Donation from W.E.B. Du Bois Institute

An anonymous donor from the W.E.B. Dubois Institute has given the Sylvia Gaither Garrison Library several copies of Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008 by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The book is a beautifully and richly illustrated (743 full color images!) coffee table type book, but is highly informative and well-written. As the title suggests, the book covers the African American experience from its beginnings in 1513 with Balboa's expedition, all the way up to nearly the present day. While the book cannot, because of its breadth, go into every event in African American history to great depth, it certainly contains a wealth of information about the big picture of African American history. The early chapters on the genesis of African Americans (both in North and South America) are particularly enlightening.

The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, established in May 1975, is a research institute at Harvard University. Its purpose is to "facilitate the writing of doctoral dissertations in areas related to Afro American Studies". The institute awards up to 20 scholarships annually. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the current director.

W.E.B. Dubois, the institute's namesake, was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, in 1895. He is well known, among other accomplishments, for authoring such works as The Souls of Black Folks, helping to found the Niagara Movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and editing The Crisis, the magazine published by the NAACP.

Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is editor in chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center and of the daily online magazine The Root. He has received more than forty honorary degrees from institutions the world over."
-Biography from Life Upon These Shores' book jacket.

The staff at the SGGL would like to express our heartfelt thanks to the anonymous donor at the
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for these wonderful books.