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"This edition of The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois is the first to be arranged and dedicated in accordance with Du Bois's manuscript notes. The Great Barrington Edition opens, as he intended, with the story of his birth and childhood in a small western Massachusetts town. It begins with these words: "I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation which began the freeing of American Negro Slaves." Du Bois was born in the town where Berkshire Publishing Group is located. His autobiography tells the story of a little boy, the only Black boy in his school, who became the first African American PhD at Harvard, an educator, editor, and activist, and a writer of expressive, lyrical, and accessible prose. Our rearrangement of the chapters was made after we found a copy of the marked-up original manuscript for the book in the archives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. That document shows how Du Bois had wanted the chapters ordered, and his changes to the dedication. In the final chapters, he explains why he chose to become a communist. While the communism he praised did not turn out to offer the utopia so many hoped for, the problems he identified are still with us. His reasoning will resonant with modern readers who share his frustration with the continued inequities in our society"--

"The Souls of Black Folk is a founding text of the US civil rights movement, an inspiring work of literature and advocacy by a young man who drew on his own experience as a child in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a teacher in the hills of Tennessee, a father grieving after the death of his baby son. It is a book compiled in haste but nonetheless a command performance. The fourteen vivid essays are political, philosophical, historical, and personal. The first three explore the history of slavery, following by six chapters of sociological analysis in Du Bois's resonant prose. The remainder of the book is replete with stories that show different facets of the Black experience and explain Du Bois's statement that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." More than a century later, The Souls of Black Folk inspires us to find the courage and imagination to solve that problem in the twenty-first century. Berkshire Publishing is delighted to make several of W. E. B. Du Bois's most accessible and relevant books available in new Great Barrington Editions. They include his Autobiography rearranged, for the first time, in accordance with Du Bois's instructions and also available for the first time as an ebook. Berkshire Publishing Group was founded in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the small New England town where W. E. B. Du Bois was born in 1868. Du Bois wrote eloquently about the town and its people, and he is remembered today as the most influential graduate of the town's schools. Du Bois wrote eloquently about his formative experiences in Great Barrington: Du Bois's origins in Great Barrington have been an inspiration to Berkshire Publishing Group for many years, as debates about honoring him roiled the town. Some claimed that this was simply racism; others insisted that the issue was that he he became a communist and left the United States at the end of his life, Nonetheless, at long last there is now a W. E. B. Du Bois Middle School in Great Barrington, and signs on roads leading into town saying, "Birthplace of W. E. B. Du Bois." Main Street is lined with flags showing his portrait and the words "Native Son." As this book was going to press in 2022, his granddaughter, Yolande Du Bois Williams Irvin (1932-2021), was buried in the Mahaiwe Cemetery, next to her grandmother, mother, and uncle (Du Bois's first wife and his two children). And the small Black church that "Willie" Du Bois attended and wrote his first published articles about, a story first told in Berkshire's Sewing Circles and Dime Suppers, is being developed as an educational and cultural center"--

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

"More than one hundred years after its original publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press, ThePhiladelphia Negro remains a classic work and is the first sociological case study of an African American community in the United States.It is also the first, and perhaps still the finest, example of engaged sociological scholarship-the kind of work that, in contemplating social reality, helps to change it. This edition features a newly revised introduction by Elijah Anderson that examines how the neighborhood studied by Du Bois has changed over the course of a century; and contextualizes the study in light of recent twenty-first-century scholarship"--

"First published in 1920, Darkwater gives voice to the rising power of the "darker races" around the world; it frames Africa's blistering indictment of Europe in a study of the curious and twisted souls of white folk; and it includes Du Bois's landmark essay "The Damnation of Women," in which he explores gender inequality and the double burdens forced onto black women. Combining essays and analysis with poetry, allegory, and short fiction, Darkwater is an angry and eloquent argument that, as Du Bois writes, "a belief in humanity is a belief in colored men.""--