Synopsis
This collection of essays on African American history, culture, and society probes fundamental issues of race and justice and documents Du Bois's conviction that the "soul" of the black community must be preserved and revered. The text reprinted here is that of the first book edition (1903).
"Contexts" presents a fascinating collection of political and biographical documents related to the text. Also included are eighteen photographs that accompanied Du Bois's 1901 article "The Negro As He Really Is."
"Criticism" offers thirteen contemporary and recent assessments of Du Bois and Souls, rounding out the picture of this enduring work.
About the Authors
W. E. B. Du Bois, a sociologist, historian, writer, and civil rights activist, is recognized as one of the foremost intellectual leaders of the twentieth century. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868. He attended Fisk University, Humboldt University, and was the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard University, in 1895. He was a foundational member of the international Pan-Africanist movement and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. From 1910 to 1934 he edited The Crisis, the NAACP's flagship journal. In his later years, he and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, traveled around the globe supporting anticolonial, antimilitarist, and communist struggles. Du Bois died in Accra, Ghana, on August 27, 1963. The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays published in 1903, is his best-known work.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Ph.D.Cambridge), is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research, Harvard University. He is the author of Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008; Black in Latin America; Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora; Faces of America; Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race with Cornel West; Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. His is also the writer, producer, and narrator of PBS documentaries Finding Your Roots; Black in Latin America; Faces of America; African American Lives 1 and 2; Looking for Lincoln; America Beyond the Color Line; and Wonders of the African World. He is the editor of African American National Biography with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and The Dictionary of African Biography with Anthony Appiah; Encyclopedia Africana with Anthony Appiah; and The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, as well as editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com.
Terri Hume Oliver is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. The title of her dissertation is The Ends of Childhood: An American Rhetoric of Minority. She has published reference entries on Cynthia Ozick, Susan Cheever, and Robert Beck, and was a research assistant for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature.
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