“Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad” by Matthew F. Delmont is about the more than one million Black men and women who served in the American military in WWII, and the racially fraught environment in which they and their families lived and worked. This is a broadly comprehensive work that covers everything from the Tuskegee airmen to Thurgood Marshall’s work defending the civil rights of Black servicemen and women, from the time of the Spanish Civil War to the integration of the armed services in 1948. I would argue it’s a must-read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of American history on the whole, since this author takes care to lay the historical groundwork for the racism and discrimination that pervaded the wartime experience of Black Americans, and what their participation meant for them and American culture more broadly after the war. I’ll admit that my knowledge in this area was lacking, and once I started, I ended up reading the whole thing in one day.