Open wound: the long view of race in America

Race and the human race

The Colonial Period

How the American racial system began: Atlantic slavery becomes market-driven and color-defined

Anglo Americans adopt the Atlantic racial system

The construction of planter hegemony, 1676-1776

The era of the American Revolution: the challenge to slavery and the compromise

The Antebellum Republic

The old south's triumph

The old south's crisis and the emergence of the white solidarity myth

Emancipated but Black: freedom in the free states

The planter and the "wage slave": a reactionary alliance

King cotton's jesters: the minstrel show interprets race for the white working class

The war of the cabins: the struggle for the soul of the "common man"

The Racial System Challenged and Revised

The republican revolution and the struggle for a "new birth of freedom"

Reconstruction: the radical challenge, 1865-77

Between slavery and freedom: the conservative quest for a halfway house

The Racial System in a Rising Superpower

The Age of segregation at its zenith: the racial system in a world of colonialism

Radical challenge, liberal reform: African Americans gain new allies

The American century, the American dilemma

The Black freedom movement

The racial system in the age of corporate globalism, technological revolution, and environmental crisis.