Jane Dailey

A major new history of the fight for racial equality in America, arguing that fear of black sexuality has undergirded white supremacy from the start In White Fright, historian Jane Dailey upends our understanding of the long struggle for African American rights. Those fighting against equality were not exclusively motivated by a sense of innate superiority, as is often supposed, but also by an intense preoccupation with the question of interracial sex and marriage. In this urgent investigation, Dailey examines how white fears played out in battles over lynching, in policing of black troops' behavior overseas during World War II, in the violent outbursts following the Brown v. Board decision, and in the aftermath of the eventual Loving v. Virginia ruling, which finally declared marriage a "fundamental freedom." Placing sex at the center of civil rights history, White Fright offers a bold new take on one of the most confounding threads running through American history.

The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America's Racist History

White Fright

What was America? The question resounds today more than ever. While countless contemporary textbooks have sought to relate this country's history, most have done so in fragmented, diluted, or unapproachable ways. These two volumes break down all the barriers to a full understanding of America: it has just two authors, each with a strong point of view; it is told in pure narrative form, befitting its riveting story; and it is as low-cost a textbook as there has ever been. Unlike other open access textbooks, Building the Republic is authoritative and coherent. Throughout, Harry Watson and Jane Dailey emphasize the enduring and multifarious influence of religion, the evolution of law and legal norms, and the distinctive history and influence of the South. And they take a capacious view of the role of politics in US history, beyond simple "political history." These two volumes sweep the reader up in the inimitable history of a country forever remaking itself.

A Narrative History from 1877

Building the American Republic, Volume 2

Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics. Melding social, cultural, and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians--from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans.

Jane Dailey

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