Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation

The surprising and counterintuitive origins of America's racial crisis Why did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that "all men are created equal"? The usual answer is racism, but the reality is more complex and unsettling. In Bind Us Apart, historian Nicholas Guyatt argues that, from the Revolution through the Civil War, most white liberals believed in the unity of all human beings. But their philosophy faltered when it came to the practical work of forging a colour-blind society. Unable to convince others - and themselves - that racial mixing was viable, white reformers began instead to claim that people of colour could only thrive in separate republics: in Native states in the American West or in the West African colony of Liberia. Herein lie the origins of "separate but equal." Decades before Reconstruction, America's liberal elite was unable to imagine how people of colour could become citizens of the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, Native Americans were pushed farther and farther westward, while four million slaves freed after the Civil War found themselves among a white population that had spent decades imagining that they would live somewhere else.

Table of Contents:
MAPS; INTRODUCTION; PART I: DEGRADATION; PART II: AMALGAMATION; PART III: COLONIZATION; EPILOGUE; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS; NOTES; INDEX

About the Author :
Nicholas Guyatt is a University Lecturer in American History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of the United States, including Another American Century: The United States and the World after 9/11 (Zed Books, 2003), Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World (Random House/Harper Collins, 2007), and most recently Providence and the Invention of the United States (CUP, 2007).

Review :
"Whether, or on what terms, Indians, Europeans, and Africans could live together on the North American continent has been a vexing question from the very beginning of the American experiment. Bind Us Apart complicates the traditional narrative about the supposedly fixed contours of racial thinking during the early American republic. Nicholas Guyatt offers an elegant and illuminating analysis of the winding and tortured parth to separate and unequal society we recognize even today. This is a must-read for all who are interested in the origins of America's troubled racial landscape." "Nicholas Guyatt's well-meaning citizens of the early American republic believed in human equality and sought to bring it about. But they could not overcome their own of their society's limitations, or undertsnad that Native and African Americans wanted to determine their own furtures. Bind Us Apartc contributes mightility to understanding how the republic besmirched its highest and boldest visions with racisim and exlusion." "Nicholas Guyatt is a master storyteller and a brilliant scholar. With Bind Us Apart, he has written a provocative and counterintuitive - but never contrarian or glib - account of the origins of segregation in the United States. This book is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the racial fault lines that continue to divide this country today."