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A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic

by Bruce Dain

Harvard University Press, 2002
eISBN: 978-0-674-03014-5 | Cloth: 978-0-674-00946-2
Library of Congress Classification GN269.D34 2002
Dewey Decimal Classification 305.8009

ABOUT THIS BOOK | REVIEWS | TOC

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of modern racial consciousness in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. A Hideous Monster of the Mind reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural relativism, cultural pluralism, and latter-day Afrocentrism.

From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of cotton culture, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith, but also the first self-consciously "black" African-American writers. These various thinkers transformed late-eighteenth-century European environmentalist "natural history" into race theories that combined culture and biology and set the terms for later controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human differences.

In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion "race" caused for thinkers black and white, A Hideous Monster of the Mind offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern American racial thought.

REVIEWS

An unusually intelligent and level-headed book that makes several important contributions--recontextualizing Jefferson's thought, familiarizing us with important black authors who have been largely forgotten, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and fearlessly demonstrating the hopeless intellectual confusion 'race' caused for Samuel Stanhope, Hosea Easton, and Josiah Nott. Dain is repeatedly and delightfully insightful.
-- James Oakes, City University of New York

The book's many virtues include a fresh angle on scientific racialism--one which presents an important engagement of minds across the color line, and which nicely sets the development of the concept of "race" within the broad context of natural history debates. The book likewise provides some fine distillations of major scientific treatises; and the narrative attention to individuals, not just ideas, is effective--here is a vivid gallery of characters. All of this is carried out in a clean and often charmingly ironic prose.
-- Matthew Frye Jacobson, Yale University

From the outset, American thinkers have grappled with the problematic nature of race. Dain...provides a welcome synthesis and critique of writings from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century...Dain ably limns multiple influences on race theory, including pro-and anti-slavery movements and foundational but evolving scientific, religious, and societal beliefs. He does not shy from expressing his viewpoints about the intellectual honesty or rigor of his various subjects, but he attempts to be neutral on the issue of race itself within the historical context...This scholarly review of white and black thinkers is a notable contribution to American race studies.
-- Janet Ingraham Library Journal

Are racial differences the result of disparities in environment and social position or innate biological variations? This question loomed large in early America, and this fascinating work of intellectual history revisits the race debates in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War...Dain explores shifting conceptions of race in the writings of public intellectuals from Jefferson to Frederick Douglass...Dain's broad research, nuanced analyses and skillful writing make this an indispensable introduction to early attitudes about race.
-- Publishers Weekly

In this intellectual history, Bruce Dainoffers a striking approach to American race theory. Rejecting approaches that focus solely on a white or black perspective, he uses an "integrated" methodology that analyzes what white and black American intellectuals thought, wrote, and said about race theory between the American Revolution and Civil War as a coherent whole. To develop this method, Dain organizes a vast array of treatises essays, pamphlets, speeches and other ruminations into eight densely packed chaptersWhat emerges from this study is a theoretical discussion that was biological, anthropological, theological, and, always, politicalThis integrated approach makes it possible to discern what purports to be scientific and what is actually ideological in early American race theoryThis is an informative and innovative history about race theory, a persistent and pernicious theme in American history.
-- Lester P. Lee, Jr. History

A Hideous Monster of the Mind is a closely argued, nuanced, and sophisticated study of the intellectual history of the construction of race in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. Bruce Dain positions this fine study in multiple contexts...In what is the most significant contribution of an important book on race, Dain integrates black theorists and writers such as Phyllis Wheatley, Prince Saunders, David Walker, Hosea Easton, and James McCune Smith into his description of "black people's own sense of blackness"...A Hideous Monster of the Mind is an intricately structured, multidimensional, and revelatory exploration of the manifold, conflicted, conflicting, and everevolving meanings of race and citizenship in the antebellum United States. Bruce Dain has read widely, he handles his evidence deftly and with a subtlety that issues in a narrative that is at once rich in texture and powerful in its exegesis.
-- Micheal Morrison Civil War History

TABLE OF CONTENTS






1 The Face of Nature1

2 Culture and the Persistence of Race       40

3 The Horrors of St. Domingue         81

4 The Mutability of Human Affairs     112

5 Conceiving Universal Equality      149

6 Black Immediatism                  170

7 The New Ethnology                  197

8 Effacing the Individual            227

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