In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois looked ahead at the dawn of the new century and declared that, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” In these two books, historians Nicholas Grant and John Munro take up Du Bois’s challenge to center our understanding of the twentieth century around race and colonialism as key factors in the ordering of the world. While each of these important works is deserving of their own review, the coincidence of their nearly simultaneous publication provides a unique opportunity to assess not only these two books, but also the state of the field in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Though distinct in their approach in important respects, The Anticolonial Front and Winning Our Freedoms Together share several core conceptions about their subject matter and its place in the literature. First, both authors seek to decenter the Cold War from its dominant place in the historiography of twentieth-century international relations. Munro, whose work centers on “a tendency within the postwar Black liberation struggle in which the imperial structure of gendered racial capitalism took center stage in political theory and organization,” is forthright in putting the Cold War in its place. “The cold war loomed large in the twentieth century,” he observes, “but the relationship between empire and decolonization mattered more” (Munro, 2, 3). Grant, who is focused on the particular case of South Africa and apartheid, is slightly less sweeping in identifying colonialism and anticolonialism as the dominant axes of international relations but also makes clear that rather than a sui generis conflict, the Cold War, and particularly anticommunism, “was bound up with white supremacy at this particular moment” in a way that made it impossible to disentangle from the imperial past (Grant, 10). While more traditional Cold War scholars will inevitably have their own rejoinders, it is hard to argue with the conclusion that that conflict has exercised a disproportionally large influence on diplomatic history and international relations scholarship. As Robert Vitalis recently demonstrated in White World Order, Black Power Politics, the primacy of the Cold War geopolitical framework within the academy—often at the expense of those emphasizing race and colonialism—is far from accidental and in fact reveals larger structural biases within the profession itself.