The Souls of Black Folk is Du Bois’s outstanding contribution to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to the question, “What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?” Here, in a major addition to American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the conceptual foundations of Du Bois’s interpretation of black politics.

For Du Bois, writing in a segregated America, a politics capable of countering Jim Crow had to uplift the black masses while heeding the ethos of the black folk: it had to be a politics of modernizing “self-realization” that expressed a collective spiritual identity. Highlighting Du Bois’s adaptations of Gustav Schmoller’s social thought, the German debate over the Geisteswissenschaften, and William Wordsworth’s poetry, Gooding-Williams reconstructs Souls’ defense of this “politics of expressive self-realization,” and then examines it critically, bringing it into dialogue with the picture of African American politics that Frederick Douglass sketches in My Bondage and My Freedom. Through a novel reading of Douglass, Gooding-Williams characterizes the limitations of Du Bois’s thought and questions the authority it still exerts in ongoing debates about black leadership, black identity, and the black underclass. Coming to Bondage and then to these debates by looking backward and then forward from Souls, Gooding-Williams lets Souls serve him as a productive hermeneutical lens for exploring Afro-Modern political thought in America.

The 1950 espionage case of Klaus Fuchs, who betrayed British and American atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, touched off a witch hunt in the United States that led to the capture of the Rosenbergs and many other alleged spies. The case fueled the fires of national concern over communism, Soviet espionage, internal subversion, and security in the nuclear age. Robert C. Williams has tenaciously retraced Fuchs's trail from Nazi Germany to Britain, Canada, Los Alamos, and finally to Dresden, where Fuchs now lives the life of a successful retired nuclear physicist. In his search Williams has not only uncovered Fuchs's personal story but has also established that his espionage was part of a much larger Soviet effort to penetrate and control British intelligence.

Klaus Fuchs had access to the most highly classified secrets of the wartime Manhattan Project. Cleared eight times by British security, and consequently accepted without investigation by the Americans, Fuchs worked in a hermetic world of security through secrecy—a world whose rules he publicly defended and privately betrayed. He played his role carefully for almost a decade, passing classified information to Soviet intelligence through a German communist espionage ring that operated under the very nose of the British government during and after the war. As part of the secret Anglo-American bomb project, he brought to Britain—and gave to Russia—technological know-how that helped both countries develop their own A-bombs.

This first full-length portrait of Klaus Fuchs and his case, based in part on newly available American and British archives on the subject, is an exciting find for general readers in the history of science, espionage, World War II, and the Cold War. It will also be of high professional interest to historians and physicists.

In the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican world, histories and collections of ritual knowledge were often presented in the form of painted and folded books now known as codices, and the knowledge itself was encoded into pictographs. Eight codices have survived from the Mixtec peoples of ancient Oaxaca, Mexico; a part of one of them, the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, is the subject of this book. As a group, the Mixtec codices contain the longest detailed histories and royal genealogies known for any indigenous people in the western hemisphere. The Codex Zouche-Nuttall offers a unique window into how the Mixtecs themselves viewed their social and political cosmos without the bias of western European interpretation. At the same time, however, the complex calendrical information recorded in the Zouche-Nuttall has made it resistant to historical, chronological analysis, thereby rendering its narrative obscure.

In this pathfinding work, Robert Lloyd Williams presents a methodology for reading the Codex Zouche-Nuttall that unlocks its essentially linear historical chronology. Recognizing that the codex is a combination of history in the European sense and the timelessness of myth in the Native American sense, he brings to vivid life the history of Lord Eight Wind of Suchixtlan (AD 935–1027), a ruler with the attributes of both man and deity, as well as other heroic Oaxacan figures. Williams also provides context for the history of Lord Eight Wind through essays dealing with Mixtec ceremonial rites and social structure, drawn from information in five surviving Mixtec codices.

This exciting medical detective story of the search for the cause of beriberi—an account of the 26 years of research for a method of isolating the vitamin, the determination of its molecular structure, and the development of methods for its synthesis—is a remarkable first-person account of an important chapter of medical history. The book summarizes all that has been learned about beriberi since the beginning of medicine. It chronicles the unceasing efforts of the author to eradicate the scourge of beriberi among the rice-eating peoples of the world.

Beriberi is of evident interest to specialists in the fields of nutrition and public health; it appeals also to those confronted with practical problems in applied medicine or science; and it is a compelling story of an exciting and admirable human adventure for the general reader. The author has directed his book especially to students in Asia who are becoming increasingly responsible for the welfare of their countries.