Jim Crow Citizenship：Liberalism and the Southern Defense of Racial Hierarchy

Steedman (political science, U. of Southern Mississippi) analyzes the connections between liberalism, republicanism, wage-labor and racial hierarchy in America between 1865 and 1920, though he also reaches back into the antebellum period. He argues that changes in this period account for intersecting forms of civil subordination that persist in American society. To do this, he examines the fusion of slavery and household paternalism, the "crisis of mastery" in the reconstruction era and how it resolved in favor of the employing-class, the tension between race and contractually-based relations, the consolidation of white supremacy by southern white progressives and the recasting of black southerners as a dependent child-race. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Marek D. Steedman is associate professor of Political Science at the University of Southern Mississippi.