 He goes on to cite as further cases the Irish and the Germans of the Sturm und Drang period. This is part of a broader recognition by Du Bois, one that he gives expression to explicitly only subsequent to Souls, that “the imprisoning of a human group with chains in the hands of an environing group” was not “a singularly unusual characteristic of the Negro in the United States in the nineteenth century”, but that “the majority of mankind has struggled through this inner spiritual slavery…” (1940: 137).