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Books By
Paul Laurence Dunbar
The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar /
The Sport of the Gods /
Majors and
Minors /
The Heart of Happy Hollow
Lyrics of Lowly Life
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In His Own Voice: Dramatic & Other Uncollected Works
Little Brown Baby /
Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader /
Best Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar
Collected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar
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The Fanatics /
Folks from Dixie
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Paul Laurence Dunbar
(1872-1906)
First African-American
Professional Poet
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)was a poet and an author who was acknowledged
as the first important black poet in American literature.
His ability was recognized from early
childhood and he enjoyed his greatest popularity in the early
twentieth century; he wrote not only dialect poems but also novels,
short stories, essays, and many poems in standard English.
The son of Matilda and Joshua Dunbar, natives
of Kentucky, Paul was born on June 27 in Dayton, Ohio, and died
there on February 9, 1906. His parents separated in 1874. His mother abandoned made a living as a "colored washerwoman."
Among her customers was the Wright family of Dayton.
Matilda Jane, a
remarkable woman, was devoted to her son and had a great influence
on him. Born in slavery, she learned poetry by listening to her
slave-master read poetry at family gatherings, and she was
determined that Paul receive an education and inspired him in the
writing of poetry.
Dunbar produced twelve poetry books, four books of short stories, five novels
and one drama. Forty of his poems were set to music by famous
musicians of his time, including Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and the black
composer J. Rosamond Johnson. Fifteen of his short stories appeared in
such publications as Lippincott's, The Sunday Evening Post,
Independent, Dayton Tattler, Harper's Weekly,
Century,
Denver Post, Smart Set, Outlook, Bookman,
and Current Literature.
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A Dunbar Chronology
1890 (December 13) -- Dunbar and an associate, Preston Finley, published
the first issue of Dayton Tattler, a black-oriented weekly
newspaper printed by Wright & Wright, Printers, owned by Orville
and Wilbur Wright
1891 -- graduated from Dayton, Ohio's Central High School
with honors; in the same class as Wilbur and Orville Wright.
1893 -- recited poetry at the World's Fair, where
he met Frederick Douglass, who called him on of America's most
promising young writers.
1895 -- went to Toledo and, with the help of attorney Charles A. Thatcher and
psychiatrist Henry A. Tobey, obtained work there reading his poetry at
libraries and literary gatherings.
1895 --
Majors and
Minors, Dunbar's second collection of verse published by Tobey and
Thatcher
1896 -- Dunbar dialect poems
received positive reviews from the
eminent novelist William Dean Howells in Harper's Weekly. This recognition by America's greatest critic was the
beginning of Paul's national reputation.
1897 -- sponsored by the Savage Club in London, England,
to give a series of readings and, after his return to America, obtained employment at the Library of Congress in
Washington
1898 (March 8) -- married Miss Alice Ruth
Moore, a teacher and writer from New Orleans.
1902 -- Moore and Dunbar
separate. Separation caused Dunbar to suffer emotional depression.
1903 -- developed tuberculosis. Stayed
a short period in Colorado;
returned to Washington; health continued to decline as
he persisted in producing poems; reliance on alcohol to temper
his physical and psychological problems exacerbated his
illnesses.
1904 -- returned to Dayton to stay with his mother.
1906 (February 9) -- died in his mother's arms at the age of 33.
Schools, banks, and hospitals all over the country have
been named in his honor. In 1938 his family home was dedicated as a state museum by the
Ohio Historical Society and is now a national landmark. In 1976 the
U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in his honor. His
tomb at Dayton's Woodland Cemetery is marked by a statue erected in
his memory. Most recently, the University Library of Wright State
University has been renamed the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library.
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We Wear the Mask
By Paul Laurence Dunbar
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes-
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile
And mouth with myriad subtleties,
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but oh great Christ, our cries
To Thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile,
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
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http://www.dayton.lib.oh.us/archives/dunbar.htm
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Civilization: The West and the Rest
By Niall Ferguson
The rise to global predominance of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five hundred years. All over the world, an astonishing proportion of people now work for Western-style companies, study at Western-style universities, vote for Western-style governments, take Western medicines, wear Western clothes, and even work Western hours. Yet six hundred years ago the petty kingdoms of Western Europe seemed unlikely to achieve much more than perpetual internecine warfare. It was Ming China or Ottoman Turkey that had the look of world civilizations. How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? In Civilization: The West and the Rest, bestselling author Niall Ferguson argues that, beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts that the Rest lacked: competition, science, the rule of law, consumerism, modern medicine, and the work ethic. These were the "killer applications" that allowed the West to leap ahead of the Rest, opening global trade routes, exploiting newly discovered scientific laws, evolving a system of representative government, more than doubling life expectancy, unleashing the Industrial Revolution, and embracing a dynamic work ethic.
Civilization shows just how fewer than a dozen Western empires came to control more than half of humanity and four fifths of the world economy.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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What This Cruel War Was Over
Soldiers Slavery and the Civil
War
By Chandra Manning
For this impressively researched
Civil War social history, Georgetown
assistant history professor Manning
visited more than two dozen states
to comb though archives and
libraries for primary source
material, mostly diaries and letters
of men who fought on both sides in
the Civil War, along with more than
100 regimental newspapers. The
result is an engagingly written,
convincingly argued social history
with a point—that those who did the
fighting in the Union and
Confederate armies "plainly
identified slavery as the root of
the Civil War." Manning backs up her
contention with hundreds of
first-person testimonies written at
the time, rather than
often-unreliable after-the-fact
memoirs. While most Civil War
narratives lean heavily on officers,
Easterners and men who fought in
Virginia, Manning casts a much
broader net. She includes
immigrants, African-Americans and
western fighters, in order, she
says, "to approximate cross sections
of the actual Union and Confederate
ranks." Based on the author's
dissertation, the book is free of
academese and appeals to a general
audience, though Manning's harsh
condemnation of white Southerners'
feelings about slavery and her
unstinting praise of Union soldiers'
"commitment to emancipation" take a
step beyond scholarly objectivity.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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