The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and
enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into
studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this
separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of
modern racial consciousness in the United States from the
Revolution to the Civil War. "A Hideous Monster of the Mind"
reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process
that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but
also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural
relativism, cultural pluralism, and latter-day Afrocentrism.
From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as
Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary
disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of
cotton culture, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not
only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope
Smith, but also the first self-consciously "black" African-American
writers. These various thinkers transformed late-eighteenth-century
European environmentalist "natural history" into race theories that
combined culture and biology and set the terms for later
controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the
ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined
conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been
largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith.
Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions
were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human
differences.
In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers,
reestablishing the European intellectual background to American
racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion "race" caused
for thinkers black and white, "A Hideous Monster of the Mind"
offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern
American racial thought.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!