White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812

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