My project, part of my next book, North Versus Black Atlantic: Race, Empire, and the Origins of American International Relations, is a biographical and interpretive essay, the first ever, on Merze Tate (1905-1996, Ph.D., Radcliffe and Harvard, 1941). Tate was the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in international relations, the first African American woman to receive an Oxford Literature degree, the first American woman to study at the most prestigious advanced studies program in the world, Alfred Zimmern’s Institute of International Studies in Geneva, the first political scientist to write on arms control in the United States as well as the first to study America’s nineteenth century Pacific empire. She nonetheless died in obscurity, at least as far as white scholars go.