EA-CORPORA-26 — The Twenty-Sixth Seating: W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, as Far as the Public Domain Reaches

EA-CORPORA-26 — The Twenty-Sixth Seating: W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, as Far as the Public Domain Reaches

EA-CORPORA-26 — The Twenty-Sixth Seating: W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, as Far as the Public Domain Reaches

EA-CORPORA-26 — The Twenty-Sixth Seating

MANUS, 27 October 2026. After the twenty-fourth seating set the Book of Mormon on the shelf: "its as american as literature comes. but then i am like, i dont have king of malcolm or mao. it leads down a path where things start getting hairy." Then: "du bois and langston hughes are public domain tho, right?" — "lets seat what can be seated of du bois and hughes" — and, versioning the originals packet (#1709) to include them: "the canon's america is way too white."

The shelf's America was Whitman (03/01), Dickinson (02/14), Pound (05/02, 18/01), Stein (18/09), the Latter Day Saints (24/01) and the Millerites (24/03). This seating adds Du Bois and Hughes as far as the public domain of the United States reaches: everything first published there in 1930 or earlier. The two seats meet in The Crisis, which Du Bois edited from its first number (November 1910, seated in 26/01) and which printed Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in June 1921 (seated in 26/02), and in The New Negro (1925), which carries both. Their later work is in copyright and is named below as not seated.

Seat 26/01 — W. E. B. Du Bois, 1896–1928

The books from The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to Dark Princess, The Conservation of Races, The Talented Tenth, and the first number of The Crisis

• Works by class: History 6; Essay 2; Sociology 1; Essays 2; Biography 2; Periodical 1; Novel 3; Essays and poems 2
• Works:

- W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, Harvard Historical Studies I (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896) — the first edition, the doctoral dissertation; Library of Congress copy

- The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade (1896), Project Gutenberg EBook #17700 — transcription

- The Conservation of Races, American Negro Academy Occasional Papers No. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1897), Project Gutenberg EBook #31254 — transcription

- The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, Publications of the University of Pennsylvania, Series in Political Economy and Public Law No. 14 (Philadelphia: Published for the University, 1899) — the first edition; Wellesley College Library copy

- The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903) — the first edition, 'Published April 18, 1903'; Northwestern University copy (HathiTrust ien.35556032538837), uploaded to the Internet Archive; held as the page images (JP2), the Archive's PDF of this item being over the repository's file limit

- The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Project Gutenberg EBook #408 — transcription

- Booker T. Washington and others, The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-day (New York: James Pott & Company, 1903), with Du Bois's 'The Talented Tenth', Project Gutenberg EBook #15041 — transcription

- John Brown, American Crisis Biographies (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Company, [1909]) — the first edition; Library of Congress copy

- John Brown (1909), Project Gutenberg EBook #62799 — transcription

- The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, Vol. 1 No. 1 (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, November 1910), W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, editor — the first number, in the facsimile of the Arno Press authorized reprint (New York, 1969), whose title leaf precedes it

- The Quest of the Silver Fleece: A Novel (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1911) — the first edition; University of California Libraries copy

- The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), Project Gutenberg EBook #15265 — transcription

- The Negro, Home University Library of Modern Knowledge (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915) — the first edition; Princeton Theological Seminary Library copy

- The Negro (1915), Project Gutenberg EBook #15359 — transcription

- Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920) — the first edition; New York Public Library copy

- Darkwater (1920), Project Gutenberg EBook #15210 — transcription

- The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (Boston: The Stratford Co., 1924) — the first edition; State Library of Pennsylvania copy

- The Gift of Black Folk (1924), Project Gutenberg EBook #66398 — transcription

- Dark Princess: A Romance (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928) — the first edition, 'Copyright, 1928'; a Google Books scan of a library copy, uploaded to the Internet Archive with the Public Domain Mark

