With a richly textured book cover featuring Booker T. Washington working at his desk, Michael Bieze and Marybeth Gasman have edited an interesting collection of some of the Tuskegee leader's lesser-known writings in Booker T. Washington Reconsidered. Bieze and Gasman intend this work to become an extension of the Booker T. Washington Papers edited by Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, and published by the University of Illinois Press decades ago. Thus, while the edited version of The Washington Papers still remains essential, the authors seek to show that it is not definitive as it lacks many of Booker T. Washington's contributions to journals and newspapers, and even some of his books. Moreover, Bieze and Gasman have reproduced Washington's publications in their original layout, including pictures, design, and fonts, in order to better convey Washington's intentions and to avoid possible distortions like those they identified in Harlan and Smock's fourteen-volume work.

Booker T. Washington Reconsidered consists of nine chapters plus an Introduction and Conclusion. In 265 pages, the authors have created a topical work that includes many useful essays and other reprints of Washington's writings. Each chapter begins with a commentary by the authors where they provide a nuanced perspective and context for the primary writings of Washington that follow.

The authors offer four main reasons for producing this work. First, to provide a thematic study that will allow readers to examine multiple facets of Booker T. Washington's life. Second, to make more of the Tuskegean's writing accessible to scholars and researchers alike. The original formats of Washington's publications used in the book are critical and provide the third reason why Bieze and Gasman published this volume. This also helps to raise historiographical questions regarding the form of Washington's writings edited by Harlan and Smock. And last, they aim to provide readers with some of the materials produced by Washington that remain outside the reach of most researchers because they are not located in archival holdings, but in vast private holdings within African American families and among collectors of black ephemera.

Following the Introduction, Bieze and Gasman present works produced by Washington on the themes of autobiography, speeches, education, work, philanthropy, aesthetics, race, religion and politics. Each theme begins with an analysis by the authors before the reader is introduced to Washington's actual writings.

Readers will peruse the chapters with interest. For example, in chapter 8, titled “Religion,” the authors note that researchers looking for information on Washington's contribution to the African American church will typically find little to nothing at all. This is because Washington purposefully stayed away from appearing to be a pastor, an activist church leader, or a writer on theological philosophy, even though he briefly studied at Wayland Seminary in Washington, DC during the fall of 1878. Nonetheless, Bieze and Gasman follow this commentary with essays Washington wrote on religion like “Christianizing Africa,” and “Sowing and Reaping.” These works are complemented by six other related essays like “The Colored Ministry; Its Defects and Needs,” and “The Kingdom of God,” which the Tuskegean wrote and which can be found online at the Johns Hopkins University Press's website (www.press.jhu.edu/BTW) as an extension of this book in easily accessible form.

Indeed, one of the most interesting features of this work is that although it begins in printed format, it extends into a digital component at the website hosted by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Thus the website allows readers to examine and print on-demand additional materials that Washington wrote that would have been too unwieldy to include in book form. For example, chapter 3 on education features only one essay by Washington, titled “Twenty-Five Years of Tuskegee,” published in World's Work in 1906. However, online, readers will find seven additional education-related writings of Washington's, like “The Story of ‘Tobe Jones’,” published in the New England Home Magazine in 1898; “Problems in Education,” published in 1902 in The Cosmopolitan; and “Among Negro Students,” in the Youth's Companion, published in 1902.

This study is written for the specialist reader and will be of interest mainly to history scholars and graduate students interested in the age of Booker T. Washington, southern history, American history, and African American history. With Booker T. Washington Reconsidered, Bieze and Gasman are continuing a developing trend in Booker T. Washington scholarship which attempts to rescue and reconstruct Washington's legacy more accurately, and to analyze his body of work more holistically. Quite simply, the authors succeed in placing new materials at the disposal of scholars in a provocative and pathbreaking manner.