I was not trained in African American history, but first developed a passion for it during my first teaching job in Pittsburgh, where a number of my colleagues were interested in locating the origins of Black Nationalism and began researching the life of a local black physician, Martin R. Delany. That led me to a wider exploration of nineteenth-century African American history.
A penetrating story of the person many considered the intellectual leader of nineteenth-century African American.
A man who rose from poverty in New York City to gain a degree from Cambridge University, spent almost thirty years in Liberia, wrote some of the most incisive analyses of African civilization before returning to America where he mentored W.E. B. DuBois and other leaders of the new Civil Rights Movement.
Alexander Crummell (1819-1898) was one the most prominent Afro-American intellectuals of the nineteenth-century. This biography places Crummell's ideas within the context of his life and times.
I graduated from Wheaton College, MA, at the time, a women’s college where I developed a heightened appreciation of the power of women’s abilities to strive for more and achieve more. After learning about an ancestor’s involvement in founding the first women’s only medical school, I knew those graduates’ stories needed to be unearthed from the shadows of history by writing my book. Every March, to coincide with Women’s History Month, I celebrate these women, other glass-ceiling smashers, and the authors who write about them through my list of #31titleswomeninhistory. I have presented to the American Medical Women’s Association, local chapters of AAUW, ADK sorority, and Soroptimist International, among others.
I sincerely thank Ruth P. Watson for sharing Maggie Lena Walker's story to celebrate Walker’s accomplishments, including being the first African American woman to charter a bank and serve as a bank president.
I stood in awe learning about this unknown woman of history: an entrepreneur, civic leader, philanthropist, and visionary who believed in the power of people. I love historical fiction because a talented author like Watson can also weave in references to other people and historical events.
Watson succeeds in this respect when she mentions other influential African Americans like W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington as she highlights Walker’s role in challenging Jim Crow-era norms.
In the vein of The Personal Librarian and The House of Eve, a “remarkable and stirring novel” (Patti Callahan Henry, New York Times bestselling author) based on the inspiring true story of Virginia’s Black Wall Street and the indomitable Maggie Lena Walker, the daughter of a formerly enslaved woman who became the first Black woman to establish and preside over a bank in the United States.
Maggie Lena Walker was ambitious and unafraid. Her childhood in 19th-century Virginia helping her mother with her laundry service opened her eyes to the overwhelming discrepancy between the Black residents and her mother’s affluent…
Improbable trailblazers have fascinated me ever since I told the story of Black cardiac surgery pioneer Vivien Thomas in a 1989 Washingtonian Magazine article that won the National Magazine Award and inspired the Emmy-winning HBO film Something the Lord Made. My passion for chronicling unheralded genius has led me from one of the most remote corners of the American west to Baltimore operating rooms to the classrooms and courtrooms of Washington, DC. My decade-long collaboration with civil rights pioneer Dovey Johnson Roundtree in co-writing her autobiography Mighty Justice whetted my interest in a host of fierce African American women pathbreakers.
Cemented in popular consciousness by the 2020 Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer, African American millionaire and philanthropist Madam C.J. Walker stands as one of the foremost emblems of Black economic achievement. The woman born Sarah Breedlove to former slaves in 1867 transformed herself from cotton picker to washerwoman to direct sales pioneer to iconic beauty empire head and social activist at a time when even educated Black women of privilege were constrained by the white male hierarchy. The bare bones of this narrative would be sufficient for a book. But in the hands of Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, journalist A’Lelia Bundles, the rags-to-riches story becomes a window into the social, economic, and racial realities of the times and a riveting portrait of the shrewd, unflinching and ambitious woman who triumphed despite them.
The book behind the Netflix series, starring Octavia Spencer
'One of the most fabulous African-American figures of the twentieth century' Ishmael Reed
Madam Walker was the first free-born child in her family, growing up in abject poverty in post-Civil War America. From humble beginnings, she overcame societal prejudice, family betrayals and epic business rivalries to pioneer cosmetics that revolutionised black hair care, build a beauty empire, and become one of the wealthiest self-made women in America.
Not only an astute businesswoman, but a passionate activist and philanthropist, Madam Walker provided jobs and training for thousands of African American women across…
I was born and raised in Nyack, New York, and all of my degrees are from colleges and universities in New York. I have always been interested in race relations in America and understanding their causes and consequences. Hope and despair are two themes that run through the experiences of people of African ancestry in America. The books I selected include fiction and nonfiction works that highlight promises made and promises unfulfilled.
