Ted Widmer, 'A Database of Early African and African American Music'

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Ted Widmer is an historian and former presidential adviser who writes widely on history, politics and their intersection.  He is Distinguished Lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York.  

From 1997 to 2001, he was a foreign policy speechwriter and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, and he collaborated with the former president on his memoir, My Life.  He also served as a senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012-2014.  

He has been particularly active in the realm of public history. From 2010 to 2015, he helped to create an ambitious series about the Civil War (“Disunion”) in the New York Times, and became one of its lead contributors.  In 2019, he conceived and edited a year-long series in the New York Times about the global transformations of the year 1919 ("The Year of the Crack-Up").

In 2020, his book, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington was published by Simon and Schuster.  It received the prize for the best book of the year from the Lincoln Forum, and the inaugural prize for best book from the Society of Presidential Descendants, among other awards.  A new introduction has been written by former Rep. Liz Cheney, explaining how the book helped to shape her thinking in the chaos of the 2020-2021 presidential transition. 

He has also written or edited six other books, including a two-volume series in the Library of America, American Speeches.  In 2022, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his next project, a study of racial tension in Boston in 1968. 

A Database of Early African and African-American Music

Ted Widmer’s fellowship project is centered on the building of a platform for a global database of early African and African American music. A  well-conceived database would create an infrastructure for the study of one of the most enduring cultural contributions in world history, all the more remarkable for the fact that it faced such adversity.  Paradoxically, the effort to stamp out the music has left a deep documentary record, which we can build up into a searchable database, and something like immortality.