Current Research
The Battle of Adwa, artist unknown
When the World Turned: the Battle of Adwa, 1896
My current research concerns successful Ethiopian resistance to European colonization in the 1880s and 1890s. It is organized around the battle of Adwa in March of 1896: a stunning victory for Ethiopian forces but a rout and a disaster for Italy. Adwa is deeply interesting in its own terms because Ethiopia is the only African country successfully to resist European colonization before 1914. However, it is Adwa’s global context that makes the story compelling because Adwa – the story of Africans seeing to their own freedom – played out against a background of almost unrelenting European expansion into Africa and it resonated powerfully in post-Emancipation America where hierarchies of race and ethnicity were only beginning a process of challenge and renegotiation. For additional information visit BattleofAdwa.org