Overview

By examining Jewish experiences between the American Civil War and the African American Civil Rights Revolution, this book focuses on citizens who usually spent their daily lives inBlack and white ""peoplehoods."" Some of the white ones, commanding the nation's ""public square,"" structured a segregated republic and capitalist economy that would experience WWII and the news about the Holocaust that murdered millions of Jews. This political economy sustained a hierarchy of privatized ethnic groups whose race and religion, in their norms of ""ethnicking,"" was used to deprive them of legal and equal collective standing.ThisWas Americais a book about those privatized identities that the years of the Civil Rights Revolution would bring into the republic's public square.

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9781644696378

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"“Korman (emer., Cornell Univ.), author of the prize-winning book Industrialization, Immigrants, and Americanizers (1967), has written an important and timely history focusing primarily on Black and Jewish Americans, as well as other ethnic groups, as they found themselves isolated from the ""public square"" of American life over a century. Although the terms melting pot and salad bowl have been used by historians to describe the goal of creating a common American culture by assimilating the large influx of immigrants that arrived in the decades after the Civil War, Korman argues that in fact the public square was ""owned"" by white Anglo-Americans who denied ""[B]lack and white 'minorities'"" equal collective standing. Influenced by neo-Darwinian ideas and the germ theory of disease, the custodians of the public square excluded Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and other non-white groups, as well as immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, from full participation in American life. Korman credits the Civil Rights Movement for bringing about a more inclusive, multicultural society, which has desegregated the public square but has also received backlash from those who cling to the idea of a white, Christian nationalism.” — J. Fischel, emeritus, Millersville University, CHOICE (September 2023 Vol. 61 No. 1)"

Author Information

Gerd Korman is an American historian, Professor emeritus at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. In his years of teaching, in his books and articles, he has made original contributions in the field of Euro-American history; it now includes the Holocaust.

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