Clint Smith’s next book looks beyond familiar WWII narratives
Clint Smith’s forthcoming book approaches World War II through the people who lived it and the places that preserve its memory. Just Beneath the Soil: World War II Through the Eyes of Its Last Witnesses, due from Knopf in May 2027, follows the method of his bestselling How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. In both books, history takes shape through sites, personal stories and the choices societies make about what to remember. That approach makes public memory part of the subject, rather than a backdrop to it.
Smith began thinking about the project while touring for How the Word Is Passed, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was adapted for young readers by Sonja Cherry-Paul in 2025. Conversations about how the United States confronts slavery repeatedly raised questions about Germany’s reckoning with the Holocaust. Smith visited Germany in 2021 and 2022, initially intending to compare how the two countries tell difficult histories. The research widened his focus, too: it made him realize how much he still had to understand about World War II.
Germany became a starting point for a broader inquiry into people and places whose stories fall outside what Smith calls the dominant “Band of Brothers framework.” That phrase points to a familiar way of presenting the war, one that can leave other experiences at the margins. The new book considers monuments, memorials and public sites, while also giving space to survivors themselves. The balance matters: a memorial can show what a society chooses to preserve, while testimony can convey what those choices leave out.
Smith sees urgency in recording testimony while people with meaningful firsthand memories of the war are still alive. The project therefore carries a time limit that historical research alone can't remove. Once witnesses are gone, the work of remembering depends more heavily on records, institutions and the accounts passed between generations.
That urgency reaches beyond historical preservation. Smith wonders what the loss of those witnesses means for society and the political order built after World War II. He asks whether the weakening of that postwar infrastructure is connected to the passing of people able to recall how destructive events can become. The question is pointed, though the book's premise doesn't reduce the relationship to a simple cause and effect. This is more significant than it looks: preserving testimony can keep history close enough to challenge easy assumptions about how stable political arrangements are.
Teaching history without flattening it
At the NCTE Secondary Section Luncheon on November 21, Smith plans to speak to educators about teaching complexity and the many stories that shape national and global history. He argues that public debate increasingly pressures people to simplify or erase the past, narrowing whose experiences count. In his view, history is also too often filtered through contemporary political aims and told primarily through white, American or European perspectives. The problem isn't only that some stories disappear; a narrow frame can make the remaining stories seem like the whole account.
Smith wants teachers to resist turning education into an ideological weapon. Students, he says, need to encounter the “both/andedness” of history: its competing experiences, contradictions and unfinished questions. That can be harder to teach than a clean sequence of heroes, villains and conclusions, but it gives students a better sense of how people actually live through events. Presenting historical figures as complex, inconsistent people can help students recognize themselves in the past and feel more connected to it.
Here's the thing: complexity doesn't require a teacher to treat every claim as equally persuasive. It asks students to look at evidence, context and the limits of what can be known. If you're working in this space, Smith's emphasis offers a practical test for classroom materials: whose experience is visible, and what gets lost when the account is made simpler?
A writer who still thinks like a teacher
Smith says he misses the classroom and considers teaching high school English the best job he has had. He remembers the pleasure of discussing literature with teenagers in a circle, where a poem or book could prompt a conversation no single interpretation settled. He also acknowledges how demanding the work has become. Educators he knows care deeply about their students, he says, while facing pressures inside and outside school amid the spread of social media and AI in the post-Covid era. The tools and pressures may change how students encounter information, but they don't remove the need to interpret it.
He still approaches his writing as an educator. Smith aims for How the Word Is Passed and Just Beneath the Soil to work in high school American and world history classes while retaining scholarly rigor. That pairing is demanding: a book has to be readable enough to invite students in, yet careful enough to support serious discussion. Smith's aim suggests that accessibility and rigor can reinforce each other when the writing makes room for evidence, uncertainty and human detail.
His YouTube series, Crash Course Black American History, grew from a desire to give teachers resources for teaching Black American history. The through line is practical: help students encounter history through language, poetry and human experience, with enough complexity to make the past feel real. A useful classroom resource can open a subject; it can't settle every question the subject raises. And yet, a starting point matters.
What the project asks readers to carry forward
Just Beneath the Soil connects the work of remembering with the work of teaching. Its focus on witnesses and memorial sites gives readers two ways to examine the past: through people who experienced it and through the public choices that shape its legacy. The book's questions about the postwar order extend that examination into the present, without making the past a simple template for current events. For readers and teachers, the challenge is to keep those accounts in view after the witnesses are gone. That means allowing history to remain complicated. A necessary discomfort.
