Nonfiction biography

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American History : Book Review

Stirring upon intellectual , political , financial , societal , and cultural trends in around three hundred and fifty pages , The House I Live In provides an intuitive , if somewhat unpersuasive , review of American race relations over the past century and a half . The narrative is appealing with considerable awareness devoted to popular culture at the start of the chapters

Robert J . Norrell 's historical characters are outlined with the nimble brushstrokes of a capable historian , confident of his ability to

attract the consideration of nonacademic readers whilst not losing the regard of academics . Although this study is partial mainly to black and white relations rather than the broader his title suggests , Norrell achieves his stated intention to "offer a broad view of the quest for equal rights for African Americans and connect those efforts to big evolving structural realities of the twentieth century (p . xii . His general idea will influence future scholarship even as specialists jump on his isolated errors as well as question his tendentious and often unconvincing explanations

Norrell attempts to explain how "racial competition for economic opportunity , political power , and the use of physical space " have served as a continuing offset to the American "creed of democratic values - liberty , democracy , and equality (pp . xii , xiii . Norrell 's fuller interpretive framework , influenced by Max Weber , concedes the significance of monetary and political factors , but the central theme of The House I Live In is the gradual alteration of existing notions of the American democratic creed . He implies that the capability of a few leaders to affirm widely shared perceptions of this creed while also broadening its scope to include African Americans accounts for the progress that has occurred in American race relations . Norrell argues that Abraham Lincoln 's Gettysburg Address achieved "a fundamental change in what Americans would believe thereafter (p . 13 even though he recognizes that Lincoln 's reformulation of Jeffersonian egalitarianism did not prevent white supremacy during the late nineteenth century

Norrell 's account gives limited thought to the internal dynamics of African American politics during this period . African American civil rights proponents such as Frederick Douglass and Ida B . Wells are discussed in passing , while Booker T . Washington is depicted as the intellectual leader who provoked the surfacing of an effective black challenge to white supremacy . According to Norrell , Washington succeeded because of his insistence that African Americans were simply another ethnic group rather than a distinctive racial one and his "faith that democratic values , as defined by Abraham Lincoln , provided the ideological foundation most likely to enable black uplift (pp . 63-64 Rather than an accommodationist , Washington was a remarkably prophetic leader who anticipated "virtually all of the naacp 's [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] later successful protest agenda (p . 64 . Norrell argues that in contrast to the exclusiveness and racial romanticism of the "black ethnic nationalist W . E . B . Du Bois "Washington 's strategy more nearly encompassed the ambitions of all African...