American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois explores the contributions of three writers to the development of American socialism over a fifty--year period and asserts the vitality of socialism in modern American literature and culture.

Drawing upon a wide range of texts including archival sources, Mark W. Van Wienen demonstrates the influence of reform-oriented, democratic socialism both in the careers of these writers and in U.S. politics between 1890 and 1940. While offering unprecedented in-depth analysis of modern American socialist literature, this book charts the path by which the supposedly impossible, dangerous ideals of a cooperative commonwealth were realized, in part, by the New Deal.

American Socialist Triptych provides in-depth, innovative readings of the featured writers and their engagement with socialist thought and action. Upton Sinclair represents the movement's most visible manifestation, the Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901; Charlotte Perkins Gilman reflects the socialist elements in both feminism and 1890s reform movements, and W. E. B. Du Bois illuminates social democratic aspirations within the NAACP. Van Wienen's book seeks to re-energize studies of Sinclair by treating him as a serious cultural figure whose career peaked not in the early success of The Jungle but in his nearly successful 1934 run for the California governorship. It also demonstrates as never before the centrality of socialism throughout Gilman's and Du Bois's literary and political careers.

More broadly, American Socialist Triptych challenges previous scholarship on American radical literature, which has focused almost exclusively on the 1930s and Communist writers. Van Wienen argues that radical democracy was not the phenomenon of a decade or of a single group but a sustained tradition dispersed within the culture, providing a useful genealogical explanation for how socialist ideas were actually implemented through the New Deal.

American Socialist Triptych also revises modern American literary history, arguing for the endurance of realist and utopian literary modes at the height of modernist literary experimentation and showing the importance of socialism not only to the three featured writers but also to their peers, including Edward Bellamy, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Claude McKay. Further, by demonstrating the importance of social democratic thought to feminist and African American campaigns for equality, the book dialogues with recent theories of radical egalitarianism. Readers interested in American literature, U.S. history, political theory, and race, gender, and class studies will all find in American Socialist Triptych a valuable and provocative resource.

Scholar, author, editor, teacher, reformer, and civil rights leader, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was a major figure in American life and one of the earliest proponents of equality for black Americans. He was a founder and leader of the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the Pan-African Movement; a progenitor of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance; an advocate of anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, unionism, and equality for women; and a champion of the rights of oppressed people around the world.

The three-volume Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois offers a unique perspective on Du Bois's experiences and views. In recognition of the significance of the Correspondence, the final volume was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review.

Herbert Aptheker has provided an introduction and notes to each volume, illuminating the circumstances and identifying the personalities involved in the correspondence. A long time friend and colleague of Du Bois, Aptheker is a well-known historian of the African American experience. In 1939 and again in 1969, he won the history award given by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Among his most prominent works are American Negro Slave Revolts and the three-volume Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States.

Scholar, author, editor, teacher, reformer, and civil rights leader, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was a major figure in American life and one of the earliest proponents of equality for black Americans. He was a founder and leader of the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the Pan-African Movement; a progenitor of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance; an advocate of anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, unionism, and equality for women; and a champion of the rights of oppressed people around the world.

The three-volume Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois offers a unique perspective on Du Bois's experiences and views. In recognition of the significance of the Correspondence, the final volume was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review.

Herbert Aptheker has provided an introduction and notes to each volume, illuminating the circumstances and identifying the personalities involved in the correspondence. A long time friend and colleague of Du Bois, Aptheker is a well-known historian of the African American experience. In 1939 and again in 1969, he won the history award given by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Among his most prominent works are American Negro Slave Revolts and the three-volume Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States.

Scholar, author, editor, teacher, reformer, and civil rights leader, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was a major figure in American life and one of the earliest proponents of equality for black Americans. He was a founder and leader of the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the Pan-African Movement; a progenitor of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance; an advocate of anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, unionism, and equality for women; and a champion of the rights of oppressed people around the world.

The three-volume Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois offers a unique perspective on Du Bois's experiences and views. In recognition of the significance of the Correspondence, the final volume was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review.

Herbert Aptheker has provided an introduction and notes to each volume, illuminating the circumstances and identifying the personalities involved in the correspondence. A long time friend and colleague of Du Bois, Aptheker is a well-known historian of the African American experience. In 1939 and again in 1969, he won the history award given by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Among his most prominent works are American Negro Slave Revolts and the three-volume Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States.

Throughout American literature, the figure of the child is often represented in opposition to the adult. In Cradle of Liberty Caroline F. Levander proposes that this opposition is crucial to American political thought and the literary cultures that surround and help produce it. Levander argues that from the late eighteenth century through the early twentieth, American literary and political texts did more than include child subjects: they depended on them to represent, naturalize, and, at times, attempt to reconfigure the ground rules of U.S. national belonging. She demonstrates how, as the modern nation-state and the modern concept of the child (as someone fundamentally different from the adult) emerged in tandem from the late eighteenth century forward, the child and the nation-state became intertwined. The child came to represent nationalism, nation-building, and the intrinsic connection between nationalism and race that was instrumental in creating a culture of white supremacy in the United States.

