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THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher and educational outreach entity, was founded in 1979 with grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Although its mission was a well-grounded and no-nonsense business approach to publishing, it essentially was fulfilling a long-held dream by the great critic Edmund Wilson and others. The United States of America, they felt, ought to have a publications series of high standards and high quality of production for its national literature, and it ought to reflect the diversity and traditions of all of its writing.
The first books appeared in 1982, when I first began selling new books in an independent book store here in Carlisle. (The founding of Whistlestop Bookshop was three years away.) I still have my copies of Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. I won’t tell you how many of the 300+ to date I have acquired, but I am happy to say I never regretted one. The books are remarkably beautiful and efficient and scholarly and finely-made. They are sometimes the only respectable edition available (beware of photo-offset print-on-demand editions!). The accompanying chronologies and notes and textual discussions of every volume are a joy and an education. I cannot praise them too highly.
This listing is what I carry in the store. If you would like other volumes, send me an e-mail or call the store. Enjoy browsing, buying, and owning landmark definitive editions of great writers or great American subjects.
The listings are alphabetical by author except for new or recent anthologies at the top. Older anthologies are at the bottom of the page.
All James Baldwin titles and Ursula K. Le Guin titles are on the respective pages of the authors.
W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction
W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction
$45.00
Upon its publication in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction offered a radical new assessment of the post–Civil War era, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and, ultimately, the unjust social order of Jim Crow. Previously cast as a misguided, even villainous effort to impose an inverted and “unnatural” racial hierarchy on the defeated South, Reconstruction was for Du Bois nothing less than a milestone in the course of human history, “the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen.”Du Bois identified the problem in the work of the dominant historians of his day: “the chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself, has been almost barred from court. His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected.” In setting the record straight, Du Bois produced what co-editor Eric Foner has called an “indispensable book . . . one of the landmarks of U.S. historical scholarship.”
A sweeping, magisterial work of rigorous analysis written with precision and powerful eloquence, Black Reconstruction restores slavery to the core of American history, emphasizing its crucial importance to the nation as a whole and exposing the underlying economic engines of the Civil War and its aftermath. It makes clear that the formerly enslaved, as they claimed first their freedom and then their citizenship, were pivotal actors in this second American revolution, as soldiers and emancipators, workers and legislators.
Presented here in an authoritative, annotated edition, Black Reconstruction is joined for the first time with important writings that trace the evolution of Du Bois’s thinking about Reconstruction and its centrality in understanding the embattled course of democracy in America.
Eric Foner is the author of many award-winning books on the Civil War and Reconstruction, including The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. He is DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, and has produced, written, and hosted an array of documentary films for public television, including Finding Your Roots and The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.
This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.
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