Synopses & Reviews
In this acclaimed historical study, Alexander Saxton establishes the centrality of white racism to American politics and culture. Examining images of race at a popular level - from blackface minstrelsy to the construction of the Western hero, from grassroots political culture to dime novels - as well as the philosophical constructions of the political elite, it is a powerful and comprehensive account of the ideological forces at work in the formation of modern America.
Review
This is grand history...an extraordinary book packed with detail and argument. (Paul Buhle, The Nation)
Review
"No other book offers us such a richly detailed and elegantly written illumination of the relationship between race and the labyrinth of American party politics in the nineteenth century." Ron Takaki
Synopsis
Saxton asks why white racism remained an ideological force in America long after the need to justify slavery and Western conquest had disappeared.
About the Author
Alexander Saxton, a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, is also the author of The Indispenasble Enemy: Labor and Anti-Chinese Movement in California as well as several novels. He spent nearly twenty years as a merchant seaman and carpenter before launching a distinguished academic career.David Roediger is Kendrick Babcock Chair of History at the University of Illinois. Among his books are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner), How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. He is the editor of Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson, The North and Slavery and Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White as well as a new edition of Covington Hall's Labor Struggles in the Deep South. His articles have appeared in New Left Review, Against the Current, Radical History Review, History Workshop Journal, The Progressive and Tennis.Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Magical Urbanism. He was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in Papa'aloa, Hawaii.Michael Sprinker was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the History of Historical Materialism and History and Ideology in Proust are also published by Verso. Together with Mike Davis, he founded Verso's Haymarket Series and guided it until his death in 1999.