Racism
Subtitle: A Short History
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: May 1, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780691008998
Subjects: Racism & racial discrimination; Social history; World - General; Racism; Social Science; Sociology; Discrimination & Racism; American History; European History; History / World; Jewish Studies; Postcolonial Studies; World History/Comparative History; Race relations; History
First sentence: It is the dominant view among scholars who have studied conceptions of difference in the ancient world that no concept truly equivalent to that of "race" can be detected in the thought of the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians.
Description: "Are antisemitism and white supremacy manifestations of a general phenomenon? Why didn't racism appear in Europe before the fourteenth century, and why did it flourish as never before in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Why did the twentieth century see institutionalized racism in its most extreme forms? Why are egalitarian societies particularly susceptible to virulent racism? What do apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, and the American South under Jim Crow have in common?

How did the Holocaust advance civil rights in the United States?".

"George Fredrickson surveys the history of Western racism from its emergence in the late Middle Ages to the present. Beginning with the medieval antisemitism that put Jews beyond the pale of humanity, he traces the spread of racist thinking in the wake of European expansionism and the beginnings of the African slave trade. And he examines how the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century romantic nationalism created a new intellectual context for debates over slavery and Jewish emancipation."--BOOK JACKET.