Oct 3, 2023, 1:21 p.m.
Born in rural Michigan at the turn of the century, Merze Tate was the first African-American woman to attend Oxford. She also graduated with a doctorate from Harvard, became a leading scholar on diplomatic history, colonialism, and nuclear arms, taught for 30-plus years at Howard, and kept seeking ever more knowledge throughout her life—reading, writing, and traveling the world with her camera. University of Pennsylvania professor Barbara Savage’s new biography MERZE TATE: THE GLOBAL ODYSSEY OF A BLACK WOMAN SCHOLAR (Yale University Press; November 2023) tells the astonishing story of a woman, who, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world,” never allowed her intellectual ambitions to be thwarted.
Read More →