| International Standard Book Number |
9781635422252 ebook
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| International Standard Book Number |
9781635422245 hardcover
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| International Standard Book Number |
1635422248 hardcover
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| Personal Name |
Curran, Andrew S., author.
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| Title Statement |
Biography of a dangerous idea : a new history of race : from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson / Andrew S. Curran.
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| Production, Publication, Distribution, Manufacture, and Copyright Notice |
New York : Other Press, 2026.
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| Physical Description |
502 pages : black and white illustrations, portraits, maps ; 24 cm.
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| Bibliography, Etc. Note |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 452-481) and index.
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| Formatted Contents Note |
Part 1. Race before the advent of race; Louis XIV: king of slaves -- Jean-Baptiste Labat: the priestly ethnographer -- Part 2. The new animal: man; Francois Bernier: the first classifier -- Carl Linnaeus: the botanist who transformed man into and animal -- Part 3. Race gets a history; Buffon: the man who put humans in time -- Voltaire: the philosphe who made raciism drole -- The Scots and stage theory: David Hume, Adam Smith, Lord Kames, and William Robertson -- Part 4. Race and the enlightenment; Kant and Blumenbach and the German definition of race -- Thomas Jefferson: nation builder, race builder -- Epilogue -- Enter the antiracists.
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| Summary, Etc. |
"A riveting history of the Enlightenment figures who shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. In the first decades of the 18th century, Christianity began to lose its jurisdiction over the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance, and proto-biological ideas did not simply disappear. This raw material was increasingly "processed" by secularly minded thinkers who claimed the right to rethink the category of the human. By century's end, naturalists and classifiers had divided the human species into racial categories using methods that we now associate with the Enlightenment era. In Biography of a Dangerous Idea, prize-winning biographer and specialist of the Enlightenment Andrew S. Curran retells this story through the medium of group biography. Written more like a detective story than traditional history, the book traces the emergence of race through the lives of 14 pivotal figures, among them Louis XIV, Buffon, Linnaeus, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Blumenbach, Kant, and 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, this sweeping narrative not only reveals how the Enlightenment's ultimate Promethean quest intertwined with systems of oppression and empire, but also offers a groundbreaking reassessment of the era's most famous luminaries"-- Provided by publisher.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Race History 18th century.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Race History.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Race awareness History 18th century.
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| Subject Added Entry - Topical Term |
Race awareness History.
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| Index Term-Genre/Form |
Informational works.
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