A hideous monster of the mind
Subtitle: American race theory in the early republic
By: Bruce Dain.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 321
Subjects: Race -- History; Race -- Philosophy; Racism -- United States -- History; Racism in anthropology -- United States -- History; Race discrimination -- United States -- History; Eugenics -- United States -- History; African Americans -- Public opinion; Public opinion -- United States; United States -- Race relations; United States -- Moral conditions
Other titles: American race theory in the early republic
Description: "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 debate, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, such as 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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The face of nature; title: Culture and the persistence of race; title: The horrors of St. Domingue; title: The mutability of human affairs; title: Conceiving universal equality; title: Black immediatism; title: The new ethnology; title: Effacing the individual.