The Oxford W E B Du Bois Reader

The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader encompasses the whole of Du Bois's long and multifaceted writing career, from the 1890s through the early 1960s. The volume selects key essays and longer works that portray the range of Du Bois's thought on such subjects as African American culture, the politics and sociology of American race relations, art and music, black leadership, gender and women's rights, Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism, and Communism in the U.S. and abroad. Chronologically, the volume stretches from definitive early essays such as "The Conservation of Races" to later works such as "Africa and World Peace" and "Gandhi and the American Negro." Du Bois's most famous book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and his landmark work on colonialism, Darkwater (1920), which contains many of his best-known shorter essays, such as "The African Roots of the War," "On Being Black," and "The Burden of Black Women," are both printed in their entirety. Key chapters drawn from full-length studies, including The Philadelphia Negro, The Gift of Black Folk, Black Reconstruction, Dusk of Dawn, The World and Africa, In Battle for Peace, and Du Bois's posthumous autobiography are supplemented by dozens of shorter essays covering topics in literature, education, African politics, urban studies, and American foreign policy. Individual essays and selections from longer works also illustrate Du Bois's skillful biographical studies of historical figures such as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Phillis Wheatley, Abraham Lincoln, and John Brown, as well as contemporaries like Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Paul Robeson, and Joseph Stalin. Supplemented by an extensive critical introduction and headnotes to major works and topics, theOxford Reader offers the most extensive compilation of Du Bois's writings now available.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. First published in 1899 at the dawn of sociology, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study is a landmark in empirical sociological research. Du Bois was the first sociologist to document the living circumstances of urban Black Americans. The Philadelphia Negro provides a framework for studying black communities, and it has steadily grown in importance since its original publication. Today, it is an indispensable model for sociologists, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, educators, philosophers, and urban studies scholars. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by Lawrence Bobo, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history and sociology.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Dusk of Dawn, published in 1940, is an explosive autobiography of the foremost African American scholar of his time. Du Bois writes movingly of his own life, using personal experience to elucidate the systemic problem of race. He reflects on his childhood, his education, and his intellectual life, including the formation of the NAACP. Though his views eventually got him expelled from the association, Du Bois continues to develop his thoughts on separate black economic and social institutions in Dusk of Dawn. Readers will find energetic essays within these pages, including insight into his developing Pan-African consciousness. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.

The present volume is quite different from the other two autobiographies by Du Bois not only because of its additional two-decade span, and the significantly altered outlook of its author, but also because in it—unlike the others—he seeks, as he writes, "to review my life as frankly and fully as I can." Of course, with the directness and honesty which so decisively characterized him, he reminds the reader of this book of the intense subjectivity that inevitably permeates autobiography; hence, he writes, he offers this account of his life as he understood it and as he—would like others to believe—it to have been. Certainly, while Dr. Du Bois was deep in his ninth decade when he died, longevity was the least remarkable feature of his life. As editor, author, lecturer, scholar, organizer, inspirer, and fighter, he was among the most consequential figures of the twentieth century. Necessarily, therefore, the full and final accounting of that life and his times becomes an indispensable volume.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. One of the most neglected and obscure books by W. E. B. Du Bois, In Battle for Peace frankly documents Du Bois's experiences following his attempts to mobilize Americans against the emerging conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. A victim of McCarthyism, Du Bois endured a humiliating trial-he was later acquitted-and faced political persecution for over a decade. Part autobiography and part political statement, In Battle for Peace remains today a powerful analysis of race in America. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by Manning Marable, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Black Reconstruction in America tells and interprets the story of the twenty years of Reconstruction from the point of view of newly liberated African Americans. Though lambasted by critics at the time of its publication in 1935, Black Reconstruction has only grown in historical and literary importance. In the 1960s it joined the canon of the most influential revisionist historical works. Its greatest achievement is weaving a credible, lyrical historical narrative of the hostile and politically fraught years of 1860-1880 with a powerful critical analysis of the harmful effects of democracy, including Jim Crow laws and other injustices. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by David Levering Lewis, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.

This booktraces W.E.B. Du Bois’s fictionalization of history in his five major works of fiction and in his debut short story The Souls of Black Folk through a thematic framework of cosmopolitanism. In texts like The Negro and Black Folk: Then and Now, Du Bois argues that the human race originated from a single source, a claim authenticated by anthropologists and the Human Genome Project. This book breaks new ground by demonstrating the fashion in which the variants of cosmopolitanism become a profound theme in Du Bois’s contribution to fiction. In general, cosmopolitanism claims that people belong to a single community informed by common moral values, function through a shared economic nomenclature, and are part of political systems grounded in mutual respect. This book addresses Du Bois’s works as important additions to the academy and makes a significant contribution to literature by first demonstrating the way in which fiction could be utilized in discussing historical accounts in order to reach a global audience. “The Coming of John”, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Dark Princess: A Romance, and The Black Flame, an important trilogy published sequentially as The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color are grounded in historical occurrences and administer as social histories providing commentary on Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, African American leadership, school desegregation, the Pan-African movement, imperialism, and colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. In Black Folk Then and Now, W. E. B. Du Bois embarks on a mission to correct the omissions, misinterpretations, and deliberate lies he detected in previous depictions of black history. An exemplary revisionist exploration of history and sociology, this essay reflects Du Bois's lifelong mission to bring to light the truths of Black history and expose the African peoples' noble heritage. W. E. B. Du Bois writes extensively about the color line, which he believed at the time of publication to be the defining problem of the twentieth century. In 1946, following the Holocaust, Du Bois revised his arguments, reshaping them into the narrative we find in The World and Africa. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by Wilson Moses, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.