Originally published in 1915, "The Negro" by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was acclaimed in its time, widely read, and deeply influential in both the white and black communities.
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.
As a wellspring of critical studies of Africa and African Americans, this book directly and indirectly influenced and inspired the works of scholars such as C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, Herbert Aptheker, Eric Foner... One of the most important books on Africa ever written, it remains fresh, dynamic, and insightful to this day.
Intellectually and historically prescient, Du Bois assumed globalization as a matter of course, so that his definition of the colour 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.
(Source: www.upenn.edu)
