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By examining Jewish experiences between the American Civil War and the African American Civil Rights Revolution, this book focuses on citizens who usually spent their daily lives in Black and white “peoplehoods.” Some of the white ones, commanding the nation’s “public square,” structured a segregated republic and capitalist economy that would experience WWII and the news about the Holocaust that murdered millions of Jews. This political economy sustained a hierarchy of privatized ethnic groups whose race and religion, in their norms of “ethnicking,” was used to deprive them of legal and equal collective standing. This Was America is a book about those privatized identities that the years of the Civil Rights Revolution would bring into the republic’s public square.
“Korman... has written an important and timely history focusing primarily on Black and Jewish Americans, as well as other ethnic groups, as they found themselves isolated from the 'public square' of American life over a century. ... Recommended.”
— J. Fischel, emeritus, Millersville University, CHOICE (September 2023 Vol. 61 No. 1)
Gerd Korman is an American historian, Professor emeritus at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. In his years of teaching, in his books and articles, he has made original contributions in the field of Euro-American history; it now includes the Holocaust.
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Part One: Republican Ethnicking
1. Veritas
2. Races
3. Promised Lands by Religion
4. Ethnicking
5. Profiling
6. Peoplehood Citizens
Part Two: Republican Discipline
7. Safeguarding the Public Square
8. Screening and Quarantines
9. At Work in Danzig
10. Nationalizing Secular Peoplehoods
11. Battling Citizens
12. Bending Hierarchies
Part Three: Last Words
13. Pasts in US
14. US in the Public Square
15. Ethnicking in Plain Sight
Epilogue