| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. By Bruce Dain. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. xii, 321 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-00946-0.)
This work seeks to delineate "an integrated intellectual history of the emergence in the United States, from the American Revolution to the Civil War, of [the] first major rationalizations of race" (p. viii). Bruce Dain builds from Winthrop Jordan's and George Fredrickson's interpretations of white conceptions of blackness and black images. He argues that "black people's own sense of blackness may be seen as a new thing ... in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world," one that was crucial in constituting race theory (p. ix).	1
Tracing and connecting these evolutions in black thought are A Hideous Monster of the Mind's most significant achievements. Writers discussed range from the poetry of Phillis Wheatley to the 1850s essays of James McCune Smith, author of the book's title quotation, with insightful treatments of such major figures as David Walker, Prince Saunders, and Hosea Easton as well. Along the way, there are good in-depth treatments of African American thinking about black-sponsored emigration to Haiti, white-led colonization plans, and the significance of whether the ancient Egyptians were "black." Throughout, Dain contends that African American writers resisted Euro-American attempts to equate blackness with racial separateness and inferiority but eventually incorporated race-based thinking into their own formulations for explaining human difference.	. . .

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