• Latest Catalogs
  • Books for Courses
  • Exhibits Listing
  • View Cart
<SPAN STYLE= "" >White Over Black</SPAN>

671 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 1 map, notes, index

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Paper
ISBN  978-0-8078-4550-9
Published: September 1995

White Over Black

American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812

By Winthrop D. Jordan


Awards & Distinctions

1968 Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians

1969 National Book Award

1969 Bancroft Prize, Columbia University

1968 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa

The paperback edition of Jordan's classic and award-winning work on the history of American race relations.

"The author has put simple solutions and flashy theories aside and brought to his task a patience, skepticism, thoroughness, and humility commensurate with the vast undertaking. He combines these qualities with imagination and insight. The result is a massive and learned work that stands as the most informed and impressive pronouncement on the subject yet made."--C. Vann Woodward, New York Times Book Review

"A monumental work of scholarship, brilliant in conception and execution, humane, convincing, informed by warmth and wit, illuminating reading for all those concerned with America's tragedy. . . . As an historian with keen psychological insights into his material, Winthrop Jordan is uniquely qualified to illuminate America's anguished dilemma."--Publishers Weekly

"[A] rare thing: an original contribution to an important subject. In helping us understand today's racial crisis, Jordan has ideally fulfilled the historian's function of investigating the past in order to enlighten the present."--The judges for the 1969 National Book Award for History and Biography

"This monumental study is a tremendously important block, fascinating and appalling, of American social and cultural history. . . . Though the study was begun years before the current civil rights agitation, it is quite indispensable for a full appreciation of the realities and wellsprings and the dilemmas of the contemporary struggle."--The Phi Beta Kappa Senate award committee for the 1968 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award

"White Over Black will stand as a landmark in the historiography of this generation. Its richness and insight, its sensitive, penetrating analysis of the unspoken as well as the explicit, its union of breadth with depth, make it a brilliant achievement."--Richard D. Brown, New England Quarterly

About the Author

Winthrop D. Jordan (1931-2007) taught history at the University of Mississippi. His books include Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy and White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States.


Reviews

"One of the most important historical works of the past 40 years, contributing to the cultural shift in white thinking that made possible the election of Barack Obama."
--Gordon S. Wood, The Wall Street Journal

"The author has put simple solutions and flashy theories aside and brought to his task a patience, skepticism, thoroughness, and humility commensurate with the vast undertaking. He combines these qualities with imagination and insight. The result is a massive and learned work that stands as the most informed and impressive pronouncement on the subject yet made."
--C. Vann Woodward, The New York Times Book Review

"[A] rare thing: an original contribution to an important subject. In helping us understand today's racial crisis, Jordan has ideally fulfilled the historian's function of investigating the past in order to enlighten the present."
--The judges for the 1969 National Book Award for History and Biography

"This monumental study is a tremendously important block, fascinating and appalling, of American social and cultural history. . . . Though the study was begun years before the current civil rights agitation, it is quite indispensable for a full appreciation of the realities and wellsprings and the dilemmas of the contemporary struggle."
--The Phi Beta Kappa Senate award committee for the 1968 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award

"A monumental work of scholarship, brilliant in conception and execution, humane, convincing, informed by warmth and wit, illuminating reading for all those concerned with America's tragedy. . . . As an historian with keen psychological insights into his material, Winthrop Jordan is uniquely qualified to illuminate America's anguished dilemma."
--Publishers Weekly

"White Over Black will stand as a landmark in the historiography of this generation. Its richness and insight, its sensitive, penetrating analysis of the unspoken as well as the explicit, its union of breadth with depth, make it a brilliant achievement."
--Richard D. Brown, New England Quarterly

Related Titles

<SPAN STYLE= "" >St. George Tucker's Law Reports and Selected Papers, 1782-1825</SPAN>

St. George Tucker's Law Reports and Selected Papers, 1782-1825

Edited By Charles F. Hobson

A magisterial perspective on the development of the American court system Learn More »

<SPAN STYLE= "" >The Chesapeake House</SPAN>

The Chesapeake House

Architectural Investigation by Colonial Williamsburg

Edited By Cary Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury

Bringing new life to historic architecture Learn More »

<SPAN STYLE= "" >Radical Moves</SPAN>

Radical Moves

Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age

By Lara Putnam

The African diaspora as political and cultural collective Learn More »



© 2011 The University of North Carolina Press
116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808
How to Order | Make a Gift | Privacy
Greenpress Initiative Network Solutions