Hidden History: The Tulsa Race Massacre and the Challenge of Facing Up to Our Past
Scott Ellsworth P'24 is an award-winning writer and historian. His most recent book, The Ground Breaking: The Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City's Search for Justice, was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award. His previous book, The Secret Game, which tells the true story of a clandestine integrated college basketball contest that took place in 1940s North Carolina, won the 2016 PEN/ESPN Book Award for Literary Sports Writing, while The World Beneath Their Feet, which details the deadly race to summit the highest peaks of the Himalayas during the 1930s, won a 2020 National Outdoor Book Award.
Ellsworth and his work have been featured on the TODAY Show, NPR, the BBC, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, Voice of America, The History Channel, and in the pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Times of London. Praised for his “elegant” and “riveting” prose, a reviewer once described him as “a historian with the soul of a poet.”
Oklahoma born and bred, Ellsworth published his first book, Death in a Promised Land, while he was a graduate student at Duke. Formerly a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, he currently teaches courses on African American history, Southern literature, race and sports, and crime and justice in contemporary U.S. society in the department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.