White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History
by George M. Fredrickson
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A comparative history of race relations in the U.S. and South Africa seeks to explain the different paths each nation followed.Tags
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This work really focuses on 18th & 19th Century histories of institutional racism, injustice, and slavery in South Africa and the United States. The author context switches between these continental differences often at the paragraph frequency, which strikes me as too frequent for this comparative study. The telling in detail ends abruptly before the 20th Century with the run-up to WW I in the last few pages. There is no Sun City or Mandela Nelson here, though I get the feeling while it is not overtly stated that South Africa's longer if less bloody trek through Apartheid is what would have happened in the U.S. had it not been for the messy catharsis of the Civil War.
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21+ Works 1,316 Members
Historian George M. Fredrickson was born in Bristol, Connecticut on July 16, 1934. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1956 and then studied in Norway on a Fulbright scholarship. After serving in the Navy for three years, he earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 1964. He taught at numerous universities including Harvard show more University, Northwestern University and Stanford University. He retired from teaching in 2002. During his career, he wrote eight books and edited four more. His book White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Some of his other works include The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crises of the Union, Racism: A Short History and Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race. He died from heart failure on February 25, 2008. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Genres
- Nonfiction, Anthropology, History, General Nonfiction, Politics and Government
- DDC/MDS
- 305.8 — Society, government, & culture Social sciences, sociology & anthropology Social group - Age, Gender, Ethnicity Ethnic and national groups
- LCC
- E184 .A1 .F73 — History of the United States United States Elements in the population Afro-Americans
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- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.40)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5




















































