The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, with a Full Biography
by John Swanson Jacobs
University of Chicago Press, 2024
[Edited by Jonathan D.S. Schroeder]
[Publication date: May 21, 2024]
Lost on the other side of the world since 1855, the story of John Swanson Jacobs finally returns to America.
For one hundred and sixty-nine years, a first-person slave narrative
written by John Swanson Jacobs—brother of Harriet Jacobs—was buried in a
pile of newspapers in Australia. Jacobs’s long-lost narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, is a startling and revolutionary discovery. A document like this—written by an ex-slave and ex-American, in language charged with all that can be said about America outside America,
untampered with and unedited by white abolitionists—has never been seen
before. A radical abolitionist, sailor, and miner, John Jacobs has a
life story that is as global as it is American. Born into slavery, by
1855, he had fled both the South and the United States altogether,
becoming a stateless citizen of the world and its waters. That year, he
published his life story in an Australian newspaper, far from American
power and its threats. Unsentimental and unapologetic, Jacobs radically
denounced slavery and the state, calling out politicians and slaveowners
by their names, critiquing America’s founding documents, and indicting
all citizens who maintained the racist and intolerable status quo.
Reproduced in full, this narrative—which entwines with that of his
sister and with the life of their friend Frederick Douglass—here opens
new horizons for how we understand slavery, race, and migration, and all
that they entailed in nineteenth-century America and the world at
large. The second half of the book contains a full-length,
nine-generation biography of Jacobs and his family by literary historian
Jonathan Schroeder. This new guide to the world of John Jacobs will
transform our sense of it—and of the forces and prejudices built into
the American project. To truly reckon with the lives of John Jacobs is
to see with new clarity that in 1776, America embarked on two
experiments at once: one in democracy, the other in tyranny.
REVIEW:
"The rediscovery of a long-forgotten slave narrative would be notable enough. But this one, scholars who have seen it say, is unique for its global perspective and its uncensored fury, from a man living far outside the trans-Atlantic network of white abolitionists who often limited what the formerly enslaved could write about their experiences." -- Jennifer Schuessler ― New York Times
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Swanson Jacobs was an abolitionist, miner, sailor, and citizen of the world.
ABOUT THE EDITOR:
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a literary historian and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Armed Struggle?: Panthers and Communists; Black Nationalists and Liberals in Southern California through the Sixties and Seventies
by Gerald Horne
International Publishers, 2024
[Publication date: July, 2024]
In this exhaustively researched book, Gerald Horne sketches the
apparent paradox of some African Americans turning to armed struggle at a
time when it appeared that Jim Crow was retreating. He draws critical
distinctions between armed propaganda, armed self-defense—and armed
struggle— all of which he places in a global context of anti-war
activism, the Cold War, and African liberation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
https://www.intpubnyc.com/book-author/gerald-horne/
Gerald Horne
Gerald Horne (b. January 3, 1949) is a prolific
Marxist historian and author considered “one of the great historians of
our time” (Cornel West). Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Horne received his B.A. from Princeton and his PhD in history from Columbia
University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of
History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.
Dr. Horne has written 40 books dealing with the confluence of
African American History, Communist History, the struggle for
liberation, internationalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, white
supremacy, and fascism including
Confronting Black Jacobins and The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism,
both by Monthly Review Press and hundreds of essays and articles for a
wide variety of magazines, newspapers, anthologies, and academic as well
as popular journals in not only the United States but Europe, Asia,
Latin America, the Carribean, and Africa. Biographies written by Horne include the lives
of W.E.B. Du Bois, Benjamin Davis, Jr., William L. Patterson, John
Howard Lawson, and Ferdinand Smith, among others. Horne has also
produced a number of volumes that examine U.S. history through a lens of
settler colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and
imperialism, and their genocidal impacts on Africans and Indigenous
Americans.
Currently, seven of Horne’s titles are published by International
Publishers, including not only Armed Struggle? but also Revolting Capital: Racism & Radicalism in Washington D.C., 1900-2000., which was published in 2023.
The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name; No Name in the Street; The Devil Finds Work
by James Baldwin
Everyman's Library, 2024
[Publication date: July 9, 2024]
A
major hardcover compendium of nonfiction by one of America's most
brilliant essayists, timed to the celebration of his centenary
Novelist,
essayist, and public intellectual James Baldwin is widely regarded as
one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. This Everyman's
Library collection includes his bestselling, galvanizing essay The Fire Next Time—which
gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s and still
lights the way to understanding race in America today—along with three
additional brilliant works of nonfiction by this seminal chronicler and
analyst of culture. From No Name In the Street's extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies to the "passionate, probing, controversial" (The Atlantic) Nobody Knows My Name and the incisive criticism of American movies in The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin's stunning prose over and over proves relevant to our contemporary struggle for equality, justice, and social change.
Everyman's
Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free
paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative
endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a
full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an
introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's
life and times.
REVIEWS:
"If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one."—Michael Ondaatje
"The best essayist in this country—a man whose power has always been in his reasoned, biting sarcasm; his insistence on removing layer by layer the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country." —The New York Times Book Review
"[The Fire Next Time is] basically the finest essay I’ve ever read. . . . Baldwin refused to hold anyone’s hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you." —Ta-Nehisi Coates
“More eloquent than W. E. B. DuBois, more penetrating than Richard Wright. . . . [No Name in the Street] contains truth that cannot be denied.” —The Atlantic
“Characteristically beautiful.... He has not himself lost access to the sources of his being—which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider range of people than any other major American writer.” —The Nation
“These essays are, at once, intimate and expansive, vulnerable and relentless in their demands of the reader. They challenge and upset. Something close to the heart is happening on the page.”—From the introduction by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, social critic, and the prolific author of over 20 books. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time
were best sellers that made him an influential figure in the growing
civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where
he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He
died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the
French Legion of Honor.
