num_pages: 464
description: A powerful exploration of the past and present arc of Americas white supremacyfrom the countrys inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and todays Black Lives Matter. The most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory. Henry Louis Gates Jr. Harvard UniversityStunning timely . . . an achievement in writing public history . . . Teaching White Supremacy should be read widely in our roiling debate over how to teach about race and slavery in classrooms. David W. Blight Sterling Professor of American History Yale University; author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Frederick Prophet of FreedomDonald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacys deep-seated roots in our nations educational system through a fascinating in-depth examination of Americas wide assortment of texts from primary readers to college textbooks from popular histories to the most influential academic scholarship. Sifting through a wealth of materials from the colonial era to today Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which this ideology has infiltrated all aspects of American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity. Yacovone lays out the arc of Americas white supremacy from the countrys inception and Revolutionary War years to its nineteenth-century flashpoint of civil war to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and todays Black Lives Matter. In a stunning reappraisal the author argues that it is the North not the South that bears the greater responsibility for creating the dominant strain of race theory which has been inculcated throughout the culture and in school textbooks that restricted and repressed African Americans and other minorities even as Northerners blamed the South for its legacy of slavery segregation and racial injustice. A major assessment of how we got to where we are today of how white supremacy has suffused every area of American learning from literature and science to religion medicine and law and why this kind of thinking has so insidiously endured for more than three centuries.
language: English
title: Teaching White Supremacy: America's Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity
publisher: Pantheon