Laura E. Helton is an assistant professor of English and history at the University of Delaware. She is a coeditor of the digital humanities project “Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg.”
Laura Helton’s Scattered and Fugitive Things is an extraordinary book that chronicles and contextualizes how Black archives and libraries were built, organized, preserved, protected and used in the early twentieth century. Beautifully written, this is a major contribution to Black Studies. -- Elizabeth McHenry, author of <i>To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship</i> Laura Helton’s stellar and timely book reclaims the vital work of black librarians, collectors, and bibliophiles who built the archival infrastructure on which scholars of black history and culture rely. Those long-overlooked men and women are brought back to life with the fidelity that can only come from deep archival immersion by a superb writer. Her exceptional work and that of the brilliant people she profiles reveal a rich world of unexplored archival abundance which continues to serve as a bulwark against both unfounded speculations and outright assaults on black history. -- Barbara D. Savage, author of <i>Merze Tate: the Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar</i> Scattered and Fugitive Things is a methodological, theoretical, and archival tour de force—at once the capstone of a decade of groundbreaking scholarship in Black archives and librarianship and at the same time a call for us to attend to produce more work on these pioneering Black bibliophiles and their institutions. -- Derrick Spires, author of <i>The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States</i> Extensively researched and brilliantly constructed, Scattered and Fugitive Things weaves together the remarkable story of librarians, archivists, bibliophiles, and collectors of Black history. It describes the radical lengths that some went to collect, exhibit, and classify Black books, manuscripts, and ephemera. An essential book for anyone interested in the backstory of Black history. -- Ethelene Whitmire, author of <i>Regina Anderson Andrews: Harlem Renaissance Librarian</i>