Dr. Ellsworth teaches courses on African American history, Southern literature, race and sports, as well as crime and justice in contemporary U.S.society. Trained as a historian, he received his P.D. from Duke University in 1982. The author of Death in a Promised Land, the first-ever comprehensive history of the horrific 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Ellsworth is helping to lead the ongoing effort to uncover the unmarked graves of massacre victims. Formerly a historian with the Smithsonian Institution, he has written about American history for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, and has appeared on National Public Radio, the TODAY Show, PBS's The American Experience, the History Channel, the BBC, and in both film and broadcast documentationaries. His book, The Secret Game, won a 2016 PEN Book Award, and was named by the Chicago Tribune as one of the Top Ten Books of the Year. His newest book, The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice, was released in May, 2021.