The archive
Texts the dominant story under-stocked. Filterable by region, era, and theme. Public-domain works are reproduced in full; in-copyright works are excerpted with source links.
Ida B. Wells, 1892
Wells's 1892 pamphlet, written after a Memphis mob destroyed her newspaper offices, documenting the actual circumstances of lynchings in the post-Reconstruction South — …
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Aimé Césaire, 1950
From Discourse on Colonialism (1950): Césaire's argument that the atrocities Hitler brought home to Europe were the same atrocities Europe had practiced in its colonies,…
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Edward W. Said, 1978
The opening of Said's 1978 book, which named — and reorganized around — the Western academic and literary apparatus that produces 'the Orient' as a category of European …
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Cheikh Anta Diop, 1974
Diop's argument, defended at his 1960 Sorbonne doctoral examination and reissued in English in 1974, that ancient Egypt was a Black African civilization — and that the s…
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W.E.B. Du Bois, 1935
The closing chapter of Du Bois's 1935 monumental revision of Reconstruction historiography. The chapter is an audit of how American textbooks were taught to lie about th…
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