Referred to by some reviewers as the "Negro Bancroft," George Washington Williams was the first serious black historian in the United States. Like George Bancroft and several other nineteenth-century historians, Williams wrote works that both reflected the gentlemen-scholar romanticism of his era and foreshadowed the rise of the "scientific school" of history. Unlike Bancroft, however, he was not a mainstream figure, and his life and writing display many of the dilemmas of turn-of-the-century black intellectuals, who often experienced what W. E. B. Du Bois labeled the "duality" of being both a Negro and an American. Given the rampant racism of the day, few black historians could psychologically afford to pursue truth merely from a pure love of knowledge. Most felt compelled to refute erroneous assumptions that supported discrimination while attempting to win credibility from a skeptical, and sometimes hostile, scholarly community.

Few nineteenth-century historians were professionally trained, and...