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W. W. Norton & Company
March 2010
On Sale: March 15, 2010
512 pages
ISBN: 0393049345
EAN: 9780393049343
Hardcover
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Historical | Non-Fiction
Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race--often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals-- including Ralph Waldo Emerson--insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is white and who is American have evolved over time. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes an enormous gap in a literature that has long focused on the nonwhite, and it forcefully reminds us that the concept of race is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed according to a long and rich history.
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