Details

Subject(s)

• Racism—United States—History [Browse]
• United States—Race relations [Browse]

Homosaurus term(s)

• Racism [Browse]

Summary note

"Why has a nation dedicated to freedom and universal ideals continually produced, through its obsession with race, an unhappily divided people? Scott L. Malcomson's search for an answer took him to communities across the country and deep into our past. From Virginia colonists "going native" onward, Malcomson argues, Americans, in their mania for self-invention, pioneered an idea of race that gave it unprecedented moral and social importance. A parade of idealists, pragmatists, and opportunists - from Ben Franklin to Tecumseh, Washington Irving to Bobby Seale - defined "Indian," "black," and "white" in relation to one another and in service to the aspirations and anxieties of each era. Yet these definitions have never been gladly adopted by the people they were meant to describe. To escape the limits of race, Americans have continually attempted to escape from other races - by founding all-black towns, for example - or to nullify race by confining, eliminating, or absorbing one another. From Puritan enslavement of Indians to the separatism we enact daily in our schools and neighborhoods, Americans have perpetually engaged with and fled from other Americans along racial lines. By not only recounting our nation's most distinctive and enduring drama but helping us to own it - even to embrace it - this redemptive book offers a way to move forward."--Jacket.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (p. [519]-568) and index.

Contents

• This business of angels
• I. An Indian country. "All things in aboundance'' : colonial America as Eden ; "A new kind of disorder" : a Cherokee utopia and the rise of racial separatism 1730-1830 ; "Welcome, negro, welcome" : the Indian as slave and slaveholder ; "Grand and great--the future state" : some twentieth-century solutions to the Indian problem ; Homelands
• II. The republic of new Africa. "The grand ham" : racial imagination in the old world ; "Coal black is better than another hue" : love and race in Shakespeare's England ; "We can be as separate as the fingers" : segregation from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age ; The new negro : the beautiful despair of the Harlem Renaissance ; "This special way of life"
• III. White flight. "The essence of whiteness" : Spain, England, and the colors of empire ; "The freest of all human beings" : westward expansion and the price of liberty ; The Ethiopian opera : white masks in blackface minstrelsy ; "Old racial cries, old racial ties"
• IV. A family in time. A present from John Sutter ; Seize the time ; Have mercy ; Down to the river.

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ISBN

• 0374240795 ((alk. paper))
• 9780374240790 ((alk. paper))
• 0374527946
• 9780374527945

LCCN

00024487

OCLC

43552503

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