Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Discussions of race in early republican America must be couched in carefully qualified language, because the modern Western concept of “race” was emerging during precisely this time. Over the course of the nineteenth century, social and natural scientists in Europe and the Americas built on Enlightenment proto-racial theories to argue that human kind could be divided into various numbers of racial sub-categories. Members of each racial group were believed to differ from members of other racial groups in consistent ways that were stable and inherited across generations. While the particular indices of difference – skull size or shape, sexual “ardency,” intelligence-test score, or athletic ability – have varied over time and space, the belief in stable inherited difference has remained a staple of racial thought. Although the overwhelming majority of late twentieth-century scholars have come to reject such racial thought, the sense of difference that these nineteenth-century theories described remains the object of inquiry for most historians tracing “race” in history. In the wake of the civil rights movement, historians have paid increasing attention to the place of racial difference in the American Revolution. The reasons for this growing interest are rooted in both the salience of racial issues in late twentieth-century America and the apparent contradictions inherent in a revolution ... log in or subscribe to read full text