Race the history of an idea in the west pdf

User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.

Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Race : the history of an idea in the West Item Preview. Through the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods, he critically examines precursors in history, science, and philosophy.

But he also finds the first traces of modern ideas of race in the protosciences of late medieval cabalism and hermeticism. Following that trail forward, he describes the establishment of modern scientific and philosophical notions of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and shows how those notions became popular and pervasive, even among those who claim to be nonracist.

Ivan Hannaford — was assistant director for academic affairs at Kingston University in England until his retirement in Western History and Thought before Race 1. In the Beginning 2. The Ancient World 3. Transitions from Greece to Rome 4. Jews, Christians, Moors, and Barbarians 5.

Monsters and the Occult 6. The Racialization of the West 7. The Search for Historical and Biological Origins, — 9. Race Is All, — Upon the completion of their indenture, the person was to be given land to begin a life. Indentured servitude was hard, and many laborers did not survive their contract term and subsequently did not receive their land.

For planters, indentured servants were economically more optimal in the early colonial period. By the late s, significant shifts began to happen in the colonies. As the survival of European immigrants increased, there were more demands for land and the labor needed to procure wealth. Indentured servitude lost its attractiveness as it became economically less profitable to utilize servants of European descent. White settlers began to turn to slavery as the primary source of forced labor in many of the colonies.

African people were seen as more desirable slaves because they brought advanced farming skills, carpentry, and bricklaying skills, as well as metal and leatherworking skills.

Characterizations of Africans in the early period of colonial America were mostly positive, and the colonists saw their future as dependent on this source of labor. Chattel slavery was a form of slavery in the U. Labor status was not permanent nor solely connected to race. A significant turning point came in when Virginia enacted a law of hereditary slavery, which meant the status of the mother determined the status of the child.

In , the last of the religious conditions that placed limits on servitude was erased by another Virginia law. This new law deemed it legal to keep enslaved people in bondage even if they converted to Christianity. With this decree, the justification for black servitude changed from a religious status to a designation based on race. Before , in English common law, the legal status of children followed the status of the father.

In the colonies, this doctrine followed the colonists. Elizabeth Key, an enslaved, bi-racial woman sued for her freedom in Virginia on the basis that her father was white. The court granted freedom to her and her child in In response to this case, Virginia instituted partus sequitur ventrem making children's legal status follow the mother.

Elite colonists determined that they needed to amass more native lands for their continued expansion, to pacify poor European colonists who sought economic advancement, and to keep a dedicated labor force to do the grueling agricultural work. By the mids, new laws and societal norms linked Africans to perpetual labor, and the American colonies made formal social distinctions among its people based on appearance, place of origin, and heredity. The Africans physical distinctiveness marked their newly created subordinate position.

To further separate the social and legal connections between lower-class whites and African laborers enslaved or free , laws were put into place to control the interaction between the two groups. These laws created a hierarchy based on race. After the Revolution, the U. Constitution strongly encoded the protection of property within its words.

It is within these twin founding documents that the paradox of liberty - the human right to freedom and the socially protected rights to property - became the foundation and essence of the American consciousness. The question s of who could - and can - claim the unalienable rights has been a question for America through time. After prevailing in the American Revolution, our founders created the U. Constitution, which contains strongly-worded property rights.

It is within these twin founding documents that the paradox of liberty - the human right to freedom and the legally protected rights to property - became the foundation and essence of the American consciousness. The question s of who could - and can - claim unalienable rights has been an American debate since our inception. America would come to be defined by the language of freedom and the acceptance of slavery. Along with the revolutionary ideas of liberty and equality, slavery concerns began to surface as black colonists embraced the meaning of freedom, and the British abolished slavery within their lands.

The fledgling United States sought to establish itself and had to wrestle with the tension borne from the paradox of liberty. It became necessary to develop new rationales and arguments to defend the institution of slavery. How does one justify holding a human as property?

Major political leaders and thinkers of American history promoted theories of difference and degeneracy about nonwhite people that grew in the lateth century. Their support of inferior races justified the dispossession of American Indians and the enslavement of Africans in the era of revolution. It was this racial ideology that formed the foundation for the continuation of American chattel slavery and the further entrenchment of anti-blackness.

But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait, of painting or sculpture.

The successful American Revolution and the new Constitution resulted in fierce debates about the future of slavery and the meaning of freedom. However, the nation did not end slavery nor the uses of racial ideology to separate groups, choosing to maintain the existing hierarchy.

The U. Boosted by the Louisiana Purchase, cotton agriculture made profitable by the invention of the cotton gin , and seized American Indian lands, a new internal slave trade reinvigorated slavery, justified by 19th-century pseudo-scientific racist ideas.

How did the revolutionary ideas of equality and rights of man also harden ideas of race? Scientists argued that Africans and their descendants were inferior - either a degenerate type of being or a completely separate type of being altogether, suitable for perpetual service. Like the European scholars before them, American intellectuals organized humans by category, seeking differences between racial populations.

The work of Dr. Samuel Morton is infamous for his measurements of skulls across populations. He concluded that African people had smaller skulls and were therefore not as intelligent as others. Both Nott and Agassiz concluded that Africans were a separate species.

This information spread into popular thought and culture and served to dehumanize African-descended people further while fueling anti-black sentiment. Nott and Geo. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.

Proslavery spokespeople defended their position by debasing the value of humanity in the people they held as property.