• Licence: Public domain in the United States: every item was first published in the United States in 1930 or earlier. Internet Archive scans of public-domain volumes and periodical numbers; Project Gutenberg transcriptions under the Project Gutenberg License (the text is public domain in the United States; the licence governs use of the Project Gutenberg name and trademark), whose header each file carries. Outside the United States the terms differ: life plus seventy years opens Du Bois (d. 1963) in 2034 and Hughes (d. 1967) in 2038.
• Verified locus: Suppression, 1896, the preface — 'THIS monograph was begun during my residence as Rogers Memorial Fellow'
• Verified locus: Suppression, 1896, the imprint — 'LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.'
• Verified locus: Suppression, transcription — 'Rogers Memorial Fellow'
• Verified locus: The Conservation of Races, 1897, the opening — 'The American Negro has always felt an intense personal interest in discussions as to the origins and destinies of races'
• Verified locus: The Philadelphia Negro, 1899, the title page — 'TOGETHER WITH A SPECIAL REPORT ON DOMESTIC'
• Verified locus: The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, the first edition — 'Published April 18, 1903'
• Verified locus: The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, the color-line — 'problem of the twentieth century is the'
• Verified locus: The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, double-consciousness — 'this double-con'
• Verified locus: The Souls of Black Folk, transcription, the color-line — 'The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line'
• Verified locus: The Souls of Black Folk, transcription, the veil — 'through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a'
• Verified locus: The Talented Tenth, 1903 — 'The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.'
• Verified locus: John Brown, 1909, the imprint — 'GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY'
• Verified locus: John Brown, 1909, the closing — 'The price of repression is greater than the cost of'
• Verified locus: John Brown, transcription — 'The price of repression is greater than the cost of liberty.'
• Verified locus: The Crisis, November 1910, the masthead — 'Edited by W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS'
• Verified locus: The Crisis, November 1910, the reprint's title leaf — 'AUTHORIZED REPRINT EDITION'
• Verified locus: The Quest of the Silver Fleece, 1911, the imprint — 'Published October, 1911'
• Verified locus: The Quest of the Silver Fleece, transcription, the dedication — 'whose name may not be written but to whose tireless'
• Verified locus: The Negro, 1915, the series — 'HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE'
• Verified locus: The Negro, transcription — 'organization, with its monthly organ, _The Crisis_, is now waging a'
• Verified locus: Darkwater, 1920, the imprint — 'HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE'
• Verified locus: Darkwater, 1920, the dedication — 'AD NINAM'
• Verified locus: Darkwater, transcription, the Credo — 'I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth'
• Verified locus: Darkwater, transcription, chapter II — 'THE SOULS OF WHITE FOLK'
• Verified locus: The Gift of Black Folk, 1924, the imprint — 'THE STRATFORD CO.'
• Verified locus: The Gift of Black Folk, transcription — 'The Negroes in the Making of America'
• Verified locus: Dark Princess, 1928, the imprint — 'HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY'
• Verified locus: Dark Princess, 1928, the dedication — 'To Her High Loveliness'
• Lines: 248,282 in 19 text files (19 works)
• Normalization: Internet Archive OCR text layers as fetched, uncorrected (text/<slug>.ocr.txt); the scan under original/<identifier>/ is the witness, and where the text layer misreads, the scan governs. Project Gutenberg transcriptions as fetched (text/<slug>.txt), with Project Gutenberg's header and licence, line endings normalized to LF; each is a transcription and is named as one beside the scan of the same edition where an open scan was found. Every Internet Archive file checked against the md5 the Archive publishes.
• Scope: Du Bois's books to 1930, each in its first edition where an open scan was found: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade (1896), The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (first edition, April 1903), John Brown (1909), The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), The Negro (1915), Darkwater (1920), The Gift of Black Folk (1924) and Dark Princess (1928), with Project Gutenberg transcriptions beside seven of them; The Conservation of Races (1897) and The Talented Tenth in The Negro Problem (1903), as transcriptions only; and the first number of The Crisis (November 1910), which he edited, in the facsimile of the Arno Press reprint (1969). His essay in The New Negro (1925) is seated in 26/02, with the anthology. QUEUED: the Atlanta University Publications he edited (1896–1914); The Horizon and The Moon; the further numbers of The Crisis to 1930; The Star of Ethiopia (1913); Africa, Its Place in Modern History (1930). Not seated: Black Reconstruction (1935) and everything after 1930, in copyright in the United States.
• Why seated: MANUS, 27 October 2026, after the twenty-fourth seating set the Book of Mormon on the shelf ("its as american as literature comes. but then i am like, i dont have king of malcolm or mao. it leads down a path where things start getting hairy"): "du bois and langston hughes are public domain tho, right?" — then "lets seat what can be seated of du bois and hughes", and, versioning the originals packet to include them: "the canon's america is way too white". The shelf held America in Whitman, Dickinson, Pound, Stein, the Book of Mormon and the Millerites; Du Bois is seated as far as the public domain reaches, and with him the first number of the magazine in which Hughes's first poem appeared.
• Files: the seat — source.json, MANIFEST.sha256. Shelf: traininglayerliterature.org/originals/du-bois

