Stephanie Shaw

This book brings a new understanding to one of the great documents of American and black history. While most scholarly discussions of The Souls of Black Folk focus on the veils, the color line, double consciousness, or Booker T. Washington, this book reads Du Bois' work as a profoundly nuanced interpretation of the souls of black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Demonstrating the importance of the work as a socioh-istorical study of black life in America at the turn of the twentieth century and offering new ways of thinking about many of the topics introduced in Souls, this book charts Du Bois' successful appropriation of Hegelian idealism in order to add America, the nineteenth century, and black people to the historical narrative in Hegel's philosophy of history. It adopts Du Bois' point of view to delve into the social, cultural, political, and intellectual milieus that helped to create The Souls of Black Folk.

This essay situates the major works of W.E.B. Du Bois and some of his minor work between the 1880s and 1940 in the historical context of black people's writing about race since the eighteenth century. In offering examples of the evolution of black thinking and writing on this topic, it views Du Bois's work in the context of Moral and Ethical Philosophy (rather than the more obvious History, Sociology, and Political Economics) in order to reveal his efforts as a disruption, deliberately designed to shift the discussions of race and race relations from defense to offense, which he did most explicitly and profoundly in Dusk of Dawn (1940) but had been doing much more subtly throughout his scholarly career.