W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Book History

Abstract

The Philadelphia Negro pioneered the field of urban sociology. As a result, scholars often highlight its academic interventions that over a century after its publication remain germane to the study of cities and multiethnic populations in urban settings. While emphasis on the text’s scholarly originality and contemporary analytic relevancy is central to demonstrate its importance, consideration of The Philadelphia Negro’s book history provides an equally compelling account of its enduring significance. Book history addresses the creation of a book as a physical publication. Book history also considers the authorial choices behind infrastructural, textual adornments such as appendixes or maps. In addition, book history deals with subjects like cover art and how publishers and authors often cocreate the external visual presentation of a book’s interior contents. In this brief book history, I explore an editorial history of critical scholarly editions of The Philadelphia Negro, an analysis occasioned by a recent 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press updated edition of the text that features sociologist Elijah Anderson’s revised editorial introduction, first published in 1996. In other words, I historicize critical scholarly editions of The Philadelphia Negro to trace the book’s reception and meaning over time. I also examine selected textual and infrastructural features of each critical edition, most especially the book covers. Historical analysis of sociological writing summons historians (like me) to perform cross-disciplinary intellectual labor while it also invites sociologists to consider historical context more expansively in their assessment of sociological texts.