclear arms limitations to race and imperialism in India, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Tate credited her success to other women, Black and white, who helped her realize her dream of becoming a scholar. Her quest for research and adventure took her around the world twice, traveling solo with her cameras.
Barbara Savage’s skilled rendering of Tate’s story is built on more than a decade of research. Tate’s life and work challenge provincial approaches to African American and American history, women’s history, the history of education, diplomatic history, and international thought.
Finalist for the Stone Book Award, sponsored by the Museum of African American History
Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.
This book revives and critiques Tate’s prolific and prescient body of scholarship, with topics ranging from nuclear arms limitations to race and imperialism in India, Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Tate credited her success to other women, Black and white, who helped her realize her dream of becoming a scholar. Her quest for research and adventure took her around the world twice, traveling solo with her cameras.
Barbara Savage’s skilled rendering of Tate’s story is built on more than a decade of research. Tate’s life and work challenge provincial approaches to African American and American history, women’s history, the history of education, diplomatic history, and international thought.
Barbara D. Savage is a historian and the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work includes Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, winner of the 2012 Grawemeyer Prize in Religion. She lives in Philadelphia, PA.
