War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. host, James Early. Hello, everybody.

This is James, as always.

You know, from the very beginning when I first conceived of this series of key battles

of World War II in Europe.

I've been wanting to do an episode on African Americans in the war and the special role that they played, the obstacles that they had to overcome, just to get into the service

and into the fighting.

And I thought about it for a while, and I realized I could either write an episode from scratch.

But why should I do that when I've already done an interview with Dr. Matthew Delmont,

who's a professor at Dartmouth University, and he wrote a great book on African-Americans during the World War II time period?

And I thought, why not just rerun the interview?

You know, I've never, unless I'm mistaken, I don't think I've ever done a rerun episode.

So I apologize for that, but there's just no better way to attack this topic than to just listen to a man who literally wrote the book on the subject.

So with that in mind, without any further ado, I'm going to go ahead and let you listen to the

interview I did with Dr. Matt Delmont on his excellent book on African Americans in World War II.

And that will cover the topic very nicely.

And I strongly encourage you to get the book and read it, because as is the case with

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