W.E.B. Du Bois’s In Battle for Peace: A Black Radical Intellectual Book History

Abstract

This article offers a book history of In Battle for Peace. It presents an account of In Battle for Peace’s creation and emergence as a physical publication. It addresses the authorial ideas behind its assembly as a text, in other words the literary and infrastructural choices about chapter arrangements and textual adornments such as appendixes and interior images. It explores questions around In Battle for Peace’s editorial history, from copy-editing to cover design. It considers its circulation in culture, and its reception history amongst ordinary readers, journalists, and scholars. The essay also includes In Battle for Peace’s archival history, the documentary foundation upon which Du Bois based the book as well as the accumulation of historical artifacts related to it that he and others collected and deposited in different repositories since its publication 70 years ago. This article advances the idea that In Battle for Peace’s book history reveals how networked knowledge in a community of radicals, many of whom were communists, influenced the text’s creation and produced the generative ideas that animated the book. Specifically, artist, playwright, and writer Shirley Graham Du Bois (as co-writer, spouse, and curator) and US Communist Party leader and historian Herbert Aptheker (as copy editor and comrade) were among the most important individuals who helped shape the Black radical intellectual book history of In Battle for Peace.