The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality [Paperback]

Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Award (1990)

The Arrogance of Race is a significant contribution to the historiography of slavery and racism in America. George Fredrickson, one of the most respected and cogent historians of this complex and troubling subject, maintains that racism is a cultural phenomenon not a mere by-product of class conflict and colonialism. He opts for a “dualistic” rather than a more popular monolithic explanation of the tragedy of racism.

An investigation of the issue of race over a generation of laborPreface
Introduction: Race, Class, and Consciousness
Part One: the Debate on Slavery and Race in the Civil War Era
Part Two: Historians of the Nineteenth-Century South
Part Three: Slavery and White Supremacy: Comparative Explorations
Notes
Index
AcknowledgmentsGEORGE M. FREDRICKSON has been Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History at Stanford University since 1984. He is author of The Inner Civil War, The Black Image in the White Mind (Wesleyan Paperback), and White Supremacy, for which he won the Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Merle Curti awards; this book was also a Pulitzer Prize runner-up. The Black Image in the White Mind received the Anisfield-Wolf Award.

A graduate of Harvard University (A.B. 1956, Ph.D. 1964), Fredrickson served in he U.S. Navy from 1957 to 1960 and taught at Northwestern University from 1966 to 1984; he was William Smith Mason Professor after 1979. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oslo in 1956-57 and a Fulbright professor of American History at Moscow University in 1983. FREDRICKSON has twice been appointed senior fellow of National Endowment for the Humanities; he was a Guggenhim fellow in 1968-69 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His home is in Stanford, California.“The Arrogance of Race summarizes a generation of labor by one of America’s master scholars. It is superbly wrought – a worlSÉ