CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/24/2019

'Black Lives 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition' is a book for every art or history bookshelf

Featured spread—juxtaposing W.E.B. Du Bois' graph showing the "Proportion of Freemen and Slaves among American Negroes" from 1790 through 1870 with a portrait captioned "Young woman, head and shoulders portrait"—is from Black Lives 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition, a beautifully designed, oversized book of supreme intrinsic power that belongs on every art or American history bookshelf. Combining the photographs and hand-drawn infographics documenting the state and statistics of black lives in America that Du Bois presented at the Paris Exposition of 1900, it contains writing by Jacqueline Francis, Stephen G. Hall, David Adjaye and Henry Louis Gates Jr.. "I find this lush and exquisitely produced book essential to my understanding of a historical event that did much to change my perception of DuBois, and his brilliant expansiveness," Hilton Als writes. "It's marvelous to have this 'lost' material between covers now, and forever."