"We believe by blood only," said a Cherokee resident of Oklahoma, speaking to reporters in 2007 after voting in favor of the Cherokee Nation constitutional amendment limiting its membership. In an election that made headlines around the world, a majority of Cherokee voters chose to eject from their tribe the descendants of the African American freedmen Cherokee Indians had once enslaved. Because of the unique sovereign status of Indian nations in the United States, legal membership in an Indian nation can have real economic benefits. In addition to money, the issues brought forth in this election have racial and cultural roots going back before the Civil War. Race and the Cherokee Nation examines how leaders of the Cherokee Nation fostered a racial ideology through the regulation of interracial marriage. By defining and policing interracial sex, nineteenth-century Cherokee lawmakers preserved political sovereignty, delineated Cherokee identity, and established a social hierarchy. Moreover, Cherokee conceptions of race and what constituted interracial sex differed from those of blacks and whites. Moving beyond the usual black/white dichotomy, historian Fay A. Yarbrough places American Indian voices firmly at the center of the story, as well as contrasting African American conceptions and perspectives on interracial sex with those of Cherokee Indians. For American Indians, nineteenth-century relationships produced offspring that pushed racial and citizenship boundaries. Those boundaries continue to have an impact on the way individuals identify themselves and what legal rights they can claim today.

This work explores the dynamic issues of race and religion within the Cherokee Nation and to look at the role of secret societies in shaping these forces during the nineteenth century.

Focusing on writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Samson Occum, Charles Brockden Brown, and others, Transformable Race tells the story of how early Americans imagined, contributed to, and challenged the ways that one's racial identity could be formed in the time of the nation's founding.

This book combines transnational history with the comparative analysis of racial formation and reproductive sexuality in the settler colonial spaces of the United States and British Australia. Specifically, the book places "whiteness," and the changing definition of what it meant to be white in nineteenth-century America and Australia, at the center of our historical understanding of racial and sexual identities. In both the United States and Australia, "whiteness" was defined in opposition to the imagined cultural and biological inferiority of the "Indian," "Negro," and "Aboriginal savage." Moreover, Euro-Americans and Euro-Australians shared a common belief that "whiteness" was synonymous with the extension of settler colonial civilization. Despite this, two very different understandings of "whiteness" emerged in the nineteenth century. The book therefore asks why these different racial understandings of "whiteness" – and the quest to create culturally and racially homogeneous settler civilizations – developed in the United States and Australia.

This encyclopedia offers a comprehensive look at the roles race and ethnicity play in society and in our daily lives. Over 100 racial and ethnic groups are described, with additional thematic essays offering insight into broad topics that cut across group boundaries and which impact on society.

The second edition of the bestselling title on modern notions of race, providing timely examination of perspectives on race, racism, and human biological variation In this fully updated second edition of this popular text on the study of race, Alan Goodman, Yolanda Moses, and Joseph Jones take a timely look at modern ideas surrounding race, racism, and human diversity, and consider the ways that ideas about race have changed over time. New material in the second edition covers recent history and emerging topics in the study of race. The second edition has also been updated to account for advancements in the study of human genetic variation, which provide further evidence that race is an entirely social phenomenon. RACE compels readers to carefully consider their own ideas about race and the role that race plays in the world around them. Examines the ways perceptions of race influence laws, customs, and social institutions in the US and around the world Explores the impact of race and racism on health, wealth, education, and other domains of life Includes guest essays by noted scholars, a complete bibliography, and a full glossary Stands as an ideal text for courses on race, racism, and cultural and economic divides Combines insights and examples from science, history, and personal narrative Includes engaging photos, illustrations, timelines, and diagrams to illustrate important concepts To read author Alan Goodman's recent blog post on the complicated relationship between race and biology, please click here.

"Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780-1940, Revised Edition is a sociohistorical tour de force that examines the entwined formation of racial theory and sexual constructs within settler colonialism in the United States and Australia from the Age of Revolution to the Great Depression. Gregory D. Smithers historicizes the dissemination and application of scientific and social-scientific ideas within the process of nation building in two countries with large Indigenous populations and shows how intellectual constructs of race and sexuality were mobilized to subdue Aboriginal peoples. Building on the comparative settler-colonial and imperial histories that appeared after the book's original publication, this completely revised edition includes two new chapters. In this singular contribution to the study of transnational and comparative settler colonialism, Smithers expands on recent scholarship to illuminate both the subject of the scientific study of race and sexuality and the national and interrelated histories of the United States and Australia"--

This book is an innovative work that takes a fresh approach to the concept of race as a social factor made concrete in popular forms, such as film, television, and music. The essays push past the reaffirmation of static conceptions of identity, authenticity, or conventional interpretations of stereotypes and bridge the intertextual gap between theories of community enactment and cultural representation.

By 1840, American politics was a paradox—unprecedented freedom and equality for men of European descent, and the simultaneous isolation and degradation of people of African and Native American descent. Historians have characterized this phenomenon as the "white republic." Race and the Early Republic offers a rich account of how this paradox evolved, beginning with the fledgling nation of the 1770s and running through the antebellum years. The essays in the volume, written by a wide array of scholars, are arranged so as to allow a clear understanding of how and why white political supremacy came to be in the early United States. Race and the Early Republic is a collection of diverse, insightful and interrelated essays that promote an easy understanding of why and how people of color were systematically excluded from the early U.S. republic.