Wright's initial research involved trying to reconstruct Africa's early history from the oral traditions its people kept alive.  "I spent most of a year wandering around the lower Gambia with a tape recorder, talking to old people about the past," he says.  A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and several SUNY Faculty Research Fellowships further supported these "wanderings" and early publications: a monograph, two volumes of edited oral traditions, and some of the earliest criticism of Alex Haley's Roots.  "But ironically," Wright admits, "the best stuff I did back then involved writing about my failures - about how I just couldn't do what I'd hoped with oral traditions.   "Indiana's Brooks says, laughing, that Wright is the only historian he knows who advanced in his early career by disproving his own work.

    Of course, this did not leave Wright with clear direction for African research.  So, in the late 1980s, he turned his attention to early African-American history, writing African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins through the American Revolution (1990, 2000) and African Americans in the Early Republic, 1789-1831 (1993), both books in Harlan Davidson's American History Series.   Teaching related courses at Cortland helps Wright keep his hand in the African-American field: historian Ira Berlin calls Wright "the historiographer of slavery in the early period [of American history]" in the April 2003 edition of the Organization of American Historians' Magazine of History, whose lead article is Wright's "Recent Literature on Slavery in Colonial North America."

    But even before then, in the mid-1990s, Wright returned to pursuing his African interests, "where my heart really lies," he says.  Research he conducted in 1996 resulted in The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, The Gambia, now in its second (M.E. Sharpe, 2004) edition, a book that has caught several eyes: Allen Howard of Rutgers thinks it's "the best teaching book on Africa"; George Mason University's Peter Stearns labels it "the best combination of local sensitivity and global awareness I know of"; the History Book Club labeled it "among the 10 best books on Africa in 2004"; and a panel at this summer's Annual Meeting of the World History Association in Morocco will focus on "Teaching World History with Donald Wright's The World and a Very Small Place in Africa."  Wright sees irony in the book's success: "I thought I knew a lot about The Gambia, I'd been teaching and thinking about world history for a long time, and I thought I could see how global events affected people's lives through focus on one small place.  But, in honesty, I started with what I thought was a cool title and went from there."  Panelists at the conference in Morocco wanted Wright to attend and comment on their presentations, but he'll be in Guinea at the time, presenting his own paper at a meeting of the Mande Studies Association.  So, through the magic of the internet, he will comment by e-mail ("…so long as I get the papers a few days ahead of time," he says, "and the electricity happens to be on in Guinea.")

    Wright is taking the globalization theme further with his current work. When on leave in 2003, he and his wife Doris spent two months interviewing Gambians to determine how today's global interactions are affecting their lives.  ("They may have as many cell phones as Cortland students," he says, "but they remain poor, hungry, and short lived.")  He spent a later month of 2003 writing about this at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study Center in Bellagio, Italy (which he describes as "near where God must live"), and he and Doris are returning to The Gambia in June 2005 to continue work on the project

    But if Wright's heart lies in Africa, his soul remains close to the classroom.  He won the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1989 and a year later received the State University of New York's highest faculty rank, Distinguished Teaching Professor.  Over the summer of 2000, he helped begin instruction of African-American history at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.  After nearly thirty years of teaching, he is still not sure about the keys to being effective at it.  "Fundamental honesty is somewhere near the core," he believes, "and you have to work hard and not be afraid to show students who you are and what's important to you. But beyond that, I'm still working on it."

    Wright will not be "working on it" at Cortland in 2005-06, however. He has been named the General Mark W. Clark Distinguished Professor of History at The Citadel, so he and Doris will be in Charleston, South Carolina through the academic year.  In addition to continuing his project on globalization's effects on Gambians, Wright hopes he will have time to finish work, with several co-authors, on the first comprehensive history of the Atlantic World, a project he's been involved with since 2000.   "Writing about Africa in the broader context of the Atlantic is something I've wanted to do for a long time," Wright says.  "But however much I might like them, before I ever again agree to write anything with co-authors, I want someone to please hit me in the head with a five-iron."

    Perhaps appropriately, teaching Wright's African and world history courses at Cortland in his absence will be one of his former students, Matt Carotenuto (BA, '99), who followed Wright's path to Indiana University and Fulbright research in Africa.  "Matt's completing his dissertation on Luo nationalism in Kenya," Wright says proudly, "and it pleases me to know that he's filling my spot while I'm gone.  Of course," Wright adds with a not toward the door, "if he's better than I am, he's history!"