The genesis of this volume was a simple Sunday morning conversation with Carolyn Brown. I had attended a preview of the first episode of Ken Burns's documentary, The War, at Dartmouth College, and I shared my observations with her. We both planned to include chapters on World War II in our respective monographs, and as we discussed our mutual concern with the largely superficial treatment of Africa in European and American accounts of World War II, and our conversion to the idea that World War II deserved much greater attention in African studies, the idea for a conference took root.

We convinced Gregg Mann and Ahmad Sikainga to join us as coorganizers in the project, and we brought together twenty-six participants from around the globe for a workshop at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, March 27–30, 2008. Following that workshop we organized a conference at Cornell University, September 18–20, 2009, as well as three panels at the 2010 meeting of the American Historical Association. This has been a long process, and along the way the composition of organizers changed as well; Gregg Mann left and Timothy Parsons joined us. In the multiple steps that brought us to this point, the numerous meetings and rewrites, our conviction in this project has been reinforced, for each of us learned something new at the end of the day.

Why Revisit World War II?

In the documentary The War, Ken Burns did an admirable job in illustrating the complexity and grand scale of World War II as well as the personal experiences of individuals who witnessed its horrors and victories. While fully deserving of the praise it garnered, the series also illustrates the concerns that drive this collaborative project – the inadequate attention to Africa's role in World War II. This early version of episode one importantly included discussion of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 but then replicated the standard discussion of the North Africa campaigns, largely focusing on the actions of Generals Montgomery and Rommel.