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
black in Jersey than in Carolina, their [lips] less thick, their noses less flat.” A graduate of Princeton from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Ramsey (1749–1815) married one of John Witherspoon’s daughters in 1783 in Philadelphia and bought a small plantation in South Carolina in 1792 before moving to Charleston in 1811.
     
     

* The first edition of David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World appeared in late 1829; three more editions followed in the spring of 1830. Though differences between the editions are minor, Walker sharpened his scornful indictment of white American hypocrisy.
     
     

* After the Civil War, one of Emerson’s African American contemporaries in letters, William Wells Brown (1814–84), in The Rising Son; or, The Antecedents and Achievements of the Colored Race (1874), described early northern Europeans in terms reminiscent of those of both Herodotus and David Walker: “See them in the gloomy forests of Germany, sacrificing to their grim and gory idols; drinking the warm blood of their prisoners, quaffing libations from human skulls; infesting the shores of the Baltic for plunder and robbery; bringing home the reeking scalps of enemies as an offering to their king.”
     
     

* Benjamin Roberts, leader of the struggle against segregation in Boston schools, was Hosea Easton’s nephew and James Easton’s grandson. Paul Cuffee, the prosperous Afro-Indian seafaring merchant from New Bedford, married Mary Easton, one of James Easton’s daughters
     
     

* Speaking of “our German ancestors,” the views of Tacitus, and “Germanic institutions,” in France, Tocqueville echoes the views of his protégé Gobineau. This idea of two disparate French races is usually ascribed to the class-minded, extreme hereditarian historian Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722). Born in Normandy (and, therefore, by some accounts a descendant of the Vikings), Boulainvilliers was “an aristocrat of the most pronounced type” according to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica . He saw the aristocracy as the descendants of Franks from Germany and the peasants the descendants of mongrel Gauls and Romans.
     
     

* Early on, Tocqueville quickly mentions the pernicious influence of slavery in the United States: idleness, ignorance, pride, poverty, and indulgence, the weaknesses of white southerners, then moves on to the Americans he sees as typical Americans: New Englanders.
     
     

* Margaret Kohn notes that many scholars either remain silent on Tocqueville’s commentary regarding slavery and race or criticize him for evasion. Tocqueville’s own strategies corroborate the latter charge. The first and more famous volume of Democracy in America leads off with equality and relegates the discussion of three American races to the end of the book. Tocqueville admits that slavery and southern society belie his generalizations about the United States in footnotes and asides, though in his text he faults the South for sluggishness and laziness. He refers his readers to Beaumont’s work rather than integrating the multiracial theme into his analysis. Thomas Bender’s fond introduction to Democracy in America concedes Tocqueville’s avoidance of the fact of internal conflict in the United States and agrees with others who see Tocqueville as a prominent source for consensus thinkers such as Marvin Meyers and Louis Hartz.
     
     

* Beaumont does not use the word “miscegenation,” coined only in 1864.
     
     

* Chartists had submitted the first People’s Charter petition to the House of Commons in 1839, an action that Thomas Carlyle, moving away from his earlier sympathy with working people, answered with an influential pamphlet, “Chartism,” that expressed doubt that the needed reforms would ever be enacted. The second People’s Charter, bearing three million signatures, was submitted in 1842. Subsequent confrontation with police had led to twenty-four deaths. The House of Commons rejected all

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