Race and the Early Republic

Racial Consciousness and Nation-Building in the Early Republic

Contributions by David Brion Davis, Lacy K. Ford, Jon Gjerde, Lois E. Horton, Joanne Pope Melish, Daniel K. Richter, David R. Roediger, James P. Ronda Edited by Michael A. Morrison, James Brewer Stewart

Publication date:

01 December 2001

Length of book:

216 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9780742521308

By 1840, American politics was a paradox—unprecedented freedom and equality for men of European descent, and the simultaneous isolation and degradation of people of African and Native American descent. Historians have characterized this phenomenon as the 'white republic.' Race and the Early Republic offers a rich account of how this paradox evolved, beginning with the fledgling nation of the 1770s and running through the antebellum years. The essays in the volume, written by a wide array of scholars, are arranged so as to allow a clear understanding of how and why white political supremacy came to be in the early United States. Race and the Early Republic is a collection of diverse, insightful and interrelated essays that promote an easy understanding of why and how people of color were systematically excluded from the early U.S. republic.

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 The Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and Expansion, 1790-1860
Chapter 3 "Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food": Hunting, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic
Chapter 4 From Class to Race in Early America: Northern Post-Emancipation Racial Reconstruction
Chapter 5 The "Condition" Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North
Chapter 6 "Here in America There Is Neither King Nor Tyrant": European Encounters with Race, "Freedom," and Their European Pasts
Chapter 7 Modernizing "Difference": The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776-1840
Chapter 8 Making the "White Man's Country" White: Race, Slavery, and State-Building in the Jacksonian South
Chapter 9 "We Have a Country": Race, Geography, and the Invention of Indian Territory
Chapter 10 The Culmination of Racial Polarities and Prejudice

An important contribution to the ongoing debates...