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by: Matthew Pratt Guterl
Amazon.com's Price: $54.50 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.800973
EAN: 9780674006157
ISBN: 0674006151
Label: Harvard University Press
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: September 25, 2001
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Sales Rank: 2179240
Studio: Harvard University Press
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
With the social change brought on by the Great Migration of African Americans into the urban northeast after the Great War came the surge of a biracial sensibility that made America different from other Western nations. How white and black people thought about race and how both groups understood and attempted to define and control the demographic transformation are the subjects of this new book by a rising star in American history.
An elegant account of the roiling environment that witnessed the shift from the multiplicity of white races to the arrival of biracialism, this book focuses on four representative spokesmen for the transforming age: Daniel Cohalan, the Irish-American nationalist, Tammany Hall man, and ruthless politician; Madison Grant, the patrician eugenicist and noisy white supremacist; W. E. B. Du Bois, the African-American social scientist and advocate of social justice; and Jean Toomer, the American pluralist and novelist of the interior life. Race, politics, and classification were their intense and troubling preoccupations in a world they did not create, would not accept, and tried to change.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Things are seldom what they appear
Interesting study of the construct of race and how little and how very much the definitions matter.
Rating:  - Great Book!
This is a really well-written book! The author does a nice job of balancing his interest in the lives of four specific people with the big picture. With a very big picture! I especially liked the equal attention paid to the stories of white America and black America, not to mention everything in between or outside of these. And the section on Jean Toomer is so very sad and very moving.
Rating: - Tour-de-Force
This is an exceptional addition to the body of work that explores the idea of race as a social and ideological construct in American history. In four tightly argued essays, Guterl deftly analyzes the contributions (and contradictions) of Madison Grant, W.E.B. Dubois, Jean Toomer, and Daniel Calahan as a viable window to the problems inherent in the color line. This work is a welcome (and highly sophisticated) addition to the field of whiteness studies (joining such works as Matthew Frye Jacobson's ... Read More
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