U.S. Intellectual History Blog

Dancing in the Aisles–W.E.B. Du Bois Papers digitized!

I sent an email to UMass Amherst special collections about a research question and just now got a startling reply–the W.E.B. Du Bois papers till 1940 have been digitized! And they are working on the rest! The saints and all the archivists be praised! All that time searching and searching through 40+ reams of microfilm and now I can do a back up search of everything digitally.

Go here and click on the Credo logo.  

My first tidbit is from W.E.B. Du Bois to his daughter right after her marriage to Countee Cullen. There is still so much to be written about Du Bois’s approach to women and his ideas about gender:

The trouble with marriage in most cases, is that it ends ambition and hard work and really big ideals in the case of the woman, and because of that, it puts a millstone around the neck of the men. It should, of course, result in none of these things. It should give the woman a larger freedom and opportunity to do a real piece of work.

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