496 pages
English language
Published 2010 by W.W. Norton.
496 pages
English language
Published 2010 by W.W. Norton.
Historian Painter centers her momentous study of racial classification on the slave trade and the nation-building efforts which dominated the United States in the 18th century, when thinkers led by Ralph Waldo Emerson strove to explain the rapid progress of America within the context of white superiority. Her research is filled with frequent, startling realizations about how tenuous and temporary our racial classifications really are.