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Nell Irvin Painter

The History of White People Paperback – Illustrated, April 18, 2011

by Nell Irvin Painter (Author)

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A New York Times bestseller: “This terrific new book . . . [explores] the ‘notion of whiteness,’ an idea as dangerous as it is seductive.”―Boston Globe

Telling perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, illuminating not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of “whiteness” for economic, scientific, and political ends. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes a huge gap in literature that has long focused on the non-white and forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed as it has been driven by a long and rich history of events. 70 black-and-white illustrations

Print length

512 pages
Language

English
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

April 18, 2011
Dimensions

5.6 x 1.5 x 8.3 inches
ISBN-10

0393339742
ISBN-13

978-0393339741
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Editorial Reviews

Review

[I]ntriguing and well researched. This is an important addition to the nascent academic field of whiteness studies, which examines the social construction of whiteness with particular attention to the American experience. It should be read by all historians and anyone with an interest in cultural studies. "

An insightful and lively exposition from a distinguished scholar. --Linda Gordon"

Compelling, energetic, [and] highly readable. --Alan Nadel"

One of the most important books ever on the social construction of the notion that there is a white race. "

Compelling, energetic, [and] highly readable.--Alan Nadel

About the Author

Nell Irvin Painter is the award-winning author of many books, including Sojourner Truth, Southern History Across the Color Line, Creating Black Americans, The History of White People, and Standing at Armageddon. She is currently the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University and lives in Newark, New Jersey, and the Adirondacks.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Illustrated edition (April 18, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393339742
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393339741
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.11 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.6 x 1.5 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #19,056 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #17 in Historiography (Books)
- #268 in Ethnic Studies (Books)
- #740 in United States History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
591 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		78%
4 star		12%
3 star		6%
2 star		1%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Vagabond of Letters

REVIEW BANNED FOR THE 5TH TIME!

Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2021

Though my review is the most-upvoted critical review, and the only one shown on the front page, it keeps being removed. Stop Amazon censorship, stop Amazon purges, stop Amazon book-burning (every book contrary to Painter's thesis has already been purged: a list of over 57 volumes, including one work of the luminary Solzhenitsyn).

Without further ado, the quince-banned review:

Imagine a White author writing 'The History of Black People', and you have the inverse of this book, if he were an ill-informed racist with a complete inability to use and weigh the literature and scholarly sources, unless those sources be of 'critical theory'. Not even just American blacks, but all blacks all over the world! The very attempt would be considered racist, and would in truth be terrible ethnography: that hypothetical author would examine American blacks (under the delusion that race is purely a social construct) and then use his 'findings' to condemn East Africans, West Africans, !Kung, Xhosa, Kalahari bushmen, and Aborigines. The author takes the concept of 'White' developed to describe European-Americans and then retrojectively forces it upon European Europeans and Western civilization itself.

The author advocates a one-sided theory of race which is pretty much the Augustinian theory of evil in the key of sociology and anthropology: Whiteness [evil] is the privation of coloredness [good]; White people don't exist; White people are evil.

More social constructionist nonsense - race doesn't exist but somehow Whites are the embodiment of evil and exploitation and the Holy Minority are the embodiment of all that is good and true.

An irremediably racist diatribe against White folk brimming with hatred for Western civilization and its accomplishments, no different than the genocidal Tommy Currys or Noel Ignatievs of the world.

For a corrective, read Duchesne on 'The Uniqueness of Western Civilization'; Frank Salter, 'On Genetic Interests'; and Nobel Prize-winning biologist Sarich and Miele's 'Race'. As to why Amazon bans other viewpoints, read 'The Culture of Critique' (banned from Amazon on 19 March 2019)

228 people found this helpful

Helpful

Michael L. Hall

Extensively documented history that will teach you something on almost every page.

Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2018

Verified Purchase

I have to admit that I was skeptical of such a book and didn't believe it would teach me much that I didn't already know. I have a pretty good background in history, especially western civilization, from classical Greece to modern U.S. history. I have been a skeptic on the subject of race almost since I left high school. But Nell Painter won me over almost from the first page of this remarkable book. She did her homework, and she knows how to tell a story. She shows that notions of race are both ancient and also socially and culturally constructed. She also reveals how this conception of a "white" race emerges and becomes so important in Europe and the U.S. She reveals the silliness of race science but also places it in historical context that helps readers understand why otherwise intelligent individuals might be seduced by such notions as skull measurements, cranial capacity, skin tone, facial features, intellectual capacities, etc. She demonstrates how famous and respected figures likeThomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson were seduces by a common desperate desire to be on the superior side of a perceived "racial" and class divide, and how someone like Franz Boas could stray from the received opinions of his day when the evidence became less and less convincing. In short, the book is an education in a subject that many of us thought we knew something about. This really is a fresh look at race and notions of "whiteness" that deserves a wide audience, and it looks like that's what's happening. First you have to understand how something came about before you can really see how truly disturbing and misguided it is. She might have called her book the myth of white people, but that would have given away too much of the payoff of discovering all the foolishness that lies behind the very conception of a "white" race of humans.

