This new edition, featuring essays by Angela Davis that focus on the importance political resistance and freedom struggle, will introduce Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to the Obama generation. Already a cornerstone of every African American studies syllabus, the new edition has the potential to become the edition adopted by progressive-leaning professors and department heads. Newly relevant given the election of Barack Obama, Angela Davis discusses why and how the Narrative is important today for understanding freedom, conscience, resistance and social justice. Will be supported and promoted by the Pacifica Archives, the Pacifica Radio (including Democracy Now). In order to capture the largest market share, particularly in ongoing backlist orders from course adoptions, the title remains the same as the original edition. As this is a new critical edition, however, Angela Y. Davis is listed as a co-author, rather than an editor or contributor. The New Critical Edition is intended to be released, promoted and marketed at the same time as Davis's collection of speeches, The Meaning of Freedom, forthcoming from City Lights in Fall 09. The power of her historical insights and the sweetness of her dream cannot be denied."—New York Times Book Review "Long before 'race/gender' became the obligatory injunction it is now, Angela Davis was developing an analytical framework that brought all of these factors into play. For readers who only see Angela Davis as a public icon . . . meet the real Angela Davis: perhaps the leading public intellectual of our era."—Robin D. G. Kelley author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original "One of America's last truly fearless public intellectuals."**—Cynthia McKinney, Former U.S. Democratic Congresswoman "Angela Davis's revolutionary spirit is still strong. Still with us, thank goodness!"—Virginian-Pilot "There was a time in America when to call a person an 'abolitionist' was the ultimate epithet. It evoked scorn in the North and outrage in the South. Yet they were the harbingers of things to come. They were on the right side of history. Prof. Angela Y. Davis stands in that proud, radical tradition."—Mumia Abu-Jamal "Behold the heart and mind of Angela Davis, open, relentless, and on time!"—June Jordan "The enormous revolution in Black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people in an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night."—James Baldwin