This is a broad survey of United States history from colonial times through to the Obama presidential bid of 2008 with the contention that America was established with slavery as central to its political institutions, social ordering and economic growth and that race continued to be central to US republican society to modern times.  Roediger, a professor of history at the University of Illinois, skillfully blends this structural approach of the issue of race with a broad canvas of US history while maintaining a compelling argument.

The case that Roediger puts forward is that race underpinned every aspect of American society from its very inception and is still alive and well today.  The fact that Barack Obama is mentioned in the book seems somewhat dated, however, as it discusses, in the main, his candidacy, rather than his historic win.  The fact that Obama has won the presidency does not undermine Roediger’s argument that race “defines the social category into which peoples are sorted, producing and justifying their very different opportunities with regard to wealth and poverty, confinement and freedom, citizenship and alienation and…life and premature death” (pp.xi-xii).  This is not simply a book about slavery and African Americans, however, as it examines race in every aspect, from Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians to Irish and Italians and convincingly shows how race is intricately and intimately bound to questions of gender and class.

An example of the level of historical debate is the discussion of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 in which President Thomas Jefferson achieved the largest real estate deal in history, more than doubling the size of the United States, and secured American expansion into the West.  Jefferson had always seen expansion of the US as central to “trade, freedom, and implementing policy against indigenous people” (p.61) even before the chance of buying the land from Napoleon arose.  This land deal meant that slavery in the US could expand and that race would survive as a basis of republicanism and citizenship through the coming centuries.  Without such expansion, both geographic and economic, America as an ideal would have had to come to some firm appreciation that slavery had to gradually disappear, as it had done in the north of the republic.  From 1803 Jefferson and others could argue that “a biracial nation without slavery was impossible” (p.61).

Such arguments are highlighted virtually throughout every aspect of the American past (and indeed present) as some form of ‘Zelig’ type historical character.  The argument is compelling and it underscores the concept that ‘America’ (with regards to the United States) is not simply a geographical entity but an ideology based on racial exclusion despite its vocabulary of democracy.  The only drawback to the book is that there is an utter lack of footnotes, which would be understandable in a popular polemic if there was not also a total lack of a bibliography.  Many aspects of Roediger’s arguments have convincing examples yet, frustratingly, there is an inability for the reader, lay or professional, to follow up many of these points. But that is a minor point.  In an age when history is seen in chucks, snippets or myth it is rewarding to be able to join the dots between events and see a broader work of art.