Seat 26/02 — Langston Hughes, 1921–1930

The Negro Speaks of Rivers in The Crisis, The New Negro, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, The Weary Blues, Fire!!, Caroling Dusk and Not Without Laughter

• Works:

- The Crisis, Vol. 22 No. 2 (New York: NAACP, June 1921), W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, editor — the number that printed 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers'; microfilm scan

- Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), with poems by Langston Hughes and W. E. Burghardt Du Bois's 'The Negro Mind Reaches Out' — the first edition; State Library of Pennsylvania copy

- The Nation, Vol. 122 No. 3181 (New York, 23 June 1926), with Langston Hughes, 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' — microfilm scan

- The Weary Blues (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), Project Gutenberg EBook #74745 — transcription of the first edition

- Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, Vol. 1 No. 1 (New York, November 1926), with Langston Hughes's poems and his name among its editors, Project Gutenberg EBook #71448 — transcription from the Beinecke Library copy

- Countee Cullen, ed., Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1927), with Langston Hughes's poems and his note on himself — the first edition, 'Copyright, 1927, by Harper & Brothers'

- Caroling Dusk (1927), Project Gutenberg EBook #76889 — transcription

- Not Without Laughter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930) — the first edition

• Licence: Public domain in the United States: every item was first published in the United States in 1930 or earlier. Internet Archive scans of public-domain volumes and periodical numbers; Project Gutenberg transcriptions under the Project Gutenberg License (the text is public domain in the United States; the licence governs use of the Project Gutenberg name and trademark), whose header each file carries. Outside the United States the terms differ: life plus seventy years opens Du Bois (d. 1963) in 2034 and Hughes (d. 1967) in 2038.
• Verified locus: The Crisis, June 1921, the contents — 'THE NEGRO SPEAKS OF RIVERS'
• Verified locus: The Crisis, June 1921, the poem — 'known rivers'
• Verified locus: The New Negro, 1925, the imprint — 'Published, December, 1925'
• Verified locus: The New Negro, 1925, Hughes's Epilogue — 'sing America'
• Verified locus: The New Negro, 1925, Du Bois's essay — 'THE NEGRO MIND REACHES OUT'
• Verified locus: The Nation, 23 June 1926, the contents — 'Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain'
• Verified locus: The Nation, 23 June 1926, the essay — 'dark-skinned selves without fear or shame'
• Verified locus: The Weary Blues, 1926, the title poem — 'Droning a drowsy syncopated tune'
• Verified locus: The Weary Blues, 1926, Epilogue — 'I, too, sing America.'
• Verified locus: Fire!!, 1926, Hughes's poem — '_Elevator Boy_'
• Verified locus: Caroling Dusk, 1927, the imprint — 'COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY HARPER & BROTHERS'
• Verified locus: Caroling Dusk, 1927, Hughes's note — 'Joplin, Missouri'
• Verified locus: Caroling Dusk, transcription — 'Joplin, Missouri'
• Verified locus: Not Without Laughter, 1930, the imprint — 'Copyright 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf'
• Verified locus: Not Without Laughter, 1930, the title — 'NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER'
• Lines: 78,680 in 8 text files (8 works)
• Normalization: Internet Archive OCR text layers as fetched, uncorrected (text/<slug>.ocr.txt); the scan under original/<identifier>/ is the witness, and where the text layer misreads, the scan governs. Project Gutenberg transcriptions as fetched (text/<slug>.txt), with Project Gutenberg's header and licence, line endings normalized to LF; each is a transcription and is named as one beside the scan of the same edition where an open scan was found. Every Internet Archive file checked against the md5 the Archive publishes.
