The Passing of the Aborigines is a hybrid work of memoir, travel narrative, and colonial ethnography, presenting Daisy Bates's decades of observations among Aboriginal communities in Western and South Australia. Written in a vivid, anecdotal style shaped by journalism and imperial-era anthropology, the book records customs, kinship practices, ceremonies, languages, and daily life, while also advancing the now deeply problematic "doomed race" thesis common in early twentieth-century settler...

In "The Passing of the Aborigines," Daisy Bates presents a compelling ethnographic exploration of Aboriginal Australian culture during the early 20th century. The book is a tapestry woven from Bates' extensive fieldwork, personal observations, and interviews, offering a vivid narrative that brings to life the customs, challenges, and resilience of Indigenous communities. Her literary style is both descriptive and reflective, capturing the nuances of Aboriginal traditions while grappling wi...

In "The Passing of the Aborigines," Daisy Bates presents a poignant and often painful chronicle of Indigenous Australian life in the early 20th century. Blending autobiographical elements with ethnographic observations, Bates captures the complexities of Aboriginal culture, spirituality, and the drastic changes imposed by colonial encroachment. Her prose is both lyrical and incisive, marked by a deep empathy for her subjects, while also reflecting the conflicts of her time, illustrating th...

The Passing of the Aborigines gathers Bates's newspaper pieces into a chronicle of Aboriginal life and colonial rupture across remote Australia. Mixing anecdotal reportage with ethnographic notes, it describes ceremonies, kinship, languages, illness, hunger, and policing. The Edwardian, rhetorical style and serialized, episodic form—shaped in part by Ernestine Hill—mark an interwar "salvage" anthropology that marries meticulous observation to an extinctionist, paternalist frame. Irish-born...

The Passing of the Aborigines gathers Bates's newspaper pieces into a chronicle of Aboriginal life and colonial rupture across remote Australia. Mixing anecdotal reportage with ethnographic notes, it describes ceremonies, kinship, languages, illness, hunger, and policing. The Edwardian, rhetorical style and serialized, episodic form—shaped in part by Ernestine Hill—mark an interwar "salvage" anthropology that marries meticulous observation to an extinctionist, paternalist frame. Irish-born...

Winner of an Abraham Lincoln Institute Book AwardThough not blind to Abraham Lincoln's imperfections, Black Americans long ago laid a heartfelt claim to his legacy. At the same time, they have consciously reshaped the sixteenth president's image for their own social and political ends. Frederick Hord and Matthew D. Norman's anthology explores the complex nature of views on Lincoln through the writings and thought of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Mc...

At an event honoring Daisy Bates as 1990’s Distinguished Citizen then-governor Bill Clinton called her "the most distinguished Arkansas citizen of all time." Her classic account of the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, couldn't be found on most bookstore shelves in 1962 and was banned throughout the South. In 1988, after the University of Arkansas Press reprinted it, it won an American Book Award. On September 3, 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National...

At an event honoring Daisy Bates as 1990’s Distinguished Citizen then-governor Bill Clinton called her “the most distinguished Arkansas citizen of all time.” Her classic account of the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, couldn’t be found on most bookstore shelves in 1962 and was banned throughout the South. In 1988, after the University of Arkansas Press reprinted it, it won an American Book Award. On September 3, 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National...

DAISY BATES: "As the years passed, I was more and more convinced that it was impossibleto leave these people, to be deaf to their appeal for human kindliness,and of the hopelessness of any movement except one of help and comfort tothe individual, and personal example. So savage and so simple, so muchastray and so utterly helpless were they, that somehow they became myresponsibility. All along the thousand miles of railway, there was noother...

A life in bondage. A mind that refused to be broken. A voice that changed history. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass delivers one of the most important autobiographies in American literature, recounting his experiences as an enslaved person and his courageous journey toward freedom. Douglass vividly describes the brutality, injustice, and dehumanization of slavery, while also revealing how education, self-awareness, and determination became his tools of res...

After the birth of her child, a nameless woman is sent away to a colonial mansion to deal with “nervous depression” and “hysterical tendency” at the behest of her husband. Commanded to bedrest and with nothing to occupy her mind but her journal, she records her growing obsession with the yellow wallpaper that lines her room and her eventual descent into madness as she tries to unlock the mystery of it.Gilman’s story is a true American classic and a feminist reflection on patriarcha...

Frederick Douglass was born in 1817 and lived for ten years as a slave upon a Maryland plantation. Then he was bought by a Baltimore shipbuilder. He learned to read, and, being attracted by "The Lady of the Lake," when he escaped in 1838 and went disguised as a sailor to New Bedford, Mass., he adopted the name Douglas (spelling it with two s's, however). He lived for several years in New Bedford, being assisted by Garrison in his efforts for an education. In 1841, at an anti-slavery conven...