Editorial commentary
This audio essay engages Du Bois's 1935 Black Reconstruction, particularly the closing 'Propaganda of History' chapter, and the more-than-half-century it took the American historical profession to accept the broader analytical framework Du Bois had developed in the book.
W.E.B. Du Bois lived from 1868 to 1963 — across the lifetime of the Reconstruction settlement and its complete reversal, the rise and consolidation of the segregation regime, two world wars, the early phase of African decolonization, and the first years of the civil-rights movement in the United States. He trained as a sociologist at Harvard and Berlin, published the first empirical sociological study of an American urban Black population (The Philadelphia Negro, 1899), co-founded the NAACP in 1909, edited The Crisis for nearly a quarter-century, organized or attended every Pan-African Conference from 1900 to 1945, and spent the final two years of his life in Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah. Reading any single Du Bois text in isolation is reading one cross-section of a sustained intellectual project; the project is more legible when the texts are read in sequence across his lifetime.
The book was largely ignored by the American historical profession at the time of publication. The professional reviews were thin; the academic appointments did not come; the book did not enter the standard graduate-school reading lists in American history. Eric Foner's 1988 Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, which vindicated the major elements of Du Bois's framework, came out fifty-three years later.
The 'Propaganda of History' chapter is the book's most direct engagement with the institutional question. The chapter examines specific textbook treatments of Reconstruction, names specific historians, and documents specific omissions of primary-source material. Du Bois is not making a moral complaint; he is documenting an institutional pattern with specific case studies.
Companion reading includes Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (the 2017 Library of America edition is the standard contemporary printing); Eric Foner's Reconstruction (1988, and the 2014 second edition); and the broader contemporary Reconstruction scholarship of David Blight, Tera Hunter, Heather Cox Richardson, and Adam Domby.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
The excerpt above is reproduced under fair-use principles for archival and educational purposes. The full text is available via the canonical source linked in the provenance section. Where the work is in copyright, this archive does not reproduce more than is necessary for the analytical and pedagogical purpose at hand.
Editorial commentary
This audio essay engages Du Bois's 1935 Black Reconstruction, particularly the closing 'Propaganda of History' chapter, and the more-than-half-century it took the American historical profession to accept the broader analytical framework Du Bois had developed in the book.
W.E.B. Du Bois lived from 1868 to 1963 — across the lifetime of the Reconstruction settlement and its complete reversal, the rise and consolidation of the segregation regime, two world wars, the early phase of African decolonization, and the first years of the civil-rights movement in the United States. He trained as a sociologist at Harvard and Berlin, published the first empirical sociological study of an American urban Black population (The Philadelphia Negro, 1899), co-founded the NAACP in 1909, edited The Crisis for nearly a quarter-century, organized or attended every Pan-African Conference from 1900 to 1945, and spent the final two years of his life in Ghana at the invitation of Kwame Nkrumah. Reading any single Du Bois text in isolation is reading one cross-section of a sustained intellectual project; the project is more legible when the texts are read in sequence across his lifetime.
The book was largely ignored by the American historical profession at the time of publication. The professional reviews were thin; the academic appointments did not come; the book did not enter the standard graduate-school reading lists in American history. Eric Foner's 1988 Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, which vindicated the major elements of Du Bois's framework, came out fifty-three years later.
The 'Propaganda of History' chapter is the book's most direct engagement with the institutional question. The chapter examines specific textbook treatments of Reconstruction, names specific historians, and documents specific omissions of primary-source material. Du Bois is not making a moral complaint; he is documenting an institutional pattern with specific case studies.
Companion reading includes Du Bois's Black Reconstruction (the 2017 Library of America edition is the standard contemporary printing); Eric Foner's Reconstruction (1988, and the 2014 second edition); and the broader contemporary Reconstruction scholarship of David Blight, Tera Hunter, Heather Cox Richardson, and Adam Domby.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
The excerpt above is reproduced under fair-use principles for archival and educational purposes. The full text is available via the canonical source linked in the provenance section. Where the work is in copyright, this archive does not reproduce more than is necessary for the analytical and pedagogical purpose at hand.