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Book Review
| The House I Live In: Race in the American Century. By Robert J. Norrell. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xx, 379 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-507345-2.)
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| Touching on intellectual, political, economic, social, and cultural trends in less than three hundred fifty pages, The House I Live In provides an insightful, if somewhat unconvincing, survey of American race relations over the past century and a half. The narrative is engaging, with considerable attention devoted to popular culture and apt, vivid vignettes at the start of chapters. Robert J. Norrell's historical characters are sketched with the deft brushstrokes of a skilled historian confident of his ability to attract the attention of nonacademic readers while not losing the regard of academics. Although this study is limited mainly to black-white relations rather than the broader topic his title implies, Norrell achieves his stated intention to "offer a broad view of the quest for equal rights for African Americans and connect those efforts to big, evolving structural realities of the twentieth century" (p. xii). His overview will influence future scholarship even as specialists pounce on his isolated errors (such as the repeated misspelling of my name in the notes and bibliographical essay) as well as question his tendentious and often unpersuasive interpretations. |
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Norrell sets out to explain how "racial competition for economic opportunity, political power, and the use of physical space" has served as a continuing counterbalance to the American "creed of democratic values—liberty, democracy, and equality" (pp. xii, xiii). Norrell's fuller interpretive framework, influenced by Max Weber, concedes the importance of economic and political factors, but the central theme of The House I Live In is the gradual transformation of prevailing notions of the American democratic creed. He suggests that the ability of a few leaders to affirm widely shared understandings of this creed while also broadening its scope to include African Americans accounts for the progress that has occurred in American race relations. Norrell argues that Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address achieved "a fundamental change in what Americans would believe thereafter" (p. 13), although he acknowledges that Lincoln's reformulation of Jeffersonian egalitarianism did not thwart white supremacy during the late nineteenth century. |
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