Reading texts by John Adams, Thomas Paine, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Augusta J. Evans, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, William James, José Martí, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others, Levander traces the child as it figures in writing about several defining events for the United States. Among these are the Revolutionary War, the U.S.-Mexican War, the Civil War, and the U.S. expulsion of Spain from the Caribbean and Cuba. She charts how the child crystallized the concept of self—a self who could affiliate with the nation—in the early national period, and then follows the child through the rise of a school of American psychology and the period of imperialism. Demonstrating that textual representations of the child have been a potent force in shaping public opinion about race, slavery, exceptionalism, and imperialism, Cradle of Liberty shows how a powerful racial logic pervades structures of liberal democracy in the United States.

Dark Voices is the first sustained examination of the intellectual formation of W. E. B. Du Bois, tracing the scholar and civil rights leader's thought from his undergraduate days in the 1880s to the 1903 publication of his masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, and offering a new reading of his work from this period.

Bringing to light materials from the Du Bois archives that have not been discussed before, Shamoon Zamir explores Du Bois's deep engagement with American and European philosophy and social science. He examines the impact on Du Bois of his studies at Harvard with William James and George Santayana, and shows how the experience of post-Reconstruction racism moved Du Bois from metaphysical speculation to the more instrumentalist knowledge of history and the new discipline of sociology, as well as toward the very different kind of understanding embodied in the literary imagination. Providing a new and detailed reading of The Souls of Black Folk in comparison with Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Zamir challenges accounts that place Du Bois alongside Emerson and James, or characterize him as a Hegelian idealist. This reading also explores Du Bois's relationship to African American folk culture, and shows how Du Bois was able to dramatize the collapse of many of his hopes for racial justice and liberation.

The first book to place The Souls of Black Folk in its intellectual context, Dark Voices is a case study of African American literary development in relation to the broader currents of European and American thought.

Although W. E. B. Du Bois did not often pursue the connections between the “Negro question” that defined so much of his intellectual life and the “woman question” that engaged writers and feminist activists around him, Next to the Color Line argues that within Du Bois’s work is a politics of juxtaposition that connects race, gender, sexuality, and justice.This provocative collection investigates a set of political formulations and rhetorical strategies by which Du Bois approached, used, and repressed issues of gender and sexuality. The essays in Next to the Color Line propose a return to Du Bois, not only to reassess his politics but also to demonstrate his relevance for today’s scholarly and political concerns.Contributors: Hazel V. Carby, Yale U; Vilashini Cooppan, U of California, Santa Cruz; Brent Hayes Edwards, Rutgers U; Michele Elam, Stanford U; Roderick A. Ferguson, U of Minnesota; Joy James, Williams College; Fred Moten, U of Southern California; Shawn Michelle Smith, St. Louis U; Mason Stokes, Skidmore College; Claudia Tate, Princeton U; Paul C. Taylor, Temple U.Susan Gillman is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Alys Eve Weinbaum is associate professor of English at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Through a rich interpretation of the remarkable photographs W. E. B. Du Bois compiled for the American Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, Shawn Michelle Smith reveals the visual dimension of the color line that Du Bois famously called “the problem of the twentieth century.” Du Bois’s prize-winning exhibit consisted of three albums together containing 363 black-and-white photographs, mostly of middle-class African Americans from Atlanta and other parts of Georgia. Smith provides an extensive analysis of the images, the antiracist message Du Bois conveyed by collecting and displaying them, and their connection to his critical thought. She contends that Du Bois was an early visual theorist of race and racism and demonstrates how such an understanding makes the important concepts he developed—including double consciousness, the color line, the Veil, and second sight—available to visual culture and African American studies scholars in powerful new ways.

Smith reads Du Bois’s photographs in relation to other turn-of-the-century images such as scientific typologies, criminal mugshots, racist caricatures, and lynching photographs. By juxtaposing these images with reproductions from Du Bois’s exhibition archive, Smith shows how Du Bois deliberately challenged racist representations of African Americans. Emphasizing the importance of comparing multiple visual archives, Photography on the Color Line reinvigorates understandings of the stakes of representation and the fundamental connections between race and visual culture in the United States.

