| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Bruce Baum. The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity. New York: New York University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 342. $45.00.
The term "Caucasian" is commonly used in everyday American life and widely accepted as a synonym for the racial designation "white." Bruce Baum's sweeping history of the changing social and scientific usages of this putative racial category, however, provides ample evidence that the concept of a "Caucasian race" is in fact a remarkably arbitrary and peculiar phenomenon. This book makes an important contribution to the existing literature, which contains no comparable analysis of the development of this significant social construct.	1
Baum surveys important developments in popular and scientific racial thought from 1000–2005 A.D., focusing on the evolution of the general concept of race and the changing status of "white" people(s) within that. He traces the emergence of a socially influential conception of a European-centered Caucasian race to the work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, whose 1795 work, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, divided humanity into the five major "varieties" of Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. "Caucasians," according to Blumenbach, were understood to include "the inhabitants of Europe (except the Lapps and the remaining descendants of the Finns) and those of Eastern Asia, as far as the river Obi, the Caspian Sea and the Ganges; and lastly, those of Northern Africa" (p. 76).	. . .

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