The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America

The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America Review

The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America Feature

• Shelby Steele gives an account of race that is nothing if not controversial. Steele's nine essays derive their messages from personal experience dosed with broader social psychology.

From the sight-lines of the university setting, Shelby Steele gives an account of race that is nothing if not controversial. Steele's nine essays derive their messages from personal experience dosed with broader social psychology. The value of this book, which won a 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award, lies in its introspection, rather than its distant calculation. Steele weeds the individual out of the group and argues for personal responsibility. He offers a unique look at the African-American experience and points a questioning finger at the children of affirmative action. The knee-jerk identification he observes "presupposes a deep racist reflex in American life that will forever try to limit black possibility." In this controversial essay collection, award-winning writer Shelby Stelle illuminates the origins of the current conflict in race relations--the increase in anger, mistrust, and even violence between black and whites. With candor and persuasive argument, he shows us how both black and white Americans have become trapped into seeing color before character, and how social policies designed to lessen racial inequities have instead increased them. The Content of Our Character is neither "liberal" nor "conservative," but an honest, courageous look at America's most enduring and wrenching social dilemma.

Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (America and the Long 19th Century)

Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (America and the Long 19th Century) Review

From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable “stuff,” has had a long and checkered history giving shape to the American national identity.

Bodies of Reform reconceives this pivotal category of nineteenth-century literature and culture by charting the development of the concept of “character” in the fictional genres, social reform movements, and political cultures of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside a diverse collection of texts concerned with the mission of building character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, libel and naturalization law, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, James B. Salazar uncovers how the cultural practices of representing character operated in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers. His innovative reading of this archive offers a radical revision of this defining category in U.S. literature and culture, arguing that character was the keystone of a cultural politics of embodiment, a politics that played a critical role in determining-and contesting-the social mobility, political authority, and cultural meaning of the raced and gendered body.

Memoir of the life of Richard Henry Lee, and his correspondence with the most distinguished men in America and Europe, illustrative of their characters, and of the events of the American revolution

Memoir of the life of Richard Henry Lee, and his correspondence with the most distinguished men in America and Europe, illustrative of their characters, and of the events of the American revolution Review

This book is a replica of the original from the collections of The New York Public Library; it was produced from digital images created by The New York Public Library and its partners as part of their preservation efforts. To enhance your reading pleasure, the aging and scanning artifacts have been removed using patented page cleaning technology. We hope you enjoy the result.

Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character Since Colonial Times (Reflective History Series)

Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character Since Colonial Times (Reflective History Series) Review

A history of moral education in American schools. The author traces American traditions of moral education from the colonial era to the present, illuminating both debates about the subject and actual practices in public and private schools, colleges, and universities.