Zeteo is Reading / 16-17 November 2012

Rachael Benavidez

[N.B.: This is not part of the Fall issue of Zeteo, but one in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading.]

16-17 November 2012

I have spent the last two days (and then some) reading the pioneering work from W. E. B. Du Bois Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (1935). The New York Herald Tribune called it “a poem, a work of art.” Du Bois applies Marxist theories to slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. On Emancipation Du Bois writes:

It was the Golden Dawn, after chains of a thousand years…. For the first time in their life, they could travel; they could see; they could change the dead level of their labor; they could talk to friends and sit at sundown and in moonlight, listening and imparting wonder-tales. They could hunt in the swamps, and fish in the rivers. And above all, they could stand up and assert themselves.