A world-renowned scholar and statesman, Dr. Ralph J. Bunche (1903—1971) began his career as an educator and a political scientist, and later joined the United Nations, serving as Undersecretary General for seventeen of his twenty-five years with that body. This African American mediator was the first person of color anywhere in the world to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. In the mid-1930s, Bunche played a key role in organizing the National Negro Congress, a popular front-styled grou...

Winner of an Abraham Lincoln Institute Book AwardThough not blind to Abraham Lincoln's imperfections, Black Americans long ago laid a heartfelt claim to his legacy. At the same time, they have consciously reshaped the sixteenth president's image for their own social and political ends. Frederick Hord and Matthew D. Norman's anthology explores the complex nature of views on Lincoln through the writings and thought of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Mc...

Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Johnson Bunche (1904-71) was one of the twentieth century’s foremost diplomats and intellectuals. In the wake of centennial celebrations of his birth, leading scholars and diplomats assess Bunche’s historical importance and enduring impact on higher education, public policy, and international politics. Their essays reveal not only the breadth of Bunche’s influence, such as his United Nations work to broker peace during times of civil war in Africa, the Middle...

Ralph J. Bunche (1904–1971), winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, was a key U.S. diplomat in the planning and creation of the United Nations in 1945. In 1947 he was invited to join the permanent UN Secretariat as director of the new Trusteeship Department. In this position, Bunche played a key role in setting up the trusteeship system that provided important impetus for postwar decolonization ending European control of Africa as well as an international framework for the oversight of t...

A wide-ranging political biography of diplomat, Nobel prize winner, and civil rights leader Ralph Bunche. Silver Medal Winner from Council on Foreign Relations Shortlisted, 2024 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography A legendary diplomat, scholar, and civil rights leader, Ralph Bunche was one of the most prominent Black Americans of the twentieth century. The first African American to obtain a political science Ph.D. from Harvard and a celebrated diplomat at the...

In this book, Jonathan Holloway explores the early lives and careers of economist Abram Harris Jr., sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and political scientist Ralph Bunche — three black scholars who taught at Howard University during the New Deal and, together, formed the leading edge of American social science radicalism.Harris, Frazier, and Bunche represented the vanguard of the young black radical intellectual-activists who dared to criticize the NAACP for its cautious civil right...

"I swear by all that’s Holy, I will never come anywhere near the Palestine problem once I liberate myself from this trap." Ralph Bunche wrote these lines to his wife in 1949, during the armistice talks on Rhodes. A year later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his success in ending the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.Ralph Bunche and the Arab-Israeli Conflict provides a comprehensive study of Ralph Bunche’s diplomatic activities on the Palestine question. Bunche was at the centre of t...

A legendary diplomat, scholar, and civil rights leader, Ralph Bunche was one of the most prominent Black Americans of the twentieth century. The first African American to obtain a political science Ph.D. from Harvard and a celebrated diplomat at the United Nations, he was once so famous hehanded out the Best Picture award at the Oscars. Yet today Ralph Bunche is largely forgotten.In The Absolutely Indispensable Man, Kal Raustiala restores Bunche to his rightful place in hist...