Led by: Prof. Mia Bay (University of Cambridge)
Course Number: AMHI 665
Semesters: Summer 2025
Image: Portrait of Ida B. Wells, 1894 (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library)
The Life And Times of Ida B. Wells
The Life and Times of Ida B. Wells
Course Description
This course explores the history of African Americans between 1865 and the 1930s by taking a close look at the life of anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells. A member of emancipation’s first generation, Wells was born to enslaved parents during the Civil War, and survived a rough childhood to become a teacher, journalist, and trenchant social critic. Best known for her crusade against lynching, she was a social justice warrior whose long career as a civil rights activist illustrates the many challenges faced by African Americans during her lifetime. This course uses Wells’s life as a focal point for understanding not only anti-lynching, but also the rise of Jim Crow, the history of early Black civil rights organizations and women’s clubs, the Great Migration, the African American experience during the World War I era, and the emergence of New Negro leadership.
Please note that the required books listed under course readings are finalized but other aspects of the course syllabus are subject to change. We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase made through the Bookshop.org links provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
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About the Scholar
Mia Bay, Paul A. Mellon Professor of American History, University of Cambridge
Mia Bay joined the University of Cambridge as the Paul A. Mellon Professor of American History in 2025. From 2018 to 2024, she was the Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural, and social history whose recent interests include Black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation. She has authored or edited seven books, including the Bancroft Prize–winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Bay is also a frequent consultant on museum and documentary film projects. Her recent public history work includes working with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) on one of its inaugural exhibitions and serving as a scholarly advisor to the Library of Congress and NMAAHC’s Civil Rights History Project.
The views expressed in the course descriptions and lectures are those of the lead scholars.