Title A hideous monster of the mind : American race theory in the early republic / Bruce Dain

Published Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2002

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Description 1 online resource (x, 321 pages) Contents The face of nature -- Culture and the persistence of race -- The horrors of St. Domingue -- The mutability of human affairs -- Conceiving universal equality -- Black immediatism -- The new ethnology -- Effacing the individual Summary "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."--Jacket Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL Print version record digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL Subject 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 SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- Cultural. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Discrimination & Race Relations. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Minority Studies. HISTORY -- United States -- 19th Century. African Americans -- Public opinion Eugenics Moral conditions Public opinion Race Race discrimination Race -- Philosophy Race relations Racism Racism in anthropology SUBJECT United States -- Race relations. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140494 United States -- Moral conditions. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140383 Subject United States Genre/Form History Form Electronic book LC no. 2002027299 ISBN 9780674030145 0674030141

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