Charles Dew, one of America’s most respected historians of the South, will tell us about his powerful memoir -The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade.
He turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation.
In the book, Dew re-creates the mid-century American South of his childhood--in many respects a boy’s paradise, but one stained by Lost Cause revisionism and, worse, by the full brunt of Jim Crow.
The second half of the book shows how this former Confederate youth and descendant of Thomas Roderick Dew, one of slavery’s most passionate apologists, went on to reject his racist upbringing and become a scholar of the South and its deeply conflicted history.
The centerpiece of Dew’s story is his sobering discovery of a price
Charles Dew is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College and the author of the Fletcher Pratt Award-winning Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War and Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge, selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