I think WEB DuBois is one of the greatest scholars ever to live. I recommend this book because DuBois eloquently tackles some of American society's greatest challenges. I like that DuBois is not satisfied with contemporary explanations about racial inequities. I am grateful to DuBois for encouraging American society to explore the roles of race and racism and explaining the experiences of people of African ancestry in America.
The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches is a 1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literature.
The book contains several essays on race, some of which had been published earlier in The Atlantic Monthly. To develop this work, Du Bois drew from his own experiences as an African American in American society. Outside of its notable relevance in African-American history, The Souls of Black Folk also holds an important place in social science as one of the early works…
Finally, if we are to understand the intellectual foundations of
the post-Western world in terms of IR isms, then we ought to study the
power/culture intersection well.
For these reasons, as this book does, it’s
important to consider the potential dialogue between classical realism of
scholars such as E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau, on the one hand, and
post-colonial theorists including Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du
Bois, and Aimé Césaire, on the other. Both sides have much to benefit from each
other in understanding the phenomena of race, imperialism, and war.
This book highlights important parallels between Carr and three influential figures in the first wave of post-colonialism-DuBois, Cesaire and Fanon-on the analysis of imperialism and the causes of war. Specifically, Carr's analysis of imperialism and war parallels the first wave post-colonial thinkers in two respects. First, Carr's work historically situates imperialism in the context of the social question in Western democracies. Second, Carr's work provides an ideology critique to Enlightenment rationalism, which postulates that 'reason could determine what [are] the universally valid moral laws' and thus 'by the voice of reason men could be persuaded both to save their own…
I’m an old lawyer, a writer, and now I’ve stumbled into acting, but reading, just plain old sitting on the couch and reading, has always been my personal slice of heaven. I was a history major but not a history buff like those folks that can rattle off dates or win $287,000 on Jeopardy. These stories from history can be told realistically, romantically, impressionistically, philosophically, and lots of other ways. But satirically is how stories capture and move me the most. Nothing stirs me or grows goosebumps on me as effectively as a story of hard times and hard-hearted people who deserve a bit of exposure from some well-aimed wit.
I read Imperium in an Afro-American Literature course in college. The instructor was excellent. I was the only non-Afro-American male in the class. I sat in the back. As soon as I finished reading Imperium I said to myself “This would make a great movie.” About ten years later I adapted the book into a screenplay. I typed it myself on my old typewriter. There was gunk on some of the keys and they needed cleaning. I realized that around Scene Five. If you ever read my old manuscript, I apologize for the first twenty pages. You can tell Sutton Griggs I’m sorry, also.
Imperium in Imperio (1899) is a novel by Sutton E. Griggs. Written while Sutton was at the beginning of his career as a Baptist minister, Imperium in Imperio was sold door to door and earned modest praise upon publication. Although Griggs' novels were largely forgotten by the mid-twentieth century, scholars have recently sought to emphasize his role as an activist and author involved with the movement for Black nationalism in the United States. Critics since have recognized Griggs as a pioneering political figure and author whose utopian themes and engagement with contemporary crises constitute some of the era's most radical…
I have been doing research in the Caribbean for twenty-five years. The region is diverse and magnificent. Caribbean people have sought creative solutions for racial inequality, climate and sustainability, media literacy and information, women’s and family issues. The transnational connections with the US are complex and wide-ranging, and knowing more about this region is an urgent matter. I work to understand how sound and media work because they structure our reality in important ways. Listening as a way of approaching relationships in work and play is key to our survival. So is understanding how media works, where we get our information from, and how to tell what’s relevant, significant, and true, and what is not.
The author points to the ways American media designated sound as “black” or “white” even as “colorblindness” became the dominant paradigm for liberal attitudes towards race. While Americans claimed that they didn’t “see race”, they were exposed to an increasingly segregated soundscape and media environment. Stoever opens up new ways for us to listen to familiar voices, such as those of WEB du Bois, Lena Horne, Lead Belly, Richard Wright, and many more.
The unheard history of how race and racism are constructed from sound and maintained through the listening ear.
Race is a visual phenomenon, the ability to see "difference." At least that is what conventional wisdom has lead us to believe. Yet, The Sonic Color Line argues that American ideologies of white supremacy are just as dependent on what we hear-voices, musical taste, volume-as they are on skin color or hair texture. Reinforcing compelling new ideas about the relationship between race and sound with meticulous historical research, Jennifer Lynn Stoever helps us to better understand how sound and listening not only…
Colin Koopman researches and teaches about technology ethics at the University of Oregon, where he is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the interdisciplinary certificate program in New Media & Culture. His research pursuits have spanned from the history of efforts in the early twentieth century to standardize birth certificates to our understanding of ourselves as effects of the code inscribed into our genes. Koopman is currently at work on a book that will develop our understanding of what it takes to achieve equality and fairness in data systems, tentatively titled Data Equals.
