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Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and the Art of Self-Reinvention

At her English country manor, the writer Rebecca West had two jersey cows: Primrose and Patience. She delighted in the fresh milk they produced, and in canning vegetables, and in making jam. As Julia Cooke writes in Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work,
Writing, and the World_,_ her triple biography of West and her contemporaries Martha Gellhorn and Mickey Hahn, “When an editor at…

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W. E. B. Du Bois Directory

The W. E. B. Du Bois Directory is being developed as a comprehensive and expanding collection of materials and information by and about scholar, teacher, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. It will provide materials about Du Bois; copies of, or links to, books and articles written by Du Bois; lists of, and links to, monuments, places, and events honoring Du Bois; and links to research and…

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The Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois at the 1900 Paris Exposition

The separation of the “American Negro Exhibit” from the other US displays fit its purpose. Devoting an exhibit specifically to Black Americans suggested that they, indeed, constituted a separate society. In Du Bois’s words, the infographics made up “an honest, straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made…

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Between Data and Truth: W.E.B. Du Bois's “Data Portraits”

Data visualization is not a recent innovation. Even in the eighteenth century, activists and economists, as well as educators and politicians, were fully aware of the power of visualization to produce new knowledge.

But who, more precisely, was wielding this power? On whose behalf? And for whose benefit? The answers to these questions are what this project explores.

By retelling the…

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Denis Johnson’s Desperate, Poetic Horrors

Denis Johnson wrote about some of the most unlikable characters in American fiction, and yet he always managed to make readers care what happened to them. This talent may have had something to do with many unlikable qualities in Johnson himself that, through the force of his dedicated and uncompromising talent, carried him through three marriages, nearly two dozen books of poetry and fiction,…

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