David L. Chappell writes about human rights, mostly in the United States. He is writing his fourth book, Capitalists on Trial, which will explain three Congressional investigations that responded to public outrage about monopoly power in 1912, 1932, & 1957. Through Congress’s highly publicized hearings, the public came to share an understanding of complex and contested facts. The results include many of the deepest reforms in the history of American institutions—and a lasting factual record that remains useful in debunking ideological myths about economic life. Chappell’s first book, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Johns Hopkins, 1994), won a Gustavus Myers Award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights in North America. The Atlantic Monthly called his second book, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina, 2004), “one of the three or four most important books on civil rights.” The New York Times called it “a spectacular work” that is “intricate, dazzling in its reach into so many corners of black and white southern life, and fascinating at every turn.” His third book, Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King (Random House, 2014), drew such responses as: “the kind of clear-eyed analysis of our post-civil rights worlds of politics and memory work that we desperately need” (Jonathan Holloway of Yale University, author of Jim Crow Wisdom); “Chappell brilliantly recovers the usually neglected ferment and experimentation of a generation of Americans who tried to make good on the goals of the civil rights movement” (Tony Badger of Cambridge University, author of The New Deal); and “Beautifully written and thought-provoking” (Carol Anderson of Emory University, author of Eyes off the Prize). His most recent article is “Martin Luther King: Strategist of Force,” published in African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, 2022), a volume of 30 intellectual biographies. Chappell’s research has been funded by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He was a Fulbright Lecturer at Moscow State University in Russia in 1993. His reviews and articles have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Raleigh News & Observer, Sekai (Tokyo), Tempo (Rio de Janeiro), In These Times, Books & Culture, The Nation, The African American Review, The Journal of American Studies, The Georgia Historical Quarterly, The Journal of the Historical Society, Social Research, The World Policy Journal, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Journal of Southern History, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, beliefnet.com, Historically Speaking, We’re History, and other publications. He was raised by a single mother in Chicago. He got his B.A. in modern European history at Yale, his M.A. & Ph.D. in American history (minor fields: economics, modern Europe) at the University of Rochester, where he was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow in the Frederick Douglass Institute of African and African-American Studies. He teaches courses in economic history, intellectual history, and constitutional history (including the US Presidency). He expects to be teaching two new courses soon: Slavery & “Capitalism”; and When Did Capitalists Take Over, & How?
David Chappell
