Southern cotton planters and Northern textile mill owners maintained what has been called "an unholy alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom." This collection of essays focuses on the central role of slavery in the early development of industrialization in the United States as well as on the interconnections among the histories of African Americans, women, and labor.

Collects interdisciplinary essays that examine the crucial intersection between whiteness as a privileged racial category and the various material practices that undergird white ideological influence in America. Editors and contributors interrogate whiteness as a social construct, revealing the underpinnings of narratives that foster white skin as an ideal of beauty, intelligence, and power.

How did immigrants to the United States come to see themselves as white?

An absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, by the foremost historian of race and labour