| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Craig Steven Wilder. A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn. (The Columbia History of Urban Life.) New York: Columbia University Press. 2000. Pp. xii, 325. $35.00.

Craig Steven Wilder's book joins a number of superb and ambitious recent works that explore the intersection of working class studies and urban history. Studies by Tera W. Hunter, John K. W. Tchen, Kimberley L. Phillips, Leslie M. Harris, and Sundiata Cha-Jua, for example, move over many decades and place communities of color in relationship to white elites, to white workers, to the state, and to regional, national, and sometimes international economies. These works promise to transform social history. Even in such impressive company, however, Wilder's stylish and inventive book stands out. 1

Wilder studies Brooklyn, the city in which he grew up, in a way that illuminates the continuing burdens of racism over an astonishing 350-year sweep, even as it decisively demonstrates changes in the forms white supremacy took. His ten chapters are both chronological and thematic but the chronologies overlap fascinatingly. Thus, for example, a chapter on the commercial revolution covers the 1797 to 1876 period and is followed by one on Irish-American/African-American relations from 1800 to 1865. This structure bespeaks the author's close attention to change over time and also to multiple processes. . . .

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