W.E.B. Du Bois is widely acknowledged as the leading activist for racial equality of his generation. But until very recently little had been known of his deep commitment to the pursuit of equality within and through data technology. As Du Bois was preparing notes for his famous 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, he was also preparing an exposition of what we would today call “infographics” (or what the editors of this volume aptly call “data portraits”) for exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition world’s fair. This volume handsomely reproduces for the first time a full-color complete set of Du Bois’s charts, graphs, maps, and ingenious spirals. A beautiful book to live with, it also subtly transforms one’s understanding of the history of racial progress and inequality in America.
"As visually arresting as it is informative."-The Boston Globe
"Du Bois's bold colors and geometric shapes were decades ahead of modernist graphic design in America."-Fast Company's Co.Design
W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits is the first complete publication of W.E.B. Du Bois's groundbreaking charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition.
Famed sociologist, writer, and Black rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois fundamentally changed the representation of Black Americans with his exhibition of data visualizations at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Beautiful in design and powerful in content, these data portraits make visible a wide spectrum of African American culture, from…
Journalism and history have been my dual obsessions since high school, and my work for the past 13 years has focused on the intersection between them. The pressures of journalism, its tremendous impact, and the extraordinary characters who tend to be drawn to the profession are endlessly fascinating to me. In my time as a PhD student, professor, researcher, and book review editor for an academic journal, I have read hundreds of books about American journalism and its past (maybe over 1,000 now that I think about it, but I haven’t kept count!). I’ve also reviewed several for the Washington Post. These are some of my favorites.
My other recommendations focus on mainstream, mass-audience journalism. But there has always been much more to the press than that, particularly the advocacy-journalism tradition, of which Trotter is a shining example.
His newspaper, The Guardian, published for the Black community in Boston and beyond, pushed an uncompromising vision for racial justice that was ahead of its time. But Trotter had his faults, too, and I love that this biography refuses to engage in hero worship. Instead, Greenidge presents Trotter as a complex figure and doesn’t sugarcoat the poignant sadness of his downward spiral later in life.
William Monroe Trotter (1872- 1934), though still virtually unknown to the wider public, was an unlikely American hero. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, he galvanized black working- class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post- Reconstruction America. For more than thirty years, the Harvard-educated Trotter edited and published the Guardian, a weekly Boston newspaper that was read across the nation. Defining himself against the gradualist politics of Booker T. Washington and the elitism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Trotter advocated for a radical vision of…
To me, political and moral questions have always seemed intertwined. My career as a political theorist is dedicated to using philosophical argument to untangle the moral questions surrounding real-world politics. I am especially interested in ethics and international affairs, including the ethics of intervention, what a just world order would look like, and how our understandings of familiar ideals—like justice, democracy, and equality—would change if we thought they were not only meant to be pursued within each nation-state, but also globally, by humanity as a whole. As faculty in Political Science and International Affairs at The George Washington University, I explore these issues with colleagues and students alike.
The first half of this book offers a rich, careful textual engagement with the works of Immanuel Kant and his intellectual descendants. It is sure to be rewarding to those interested in Kant’s cosmopolitanism and its present-day variants.
But, to me, the real beauty of Valdez’s book lies in its second half, where she discusses W.E.B. Du Bois’s political thought and the history of his transnational activism against racism and empire.
Drawing on Du Bois, Valdez presents a radical vision of what democracy and political community can look like beyond the nation-state. She also offers an excellent model of how to discuss oppressed people not as helpless victims, but as political agents in their own right with lessons to teach the world about how best to struggle for justice.
Based on the theoretical reconstruction of neglected post-WWI writings and political action of W. E. B. Du Bois, this volume offers a normative account of transnational cosmopolitanism. Pointing out the limitations of Kant's cosmopolitanism through a novel contextual account of Perpetual Peace, Transnational Cosmopolitanism shows how these limits remain in neo-Kantian scholarship. Ines Valdez's framework overcomes these limitations in a methodologically unique way, taking Du Bois's writings and his coalitional political action both as text that should inform our theorization and normative insights. The cosmopolitanism proposed in this work is an original contribution that questions the contemporary currency of Kant's…
