Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the ?middle passage, ? but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright,...

W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and...

Distinguished by his hawk-like gaze and shock of silver hair, his forceful oratory and fierce advocacy, Fredrick L. McGhee was Minnesota's first African American attorney and an intelligent, tireless civil rights organizer. He moved onto the national stage when he helped found the Niagara Movement--the forerunner of today's NAACP, which McGhee later helped spread across the Midwest. Years later, NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins would remember of McGhee that "it was through him that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People reached St. Paul and our house at] 906 Galtier...