59 77DU BOIS, W.E. Burghardt. Black Reconstruction. An Essay Toward A History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York, 1935. Thick octavo, original black cloth, dust jacket, custom chemise and clamshell box. $39,000 “An Entire History Was Yet To Be Told” First edition of Du Bois “monumental” epic history that fundamentally altered views of the Reconstruction and helped spark “the long attempt to rescue black history in America,” inscribed by him: “Very sincerely, W.E.B. Du Bois, Oct 1, 1935.” In 1963 Roy Wilkins addressed the hundreds of thousands in the March on Washington to announce that W.E.B. Du Bois was dead. “Wilkins told the suddenly still crowd... ‘at the dawn of the 20th century, his was the voice calling you to gather here today in this cause’” (Lewis, 2). With Black Reconstruction, the work he considered his magnum opus, Du Bois “helped to launch the long attempt to rescue black history in America from what many scholars have called a ‘structural amnesia’… to Du Bois the broadest significance of slavery lay in its definition of the limits of American democracy” (Fabre, 58-63). Du Bois “set reconstruction historiography upright after finding it standing on its head… Analytical yet intuitive, densely researched but impressionistic, judicious and sweeping… the book represented one of those genuine paradigm shifts periodically experienced in a field of knowledge” (Lewis, 367). This monumental work “redefined the terms by which the history of the Reconstruction was analyzed” (Parfait, Rewriting History). Blockson 2426. Interior clean, light dustsoiling to text block edges only, spine head gently bumped, cloth clean, near-fine. Scarce unrestored dust jacket with shallow wear to flap folds and head of mildly toned spine, very good. Rare and desirable inscribed.
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