Contents

Prologue: Race and the Human Race

The Colonial Period

1. The Foundation of the American Racial System: Atlantic Slavery Becomes Market-driven and Color-defined
2. Anglo Americans Adopt the Atlantic Racial System: the "Sturdy Beggars" Become "Sturdy Yeomen"
3. The Construction of Planter Hegemony: 1676-1776
4. The Revolution: the Challenge and the Compromise

The Antebellum Republic

1. The Old South's Triumph
2. The Old South's Crisis, and the Articulation of the White Solidarity Myth
3. Emancipated But Black: Freedom in the Free States
4. The Planter and the "Wage Slave": A Reactionary Alliance
5. King Cotton's Jesters: The Minstrel Show Interprets Race for the White Working Class
6. The War of the Cabins: The Struggle for the Soul of the "Common Man"

The Racial System Challenged and Revised

1. The Republican Revolution and the Struggle for a "New Birth of Freedom"
2. Radical Vision, Conservative Reaction: Reconstruction from Revolution to Segregation, 1865-1900

The Racial System in a Rising Superpower

1. From the "Nadir" to the New Deal: The Racial System in an Era of World Imperialism
2. The American Century, the American Dilemma, 1940-1968
3. The Racial System in an Age of Globalism