The History of White People

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Book: Read The History of White People for Free Online
Authors: Nell Irvin Painter
Tags: History, Sociology, Non-Fiction, Politics, bought-and-paid-for
phrase comes from Charles Sainte-Beauve (1804–69), a prominent mid-nineteenth-century French literary critic and member of the Académie Française.
     
     

* De Staël met her last partner in love, Albert-Jean-Michel Rocca (1788–1817), a Swiss hussar, in the winter of 1810–11, when she was forty-four and he twenty-two. They had a child in 1812 and married in 1816.
     
     

* De Staël and Villers got along famously at first in agreement on mysticism as well as philosophy. She welcomed mystics at Coppet, and at twenty-two he had published a novel, Le Magnétiseur amoureux (1787), whose basic theme was mesmerism. Even though relations between them cooled, she came to his defense in 1815 after he had been dismissed from his professorship at Göttingen.
     
     

* With roots in Renaissance Italy, the querelle des anciens et des modernes divided scholars in France and Britain in 1690s. The Ancients advocated the respect of models from antiquity; the Moderns preferred to take their cue from their own century (in France, the century of Louis XIV).
     
     

* Recognizing the great good On Germany could do toward fostering a German identity, Goethe dismissed her contrast between classicism and romanticism as unimportant.
     
     

* Indians appeared in the census of 1800, and colored people gained their own category in 1820; thereafter, the races broke down into white, black, and mulatto in 1850. Chinese people appeared in 1870.
     
     

† The census of 1840 asked for the number of “free white males and females” and “free colored males and females.” By 1850 the question addressed simply “each free person in a household.” The three-fifths clause remains in article 1, section 2, paragraph 3 of the U.S. Constitution, however, in which people bound to a term of servitude—presumably white—are counted as whole persons.
     
     

* Rhode Island delayed ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution until 1870, because legislators feared it might enfranchise members of the Celtic race. Black men had been able to vote there since 1840.
     
     

* The tangled history of the two Saxon regions in Germany would have put Jefferson off, had he sought to trace the relationship between Hengist and Horsa—who, according to Bede (ca. 730) were Jutes—and the English and Americans of his own time. Until German unification under the Prussians, provincial borders changed with the marriages, wars, and alliances of practically every new generation of rulers.
     
     

* Hengist (“Stallion”) and Horsa (“Horse”), legendary founders of Saxon England, were said to have come from Jutland (now part of Denmark). According to Bede in his Ecclesiastical History, King Vortigern invited them from Jutland to England in 449 to help repulse attacks by the Picts and Scots. Vortigern gave them the Isle of Thanet in gratitude. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes Hengist and Horsa joint kings of Kent.
     
     

* Randolph-Macon College and the University of Alabama offered Anglo-Saxon before any northern college. Amherst (1841) and Harvard (1849) Colleges were the earliest non-southern institutions to teach Anglo-Saxon.
     
     

* Reviewing Smith’s work, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, “We cannot dismiss this article without expressing the pleasure the perusal has afforded us; it is certainly a very interesting subject; whatever tends to make visible the wisdom of the Supreme Being in the world we inhabit, is of the utmost importance to our happiness; the gratification of curiosity, when excited by trivial objects, is undoubtedly pleasant; but in this instance it is a fresh support to virtue.”
David Ramsay told Jefferson he admired his “generous indignation at slavery; but think you have depressed the negroes too low. I believe all mankind to be originally the same and only diversified by accidental circumstances. I flatter myself that in a few centuries the negroes will lose their black color. I think now they are less

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