The Problem of the Future World is a compelling reassessment of the later writings of the iconic African American activist and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois. As Eric Porter points out, despite the outpouring of scholarship devoted to Du Bois, the broad range of writing he produced during the 1940s and early 1950s has not been thoroughly examined in its historical context, nor has sufficient attention been paid to the theoretical interventions he made during those years. Porter locates Du Bois’s later work in relation to what he calls “the first postracial moment.” He suggests that Du Bois’s midcentury writings are so distinctive and so relevant for contemporary scholarship because they were attuned to the shape-shifting character of modern racism, and in particular to the ways that discredited racial taxonomies remained embedded and in force in existing political-economic arrangements at both the local and global levels. Porter moves the conversation about Du Bois and race forward by building on existing work about the theorist, systematically examining his later writings, and looking at them from new perspectives, partly by drawing on recent scholarship on race, neoliberalism, and empire. The Problem of the Future World shows how Du Bois’s later writings help to address race and racism as protean, global phenomena in the present.

In looking back on his editorship of Crisis magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois said, “We condensed more news about Negroes and their problems in a month than most colored papers before this had published in a year.” Since its founding by Du Bois in 1910, Crisis has been the primary published voice of the NAACP. Born in an age of Jim Crow racism, often strapped for funds, the magazine struggled and endured, all the while providing a forum for people of color to document their inherent dignity and proclaim their definitive worth as human beings.

As the magazine’s editor from 1910 until 1934, Du Bois guided the content and the aim of Crisis with a decisive hand. He ensured that each issue argued for civil rights, economic justice, and social equality, always framing America’s intractable color line in an international perspective. Du Bois benefited from a deep pool of black literary and artistic genius, whether by commissioning the visual creativity of Harlem Renaissance artists for Crisis covers or by publishing poems and short stories from New Negro writers. From North to South, from East to West, and even reaching across the globe, Crisis circulated its ideas and marshaled its impact far and wide.

Building on the solid foundation Du Bois laid, subsequent editors and contributors covered issues vital to communities of color, such as access to resources during the New Deal era, educational opportunities related to the historic Brown decision, the realization of basic civil rights at midcentury, American aid to Africa and Caribbean nations, and the persistent economic inequalities of today’s global era.

Despite its importance, little has been written about the historical and cultural significance of this seminal magazine. By exploring how Crisis responded to critical issues, the essays in Protest and Propaganda provide the first well-rounded, in-depth look at the magazine's role and influence. The authors show how the essays, columns, and visuals published in Crisis changed conversations, perceptions, and even laws in the United States, thereby calling a fractured nation to more fully live up to its democratic creed. They explain how the magazine survived tremendous odds, document how the voices of justice rose above the clamor of injustice, and demonstrate how relevant such literary, journalistic, and artistic postures remain in a twenty-first-century world still in crisis.

Un-American is Bill Mullen’s revisionist account of renowned author and activist W.E.B. Du Bois’s political thought toward the end of his life, a period largely dismissed and neglected by scholars. He describes Du Bois’s support for what the Communist International called “world revolution” as the primary objective of this aged radical’s activism. Du Bois was a champion of the world’s laboring millions and critic of the Cold War, a man dedicated to animating global political revolution.

Mullen argues that Du Bois believed that the Cold War stalemate could create the conditions in which the world powers could achieve not only peace but workers’ democracy. Un-American shows Du Bois to be deeply engaged in international networks and personal relationships with revolutionaries in India, China, and Africa. Mullen explores how thinkers like Karl Marx, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas Gandhi, and C.L.R. James helped him develop a theory of world revolution at a stage in his life when most commentators regard him as marginalized. This original political biography also challenges assessments of Du Bois as an American “race man.”

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois brilliantly details the African American experience. Yet the renowned sociologist was also an astute chronicler of white people, particularly their racism. As Unveiling the Color Line demonstrates, Du Bois’s trenchant analysis of whiteness and white supremacy began in his earliest work—his 1890 speech on Jefferson Davis—and continued in every major book he published in his more than sixty-year career, up to The Black Flame Trilogy.

Lisa J. McLeod traces the development of Du Bois’s conception of whiteness, and the racism inherent to it, as an all-encompassing problem, whether predicated on ignorance, moral failure, or the inability to recognize the humanity in other people. In clear, elegant prose, McLeod investigates Du Bois’s complex and nuanced thinking, putting his insights into dialogue with contemporary racial theorists to demonstrate his continuing value to present-day critical thought and activism.

Born just five years after the abolition of slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois died the night before Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. In the many decades between, Du Bois contributed as much to the political and social advancement of African Americans as any other figure.
           
This book offers an accessible brief introduction to the life and times of Du Bois. It takes in his many achievements, such as being the first black man to earn a PhD from Harvard and co-founding the NAACP, and sets them alongside the seismic political changes of the twentieth century—many of which Du Bois weighed in on, including anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles across Asia and Africa. Bill V. Mullen reveals a Du Bois who was focused not just on the immediate question of African American rights, but also took up the question of socialism, the rise of communism, and the complicated interrelationship of capitalism, poverty, and racism.
The picture that emerges here is of a powerfully original thinker, fiercely engaged with the political, economic, and social questions of his day never letting up in his struggle to change the world for the better.