| The problem of the color line at the turn of the twentieth century: the essential early essays This volume assembles essential essays--some published only posthumously, others obscure, another only recently translated--by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1894 to early 1906. They show the first formulations of some of his most famous ideas, namely, "the veil," "double-consciousness," and the "problem of the color line." Moreover, the deep historical sense of the formation of the modern world that informs Du Bois's thought and gave rise to his understanding of "the problem of the color line" is on display here. Indeed, the essays constitute an essential companion to Du Bois's masterpiece published in 1903 as The Souls of Black Folk. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was a leading scholar, writer, and political activist. For twenty-three years he was the editor of The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races. Apart from hundreds of essays and diverse short works, he published more than twenty book length texts during his lifetime, among the most well-known of which are The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study,and The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Nahum Dimitri Chandler serves on the faculty of the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, in African American Studies, ComparativeLiterature, and European Languages and Studies. He is the author of X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought and The Problem of Pure Being: Annotations on the Early Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and the Discourses of the Negro, both from Fordham, as well as Toward an African Future--Of the Limit of World. |