19th century
A01=Daniel Brook
african american
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Author_Daniel Brook
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBG
Category=HBJK
Category=HBLL
Category=HBTB
Category=NHB
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
charleston
civil rights
civil war
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
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eq_history
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
jim crow
Language_English
new orleans
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
reconstruction-era
segregation
slavery
softlaunch
united states
us history
Product details
- ISBN 9780393247442
- Weight: 623g
- Dimensions: 163 x 244mm
- Publication Date: 18 Jun 2019
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude. During Reconstruction, a movement arises as mixed-race elites make common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all.
In some areas, this coalition proved remarkably successful. Activists peacefully integrated the streetcars of Charleston and New Orleans for decades and, for a time, even the New Orleans public schools and the University of South Carolina were educating students of all backgrounds side by side. Tragically, the achievements of this movement were ultimately swept away by a violent political backlash and expunged from the history books, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that would legalise segregation for a half century and usher in the binary racial regime that rules us to this day.
The Accident of Color revisits a crucial inflection point in American history. By returning to the birth of our nation’s singularly narrow racial system, which was forged in the crucible of opposition to civil rights, Brook illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.
Daniel Brook is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Nation, and New York Times Magazine, and he is the author of several books, including A History of Future Cities and The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction. A New York native and a Yale graduate, Brook lives in New Orleans. He researched The Einstein of Sex in Berlin on a Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship.
