| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830. By John Wood Sweet. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xiv, 486 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8018-7378-9.)
John Wood Sweet's sweeping work takes seriously the colonial aspect of colonial America. By investigating the connections between race and nationalism, Sweet finds a nation that has continually and creatively tried to deny its roots. "In many ways, America came to pre-sent itself as a white nation when it was, and had been from the start, diverse, hybrid, and multiracial" (p. 10). Bodies Politic is an ambitious and persuasive account of the ways that the political inclusion of some groups and not others connected the colonial era through the Revolution to the early American republic.	1
Using Rhode Island as a case study, Sweet asks how a country's colonial roots shaped its national beginnings. The shifting forms of racism paradoxically drew white, red, and black lives together even as citizenship came to be seen as exclusively white. The real contribution of the book is Sweet's multifaceted and complicated explanation of how both Native Americans and blacks were continuously re-imagined as natural outsiders in the rapidly changing worlds of late colonial, revolutionary, and early national America.	. . .

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