Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (Jeffersonian America)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.27 (946 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0813927773 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 144 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-05-12 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
M. B. Katz said Review of Clarence Walker's Mongrel Nation. "Mongrel Nation" is an easy, one-sit read, less a book than an academic lecture: well informed, fluid, and calmly argued, padded with excessive references to 99 pages of text. The title of the book would seem to indicate that the author's main thesis involves the postmodernist rea. Logical Affirmation, Brilliant Use of Context Jefferson lecturer Professor Walker has given us more than reasoned confirmation of what Americans have long suspected, at least since the 1802 revelations by James Callender. By weaving the Jefferson-Hemings liaison into a historical setting that accommodated such relationships more comfortably tha. America's Mom and Dad D. Adams I wouldn't usually read a historical treatise such as Mongrel Nation, but this found it's way to me and I was immediately hooked. Walker is forthright, provocative, and sometimes ribald in his argument that our nation's history has been whitewashed by our refusal to confront our m
--Vanessa Bush . From Booklist *Starred Review* Thomas Jefferson’s heroic stature as an Enlightenment archetype, author of the Declaration of Independence, and the third president has always made his positions on race particularly troubling in a nation that wants to think of itself as just and equitable and also racially pure. So powerful has been the notion of a pure white origin for the nation and its founders that even scholars have gone to great lengths to deny that Jefferson, like so many other powerful white men, was “in the closet” in terms of interracial sexual relations, forced or consensual. In the first part of this slim volume, Walker argues that Jefferson and Hemings are rightly the “founding parents” of the nation, signifying the racial mixture of America from its early years. Walker maintains that unless the nation can fully recognize the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, it can never have a true sense of its identity. In the secon
Historians, too, dismissed the idea, even when confronted with compelling arguments by fellow scholars. In a country where, as early as 1662, interracial sex was already punishable by law, an understanding of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship has consistently met with resistance. Mongrel Nation seeks to uncover this complexity, as well as the reasons it is so often obscured. The president’s apologists, both before and after the DNA findings, have constructed an iconic Jefferson that tells us more about their own beliefs--and the often alarming demands