The Negro / W. E. B. Du Bois.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963, author.

Contributor:

Gregg, Robert.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Black race.

Africa--History.

Africa.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (287 pages) : maps

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2014]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Africa is at once the most romantic and the most tragic of continents. So begins The Negro, the first comprehensive history of African and African-derived people, from their early cultures through the period of the slave trade and into the twentieth century. Originally published in 1915, the book was acclaimed in its time, widely read, and deeply influential in both the white and black communities, yet this beautifully written history is virtually unknown today. As a wellspring of critical studies of Africa and African Americans, it directly and indirectly influenced and inspired the works of scholars such as C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, Herbert Aptheker, Eric Foner, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. One of the most important books on Africa ever written, it remains fresh, dynamic, and insightful to this day.The Negro is compelling on many levels. By comparing W. E. B. Du Bois's analysis with subsequent scholarship, Robert Gregg demonstrates in his afterword that The Negro was well ahead of its time: Du Bois's view of slavery prefigures both paternalistic perspectives and the materialist view that the system was part of the capitalist mode of production. On black contributions to the Civil War and to the emancipation of slaves, historians have yet to acknowledge all that Du Bois delineated. In his discussion of Reconstruction, Du Bois preempts much later historiography. His identification of segregation as an issue of class rather than race is almost forty years ahead of C. Vann Woodward's similar thesis. As to the matter of race, Du Bois is clear that the concept is a social construct having no foundation in biology.Intellectually and historically prescient, Du Bois assumed globalization as a matter of course, so that his definition of the color line in The Negro links all colonized peoples, not just people of African descent. With the resolution of the Cold War and the ascendancy of the global market, Du Bois's sweeping vision of Africans and the diaspora seems more relevant now than at any time in the past hundred years.

Contents:

Frontmatter

PREFACE

CONTENTS

I. Africa

II. The Coming of Black Men

III. Ethiopia and Egypt

IV. The Niger and Islam

V. Guinea And Congo

VI. The Great Lakes and Zymbabwe

VII. The War Of Races At Land's End

VIII. African Culture

IX. The Trade In Men

X. The West Indies And Latin America

XI. The Negro In The United States

XII. The Negro Problem

Afterword / Gregg, Robert

Suggestions For Further Reading

Index

Notes:

Originally published: New York : Holt, 1915.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-281) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9780812291759

0812291751

OCLC:

898754977