Did you know that the Temple University Libraries offer access to hundreds of thousands of full-text electronic books? Through agreements with multiple eBook providers, University faculty, staff and students can access this content through the library catalog or the dedicated “eBooks” page within the library web site.

One of our premier eBook providers, NetLibrary, offers a free eBook each month, and this month’s choice is especially significant for Temple University. In honor of Black History Month, NetLibrary’s free eBook for February 2007 is A Companion to African-American Studies.

The book’s editors are Temple’s own Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon. Lewis R. Gordon is the Laura Carnell University Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Director of Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies, at Temple University. He is the author of Her Majesty’s Other Children (1997), Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (2000) and of anthologies that include the co-edited Not Only the Master’s Tools (2005).

Jane Anna Gordon teaches in the Department of Political Science and is Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University. She is the author of Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, 1967-1971 (2001) and co-editor (with Lewis R. Gordon) of Not only the Master’s Tools: Theoretical Explorations in African-American Studies (2005).

The Gordons’ new volume chronicles the challenges that African-American Studies programs confronted in an effort to achieve acceptance in colleges and universities throughout the nation. Now, academia takes these programs for granted, but this collection of original essays by expert scholars reflects on the pitched battles to establish African-American studies as a bona fide academic discipline. The Gordons, in their Introduction: On Working through a Most Difficult Terrain, let the reader know that it was not always so easy to set up African-American Studies programs:

“The academic ‘field’ [African American studies] according to some proponents, ‘discipline’ according to others, has gone through a variety of conceptual transformations as it moved from ‘Black Studies’ to ‘Afro-American Studies’ ‘African-American Studies’ and now ‘African Studies’. During this decades long process it has met scholarly prejudice from all quarters of the university/college hierarchies.”

Now the Gordons bring together an elite group of scholars to continue their exploration of issues of ethnicity, identity, and racial politics. The publication ofA Companion to African-American Studies in electronic format is an opportunity for the Temple University community to discover the world of electronic books.

If you need additional information about any of our electronic books please drop in or use our Ask A Librarian service.

Al Vara, Reference Librarian and Subject Specialist for African-American Studies
Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian for Research and Instructional Services