The essays collected in this issue celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk. Published in 1903 by A. C. McClurg, Souls is Du Bois's biting dissent from the racist and nationalist ideologies animating the public, political culture of post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow America.

By almost every critical reckoning, The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1989) is the preeminent statement of modern black consciousness. A fusion of history, sociology, personal memoir, and collective memory, Souls is unique in form and unsurpassed in influence among African American texts.

One of the most striking aspects of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is the author's use of lines of poetry and bars of song to open each of the book's fourteen chapters. Each inscription includes a few lines or stanzas of poetry by writers from America and Europe, such as James Lowell, Lord Byron, or Friedrich von Schiller, paired with one or two bars of song.

In 1890, W. E. B. Du Bois delivered "Jefferson Davis as Representative of Civilization" as his Harvard commencement address.

With her characteristic understatement, George Eliot exposes the English bourgeoisie's use of picturesque art to affirm its self-identification and selectively to ignore aspects of reality. However, where Eliot questions the bourgeoisie's assertion of its own interests at the expense of the laboring classes, W. E. B.