How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon

David R. Roediger

Verso, 2008 - History - 240 pages

In this absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, David R. Roediger explores how the idea of race was created and recreated from the 1600's to the present day. From the late seventeenth century - the era in which DuBois located the emergence of "whiteness" - through the American revolution and the emancipatory Civil War, to the civil rights movement and the emergence of the American empire, How Race Survived US History reveals how race did far more than persist as an exception in a progressive national history. Roediger examines how race intersected all that was dynamic and progressive in US history, from democracy and economic development to migration and globalization.

Exploring the evidence that the USA will become a majority "nonwhite" nation in the next fifty years, this masterful account shows how race remains at the heart of American life in the twenty-first century.

What people are saying

excellent but too short book on racism

User Review  - grecm - Overstock.com

David Roedigers How Race Survived U.S. History is an excellent examination of antiblack racism in American culture tracing its twists and turns through history and contrapuntally interweaving it with ...

How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon

User Review  - Not Available - Book Verdict

Probing the puzzle of race in U.S. history, Roediger (history, Univ. of Illinois; The Wages of Whiteness) quickly examines patterns of race thinking and exploitation in America from settler ...

Contents

• How White: 30
• Will Race Survive?: 212
• Index: 231

About the author

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon
• Author: David R. Roediger
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Verso, 2008
• Original from: the University of California
• Digitized: Aug 4, 2009
• ISBN: 1844672751, 9781844672752
• Length: 240 pages
• Subjects: History / United States / General; Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations