An absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, by the foremost historian of race and labor

How Race Survived US History explores how the idea of race was created and recreated in American history. From the late seventeenth century — the era in which Du Bois located the emergence of “whiteness” — through the American revolution and the emancipatory Civil War, to the civil-rights movement and the emergence of the American empire, David Roediger reveals how race did far more than persist as an exception in a progressive national history. Roediger examines how race intersected all that was dynamic and progressive in US history, from democracy and economic development to migration and globalization. Exploring the evidence that the USA will become a majority “nonwhite” nation in the next fifty years, this masterful history shows how race remains at the heart of American life in the twenty-first century.

Praise for The Wages of Whiteness

“Roediger’s exciting new book, The Wages of Whiteness, makes us understand what it means to see oneself as white in a new way .... The Wages of Whiteness is an extremely important and insightful book. The story Roediger tells is a tragedy.” — The Nation

David R. Roediger is Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of, among other books, The Wages of Whiteness and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.