"Generations of scholars have given attention to various writings by W.E.B. Du Bois. Few of us, however, have had the courage, determination, and fortitude to inhabit the whole of his historically-situated oeuvre in order to think with Du Bois as he thought. Nahum Chandler, an exemplary critical hermeneuticist, continues to live an inhabitation of Du Bois' thought. And through his critical commentary on Du Bois' "essential early essays" that he has assembled in The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Chandler calls us to the responsibility to forge enhanced, even new, appreciations of Du Bois' articulated thought, and to "grappling in thought and critical reflection with the implacable matters of existence in our time." In reading these essays via an inhabitation, one cannot but experience the profound ethical and intellectual forcefulness of Chandler's inhabitation and calling." -- -Lucius T. Outlaw Vanderbilt University "This definitive collection of W. E. B. Du Bois's early essays, some having never appeared in print before, is not just another anthology among the hundreds. It is a seminal contribution to the history of modern thought. Compiled and edited by the world's preeminent scholar of early Du Boisian thought, these texts represent his most generative period, when Du Bois engaged every discipline, helped construct modern social science, employed critical inquiry as a weapon of antiracism and political liberation, and always set his sites on the entire world. We know this not by the essays alone, but by Nahum Dimitri Chandler's brilliant, original, and quite riveting introduction. If you are coming to Du Bois for the first time of the 500th time, this book is a must-read." -- -Robin D. G. Kelley author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination "Chandler's collection makes available, for the first time, a systematic, chronological tour of Du Bois's evolving vision of the global color line, as that vision was developed in the crucial opening years of his publishing life. Students ... can follow here the trajectory of this influential intellectual project, step by step. This volume provides a revelatory point of entry into the early thought of Du Bois and a valuable resource for all those interested in African American intellectual history and the sociology of race." -- -Seth Moglen Lehigh University