Caroline Elkins
Caroline Elkins is a noted historian and Pulitzer Prize winner best known for her groundbreaking and award-winning 2005 book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. A history professor at Harvard University and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Elkins has dedicated her career to unearthing and shining a light on repressed history that has been overlooked or suppressed.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Elkins attended Stanford University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in political science. After graduating she moved to Kenya, a country she had long been fascinated by, to teach at a private school. While there she vastly broadened her knowledge and appreciation of its people and culture, and began to learn about its history and the injustices done to its people. This spurred her to pursue a career as a historian and she did so by attending graduate school at the London School of Economics, where she earned a master's degree in international history and a doctorate in African history.
After completing her doctoral thesis, which looked at the impacts that changes in British colonial education policy in Kenya had on local society, Elkins penned her first book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. This exhaustive study explored the systematic torture and mistreatment of Kenyan natives during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s and 1960s. Elkins' extensive research included interviews with both perpetrators and survivors, as well as thousands of British documents that had been sealed for half a century. She examined the extent of the atrocities and the lengths to which the British went to cover them up. Imperial Reckoning was praised for its courageous, honest, and meticulously researched look into a dark episode in the nation's colonial history. It was a critically acclaimed bestseller and it earned Elkins the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Following the success of Imperial Reckoning, Elkins continued to investigate misused knowledge and forgotten events. She began writing a second book, America in Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Challenging of Empire, which explores the lives of two African American missionaries. Elkins once again uncovered suppressed history, this time delving into the involvement of the American government in African-American missions in the early twentieth century. In addition to her writing, Elkins has held numerous lectures and has used the power of storytelling to drive home the messages of her books and shed light on the need for African countries to tell their own stories.
Elkins' contributions to African history have been invaluable. By uncovering and illuminating forgotten and obscured histories, she has not only brought awareness to the injustices of colonialism, but also challenged the power structures that continue to oppress Africans and African-Americans today. Elkins' passion for learning, her tireless efforts to uncover suppressed and forgotten histories, and her masterful writing are the very foundations of her success. She has opened the hearts and minds of her readers, showing them something that many had never seen before. Her passion and dedication to history, as well as to setting the record straight and furthering human rights, can only continue to inspire readers and historians alike.
