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A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson
by Andrew S. Curran
An engaging investigation of how thirteen key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot
Over the course of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment natural historians and classifiers redefined what it meant to be human. By 1800, they had recast the very idea of humankind, sorting the world's peoples into rigid biological categories for the first time in history. Prize-winning biographer Andrew S. Curran retraces this often-misunderstood story by plunging into the lives and ideas of the most influential individuals behind this reconceptualization, among them Louis XIV, Voltaire, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson.
Moving from the gilded halls of Versailles to the slave plantations of the Caribbean, from the court of the Mughal Empire to the drawing rooms of Monticello, Biography of a Dangerous Idea not only reveals the Enlightenment's entanglement with empire and oppression—it offers a bold reassessment of the era's most celebrated luminaries.
"Brilliant…a thorough and eminently readable dissection of a pernicious lie." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A top-shelf work of creative nonfiction and history, featuring clear and engaging narrative writing…A rewarding read that is essential for academic and high school libraries, classrooms, and public libraries' biography and history collections." —Library Journal (starred review)
"A wide-ranging study of the development of the idea that there is more than one human race…A useful addition to the history of race and racism." —Kirkus Reviews
"Biography of a Dangerous Idea further cements Andrew S. Curran as one of our greatest scholars of the terrible history of race. In this vitally important, beautifully crafted book, Curran gives us biographies of the Enlightenment-era thinkers who created 'races' and also ensured that only people of European descent would benefit from these new divisions. This book, which reads more like a novel than most works of history, is essential reading for our own fraught times." —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Box: Writing the Race
"The story of an idea as dangerous as race is one that few are brave enough to tell. In thirteen sparkling biographical cameos, Andrew Curran—sharp-eyed intellectual historian and large-hearted storyteller—takes us on a journey to the dark side of the Enlightenment, introducing us to the men whose ideas contributed to unimaginable suffering, but whose ideals still infuse our hope for change." —Janice P. Nimura, author of The Doctors Blackwell, Pulitzer Prize finalist
This information about Biography of a Dangerous Idea was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Andrew S. Curran is the William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan University. A scholar and biographer, his writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, TIME, the Paris Review, and the Wall Street Journal. He is also the author or editor of five books. His most recent, edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is Who's Black and Why? His previous book was the prize-winning biography Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019).
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