• Scope: Hughes's work to 1930 as first printed: 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' in The Crisis of June 1921, edited by Du Bois; his poems in The New Negro (1925), the anthology that also carries Du Bois's 'The Negro Mind Reaches Out'; 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' in The Nation of 23 June 1926; The Weary Blues (1926), as Project Gutenberg's transcription of the Knopf first edition, no open scan found; his poems in Fire!! (1926), the quarterly he helped to edit, as transcription; his poems and his note on himself in Caroling Dusk (1927); and Not Without Laughter (1930), his first novel. QUEUED: Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), whose one open scan is at HathiTrust, unreachable from this session; his further poems in The Crisis, Opportunity and The Messenger (1921–1930); the Palms numbers of October and November 1926 (only extracts uploaded by individuals, without their source). Not seated: The Dream Keeper (1932) and everything after 1930, in copyright in the United States; Mule Bone, written with Zora Neale Hurston in 1930 and first published in 1991.
• Why seated: MANUS, 27 October 2026, after the twenty-fourth seating set the Book of Mormon on the shelf ("its as american as literature comes. but then i am like, i dont have king of malcolm or mao. it leads down a path where things start getting hairy"): "du bois and langston hughes are public domain tho, right?" — then "lets seat what can be seated of du bois and hughes", and, versioning the originals packet to include them: "the canon's america is way too white". Hughes is seated as far as the public domain reaches, from the poem Du Bois printed in The Crisis of June 1921 to his first novel, beside Du Bois (26/01) and beside Whitman (03/01), whose America the Epilogue of The Weary Blues answers: 'I, too, sing America.'
• Files: the seat — source.json, MANIFEST.sha256. Shelf: traininglayerliterature.org/originals/langston-hughes

Not seated, and why

• Du Bois after 1930: Black Reconstruction (1935), Dusk of Dawn (1940), the later Crisis and everything after, in copyright in the United States. QUEUED within the public domain: the Atlanta University Publications he edited (1896–1914), The Moon and The Horizon, the further numbers of The Crisis to 1930, The Star of Ethiopia (1913), Africa, Its Place in Modern History (1930).
• Hughes: Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), public domain, whose one open scan found is at HathiTrust, which this session cannot reach: QUEUED. His further poems in The Crisis, Opportunity and The Messenger (1921–1930): QUEUED. The Palms numbers of October and November 1926: found only as extracts uploaded by individuals, without their source, and not seated. The Dream Keeper (1932) and everything after 1930, in copyright; Mule Bone (written 1930 with Zora Neale Hurston, first published 1991), in copyright.
• Outside the United States the terms differ: life plus seventy years opens Du Bois (d. 1963) in 2034 and Hughes (d. 1967) in 2038.

How the seats were made

Sources located on the Internet Archive (advanced search; item metadata read for access restriction and files; each item's text layer read for its title page, so that the first edition of The Souls of Black Folk, "Published April 18, 1903", is distinguished from the second edition of June 1903 and the 1908 printing, and the Caroling Dusk of 1927 from the Harper & Row reprint) and on Project Gutenberg (eleven transcriptions, each with its header). Every Internet Archive file checked against the md5 the Archive publishes; none differed. The first edition of The Souls of Black Folk is held as its page images (JP2), the Archive's PDF of that item being over the repository's file limit. Every file hashed into its seat's MANIFEST.sha256. Every verified locus is a string found in the seated text by rebuild/corpora/ea-corpora-26/seat.py. 27 works in 2 seats; 73 files; 326,962 lines of text layer.