Explore the vast range of titles available.

In this boldly interpretive narrative, William McKee Evans tells the story of America's paradox of democracy entangled with a centuries-old system of racial oppression. _x000B__x000B_Before English colonization, Spanish and Portuguese conquerors enslaved American natives to produce for a European market becoming addicted to sugar, rum, and tobacco. But soon they saw their slaves sicken and die in apocalyptic numbers. They began to import Africans, who survived the killer plantation diseases long enough to allow stable production, and a new kind of slavery was born, both market driven and defined as black. A century later, English planters adopted this slavery. They passed on to future generations a racial system of interacting practices and ideas. Its ideas first justified black slavery, then, after the Civil War, other forms of coerced black labor, and, today, black poverty and unemployment. _x000B__x000B_At three historical moments, a crisis in the larger society opened political space for idealists to challenge the racial system: during the American Revolution, then during the \"irrepressible conflict\" ending in the Civil War, and, finally, during the Cold War and the colonial liberation movements. Each challenge resulted in a historic advance. But none swept clean. The emancipations of the era of the Revolution left the nation part free, part slave. The Civil War emancipated the slaves but left them half free. In the 1950s and '60s, a convergence of the colonial liberation movements and the Cold War created a crisis that opened space for the Black Freedom Movement to liberate many African Americans from a segregated bottom stratum of American society. Class became more important than color. But never had class, being poor, been a more formidable obstacle for any individual, black or white, to getting ahead. Many African Americans remain segregated in jobless ghettoes with dilapidated schools and dismal prospects in an increasingly polarized class society._x000B__x000B_Evans sees a new crisis looming in a convergence of environmental disaster, endless wars, and economic collapse, which may again open space for a challenge to the racial system. African Americans, with their memory of their centuries-old struggle against oppressors, appear uniquely placed to play a central role.

Like a moth to the flame, John Brown was drawn by an ancient Christian vision of liberation. His 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry had rocked the nation.¹ This was not because adventures by private armies were unusual in the 1850s. Nor was Brown’s raid bloodier than those of Narciso Lopez into Cuba, or William Walker’s takeover of Nicaragua, or the “border ruffians” raids into Kansas. Rather it was because while these had attempted to carry the power of the southern slaveholders into Latin America and into the American West, Brown’s band had struck a blow at slavery, and in Virginia,

In “the South they hunt slaves with dogs—in the North with Democrats,” Thaddeus Stevens exploded in 1860.¹ Was Stevens exaggerating? In a democratic republic, could slaveholders have such control over the dominant political party in the North? The nation’s population was thirty million. Only two million of these belonged to slaveholding families, virtually none of whom lived in the North. Yet Stevens was right. In the North, federal marshals, with the help of party-loyal Democrats, hunted down escaped slaves. In the 1850s, there were two apparently contradictory but actually interconnected developments. On the one hand, the Slave Power in

Between the Jamestown settlement in 1607 and the War for Independence, the English who settled the mainland plantation colonies created a raceconscious society remarkably different from the class-conscious one they had left behind. In England the great divide had been between “people of quality” and “the multitude.” By the time of Independence, however, a new mentality, later called “American exceptionalism,” had appeared that minimized or even denied class distinctions. The mark dividing the haves from the have-nots was now color: slavery was black; freedom and opportunity white. This society was different, too, from the one that had evolved in Latin

For white workers the most exciting entertainment by far was the minstrel show. No other type of theater captivated such massive audiences or was more influential. More than from newspapers, books, or sermons, it was from the minstrel show that white workers formed opinions about the South, about plantations, slavery, and how black people responded to freedom. The performers burst on stage in makeup which gave the impression of huge eyes and gaping mouths. They dressed in ill-fitting, patchwork clothes, and spoke in heavy “nigger” dialects. Once on stage, they could not stay still for an instant. Even while sitting,

Paradoxically, as slavery disappeared in the North, the expressions of racial animosity there grew more strident. In the North, the southern slaveholders and their northern allies were vulnerable. They more and more needed northern support to maintain their dominant influence in the federal government. Never before had American leaders pressed the racial defenses of slavery more vigorously. Prejudice in the North reached its zenith during the 1850s. Indeed, in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that free blacks were not citizens, and, in the words of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, “had no rights which the

At the beginning of the 1940s the Great Depression still hung on. Newspapers were full of reports about wars in Europe and Asia, but most people were less concerned about foreign affairs than about the social programs of the New Deal that were now under attack. To a nation absorbed with such homebound concerns, the media giant Henry R. Luce, in hisLifemagazine, America’s most widely read periodical, sounded a wakeup call. The nation must rise to its global mission, to its duty and opportunity to make the twentieth century “the American Century.” “The fundamental trouble with America .

When Americans think of slavery, they think of black slavery. In other places, at other times, it was not always so. Seville, c. 1626: In Lope de Vega’s playSlave of Her Lover,set in the Seville of the playwright’s day, Alberto is asked if he has a black slave for sale. “By no means would I deal in that business,” he replies. The business he spurns is not the slave trade itself. Indeed, at that very moment he is offering for sale a Muslim slave. It is the black slave trade that sparks his indignation.¹ For Lope de Vega

The solid South was vulnerable to a new wave of radicalism. War prosperity had collapsed soon after the war. The prices of cotton and tobacco had dropped precipitously. More than half of the farmers, whites and blacks, no longer owned their land. The company-owned white cotton mill villages often resembled plantation slave quarters. Child labor was widespread. Wages were so low that many workers were afflicted with malnutrition.¹ If the Communists were devils to the many, they were avenging angels to some. Desperate whites, as their parents and grandparents had done in the farmers’ movement of the 1880s and ’90s,