W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was the most influential Afro-American intellectual of the twentieth century. His accomplishments in journalism and the academic disciplines of history and sociology were pioneering, and have only recently come to be fully appreciated. His more than twenty books and over 1,000 articles should qualify him to be considered one of America’s major scholars, and certainly the leading interpreter of race relations in the U.S., although he was never offered a professorship at a major American university. In the past two decades, Du Bois has experienced a renaissance of interest in his scholarship as well as in his Pan-African politics. Although he wrote three autobiographics in his lifetime and submitted to a 180 page oral history in 1960 at Columbia University, Du Bois’s life and thought have become the subject of innumerable books and articles by historians—a cottage industry in and of itself. Du Bois’s early writings merit the attention of historians and social scientists because of their freshness even after a century and because of his openness to ideas and methods that one would not expect from his later writings.

It is the omnipresent soldiery of Berlin that first catches the American visitors’s attention. The whole city seems to have a half military stride, all Prussia rushes pell-mell to the window to see the ever-passing regiment, and German ideals from king to lover appear at first sight to be clad in spurs and shoulder-strap. The military spirit appears not to be confined to the army, but largely to permeate society. The American sees it in the stiff bow of the students, in the perfect rage for uniforms in all classes, which enables both footman and chancellor to carry their histories on their backs; above all this spirit pervades the political state. The all-pervading government works about and around the new-comer, with a military precision and careful attention to trifles which is calculated to make a Bostonian uncomfortable, and take a New Yorker's breath away.

When one hears that the vote of the socialistic party of Germany rose from 312,000 in 1881 to 1,725,000 at the last election of the Reichstag, the question naturally arises, What is the true significance of this? How far have the economic theories of Socialism really penetrated the masses of Germany? Such questions are apart from the more usual inquiries as to the scientific soundness of the official manifestoes of this party, or the personal aims of Bebel, Liebknecht or von Vollmar. Nevertheless, the inquiry into the real economics beliefs of the nearly two million German voters usually classed as “socialists,” is certainly of deep interest to the sociologist and statesman.

I recently edited a volume of essays on the Kaiserreich, under the title Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, 1996), which set out deliberately to explore the possible forms of new approaches to the history of the Second Empire; and in the circumstances it’s hard for me to approach this topic without saying something about Hans–Ulrich Wehler’s extended review of this volume in Central European History, which came out during the summer. Wehler’s response is interesting. He actually likes most of the fifteen contributions to this collection, but reserves extended hostility for the ones by Geroge Stainmetz and Elisabetn Domansky, who clearly placed themselves beyond the pale of tolerable discourse by opting for non-Weberian sociology, Foucauldian perspectives, and gender critique.