The history of White people / Nell Irvin Painter

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- Greeks and scythians -- Romans, Celts, Gauls, and Germani -- White slavery -- White slavery as beauty ideal -- The White beauty ideal as science -- Johann Friedrich Blumenbach names White people "caucasian" -- Germaine de staèl's German lessons -- Early American White people observed -- The first alien wave -- The education of Ralph Waldo Emerson -- English traits -- Emerson in the history of American White people -- The American school of anthropology -- The second enlargement of American whiteness -- William Z. Ripley and the races of Europe -- Franz Boas, dissenter -- Roosevelt, Ross, and race suicide -- The discovery of degenerate families -- From degenerate families to sterilization -- Intelligence testing of new immigrants -- The great unrest -- The melting pot a failure? -- Anthroposociology : the science of alien races -- Refuting racial science -- A new White race politics -- The third enlargement of American whiteness -- Black nationalism and White ethnics -- The fourth great enlargement of American whiteness.

Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals including Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is a white? and who is an American have evolved over time. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes an enormous gap in a literature that has long focused on the nonwhite, and it forcefully reminds us that the concept of a race is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed according to a long and rich history.