142 people found this helpful

Helpful

BC

Whew. So much to learn.

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2018

Verified Purchase

This is a dense read, and it's important to remain aware that the book is ultimately about whiteness in the US. If you aren't in it for the long haul, don't start it. Even as a lover of history, geography, and politics (all discussed in this book), my mind would get overwhelmed and I'd have to take breaks. Chapter 27 is OVERWHELMINGLY relevant to the last 10 or so years of racisl justice fights, and is certainly still relevant. After that chapter, the last few seem to be a little rushed or incomplete (likely because she is speaking about the present). It ends with looking forward, and assumptions people have made about the future of the United States as it becomes more brown, but doesn't give the concluding feeling that people generally want from a book. This should honestly be treated like a textbook, and be included in curricula.

72 people found this helpful

Helpful

Arash Taleghani

Not scholarly

Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2020

Verified Purchase

I wish I had read the intro online before buying this book. The writing style is very juvenile. It reads more like a high school student or college student term paper than a scholarly book by a Princeton historian. The title caught my attention, but sadly the book doesn't deliver.

34 people found this helpful

Helpful

robert latimore

An intellectual read meant for serious historical discourse

Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2018

Verified Purchase

What's most important to know can be summed up in the author's YouTube lecture, 'Why are white people called Caucasians?' She delves into the history of identity more than their travail from antiquity. Which seems to be a more palatable approach for the masses.

49 people found this helpful

Helpful

Kindle Customer

We Shall abolish whiteness

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2018

Verified Purchase

This careful, scholarly, proBlack book tears up the poison that whiteness inflicts on Black Women's lives.
Is painful necesary work in this struggle to remove whiteness, and its genociding,
from our daily lives and future.
Love

39 people found this helpful

Helpful

CMCC

Very Interesting Read

Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2017

Verified Purchase

The text explains, in detail, American policies and practices in regard to volunteer immigrants from (what I considered) white countries. Nell Painter reveals the deep research she conducted of this history (white people in America) in a way that reads almost like a novel. As such, it allows self-educators to benefit from traceable truth (not opinion) that was previously available only to researchers, academics, or the oral histories of the specific groups discussed.

42 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Robert Greenland

I hate racism, I didn’t like this book either.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 5, 2020

Verified Purchase

I didn’t like this book at all. Unfortunately I share that opinion with every white race-hater in the world :-( . Hm. I hate racism.

In an effort to disentangle myself from the ranting of aforementioned white race bigots about Ms Painter’s work, could I state that I was hoping for a book which might get to the real nitty-gritty of race in the Classical World. Why and how did Romans fetishize Germans, for example. How did the Byzantines view Western Europeans. How did the Greeks view their Mediterranean world, and how did they express their European aspect of it. How did ethnicity as opposed to religion play a part in the anti-Jewish pogroms of the Middle Ages. What about Islam, heresy and the New World. The list is endless. A vast subject.

Instead I got lots about slavery (abolished in England for centuries after 1066, but you wouldn’t know that from here), the Scythians (at best semi-European but good for bloodthirsty anecdotes) and the myth of white female beauty, a subject which obsesses Ms Painter as she describes it in paragraph after painful paragraph until she uses a black and white photo of an anonymous Armenian woman from a Soviet-era travel magazine to prove that not all Armenian women are beautiful.

Ouch. I guess her editor was on holiday that Armenian picture passed. It was horrid and made me feel ashamed to look at it. There was other stuff I could mention too. I don’t care to describe black people as entitled because they’re not as a rule, but it was the word that came to mind for Ms Painter when I gave this book up halfway through. Rubbish.

16 people found this helpful

Beverley Cooper Chambers

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 17, 2018

Verified Purchase

Another brilliant read. Very informative.

4 people found this helpful

Calverton Bent

As described

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 9, 2019

Verified Purchase

Very happy with purchase and condition.

2 people found this helpful

maraka

Not what I was looking for

Reviewed in Germany on October 18, 2020

Verified Purchase

I'm not that happy with this book. The idea is interesting, but the way it is written doesn't convince me.

First of all, it is actually not a history of white people, as the author herself admits. The focus is actually white slavery vs black slavery, as a fact of historical societies and as an idea inside the society of white people.

This is an intriguing concept and there are certainly interesting facts to discover. But the stile how it is delivered is - in my opinion - old-fashioned, boring and discouraging.

Old-fashioned is for me to start somewhere with the greek and roman accounts about Caucasians, Celtic and Germanic tribes without structuring the whole thing and making clear, what story this is going to tell.

Sometimes in between, we have some idea of whiteness or white supremacy. Then it's again about slavery.

Then we travel further through the centuries and learn this or that, but the guiding principles and concepts only show up from time to time and do not rule the setup of the presentation.

Sorry, but I didn't have the patience to follow this path. For modern historiography I have definitely other expectations.

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Strongly recommended.

Reviewed in Canada on October 21, 2017

Verified Purchase

Very glad I bought this. Definitely broadens one's understanding of race relations in the US and beyond. Painter's research extends in depth and scope a field that I explored in my MA on Carlyle.

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