Volume 28, Number 3 · March 5, 1981
'Herrenvolk Democracy'
By C. Vann Woodward
White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History
by George M. Fredrickson
Oxford University Press, 356 pp., $19.95
We already have a sizable shelf of comparative histories of slavery and race relations, subjects that have attracted special attention from the comparativists. Of these works most have been concerned with comparisons between Anglo-America and Latin America or the West Indies, all of them plantation societies with large populations of African origin and common experiences of slavery, emancipation, and racial adjustment. Early studies contained moral and admonitory preoccupations and stressed the contrast between rigidity and harshness toward slaves in North America and flexibility and mildness in Latin cultures. Later studies have modified the contrast, but have never entirely abandoned making invidious and admonitory comparisons.
Review, 2982 words
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