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4.27 AVERAGE
4.27 AVERAGE
This excellent book covers a wide range of topics, such as the participation of black men in the civil war to he development of black folk music. DuBois makes many elegant arguments about why black people deserve their full rights and recognition. Especially interesting to me is his well reasoned takedown of Booker T. Washington’s gradualist approach.
read for APUSH monograph critical review, lots of thoughts
challenging
informative
slow-paced
"On the Coming of John" is one of the bleakest and best essays I've ever read. There are some slower essays in the book, but they're made up for by either illuminating historical essays like "Of the Dawn of Freedom," or painful personal essays like "Of the Passing of the First-Born."
I picked this up post 2016-election because I was feeling like maybe I hadn't been doing my due diligence as a white dude to get woke. I have a long way to go, but this is a good start.
I picked this up post 2016-election because I was feeling like maybe I hadn't been doing my due diligence as a white dude to get woke. I have a long way to go, but this is a good start.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Read this in college a while ago... Loved it. Changed the way I think. It was the first time I was introduced to the concepts of "the veil" and "double consciousness". My mind was blown.
This is a hard book to review. At the time, Du Bois was very radical and this work was highly influential, but now it doesn't seem radical at all. It's how things are. I appreciate the historical significance, but overall it wasn't really an enjoyable or engaging read. There were a few exceptions, particularly when he talked about Atlanta. It's a hugely important book, and I do think it's important to still read it, but it was hard to get through despite being short.
This is a collection of essays that aim to describe what it was like to be black in America at the turn of the twentieth century. Each essay covers a different aspect of life, from religion to the aftermath of slavery to education. My favorite essay was "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," in which he criticizes Washington for advocating industrial education rather than liberal education for African-Americans. I also enjoyed the short story "Of the Coming of John," which contrasts the lives of two young men named John, one who is white and one who is black. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in African-American history.