http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 20 Mar 2011 IP address: 68.181.201.12 ‘‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’’: US History and Its Discontents in the Obama Era ROBIN D.G. KELLEY Editor’s note : A Round Table discussion of this article, with comments by Gareth Davies, Stephen F. Lawson and Stephen Tuck, is available on Cambridge Journals Online (http://journals.cambridge.org.ams). As Samuel Eliot Morrison had done when he delivered the first Harmsworth lecture eighty-seven years ago, I, too, must begin with a Prologue. ‘‘ Through the Prologue, ’’ Professor Morrison told his audience, ‘‘ the author endeav- oured to establish a personal relation between himself and his audience, and to arouse their curiosity and interest in the play that followed.’’ 1 I pray he is correct. Anyone familiar with the history of this august chair will immediately notice that I differ from every previous Harmsworth Professor in one crucial way: I’m not white. While this is, indeed, a historic occasion, there is more to the story than my being what we call in the states ‘‘a Negro first ’’ – some of it quite personal, some of it political, some of it symbolic; and much of it speaks to the place of African Americans and race in US political discourse and collective memory. The story I will share with you brought me to tonight’s topic. On 25 March of this year, the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin joined the ancestors. He was ninety-four years old. For those of you not familiar with Professor Franklin, he authored many seminal texts, notably From Slavery to Freedom : A History of Negro Americans (first published in 1947) as well as Reconstruction after the Civil War, The Militant South, George Washington Williams : A Biography, and a collection of essays titled Race and History, to University of South California. Email : rdkelley@usc.edu 1 S. E. Morrison, A Prologue to American History : An Inaugural Address (Oxford : The Clarendon Press, 1922), 1. Journal of American Studies, 45 (2011), 1, 185–200 f Cambridge University Press 2011 doi:10.1017/S0021875810002136