Cold War studies are in high gear, including recent attacks on the lively volume by Jon Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America. Wiener investigates, sometimes comically, dozens of sites, a high proportion of them downright silly as well as tragic (a California suburb has a Korean War jet on display, with a plaque honoring City Council members—even though no Korean War veterans are among them). Amy Bass homes in on a single location, the homesite of the greatest of African-American political thinkers in the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois.

Great Barrington, Massachusetts, now home to prosperous, educated Manhattanites on vacation or in retirement, might easily and logically have tried to benefit from the celebrity of the location. After all, Du Bois led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the crucial early years, wrote volume after volume of...

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