Whiteness of a different color : European immigrants and the alchemy of race / Matthew Frye Jacobson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 1958-

Contributor:

American Council of Learned Societies.

Series:

ACLS Humanities E-Book.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

European Americans--Race identity.

European Americans.

White people--Race identity--United States.

White people.

Immigrants--United States--History.

Immigrants.

Racism--United States--History.

Racism.

Race.

Race discrimination--United States.

Race discrimination.

European Americans--Race identity--United States.

Racism--History.

United States--Race relations.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 338 p. ) ill. ;

Edition:

1st Harvard University Press pbk. ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were re-racialized to become Caucasian. He provides a counter-history of how nationality groups such as the Irish or Greeks became Americans as racial groups like Celts or Mediterraneans became Caucasian.Jacobson tracks race as a conception and perception, emphasizing the importance of knowing not only how we label one another but also how we see one another, and how that racialized vision has largely been transformed in this century. The stages of racial formation-race as formed in conquest, enslavement, imperialism, segregation, and labor migration-are all part of the complex, and now counterintuitive, history of race. Whiteness of a Different Color traces the fluidity of racial categories from an immense body of research in literature, popular culture, politics, society, ethnology, anthropology, cartoons, and legal history, including sensational trials like the Leo Frank case and the Draft Riots of 1863.

Contents:

"Free white persons" in the Republic, 1790-1840

Anglo-Saxons and others, 1840-1924

Becoming Caucasian, 1924-1965

1877: the instability of race

Looking Jewish, seeing Jews

The crucible of empire

Naturalization and the courts

The dawning civil rights era

Epilogue: ethnic revival and the denial of white privilege.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-323) and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780674417809

0674417801

9780674417816

067441781X

OCLC:

1583177159

Publisher Number:

2027/heb02522 hdl