A powerful exploration of the past and present arc of America's white supremacy--from the country's inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today's Black Lives Matter. "The most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University "Stunning, timely . . . an achievement in writing public history . . . Teaching White Supremacy should be read widely in our roiling debate over how to teach about race and slavery in classrooms." --David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History, Yale University; author of the Pulitzer-prize- ..

Some were slaves who endured their last years of servitude before escaping from their masters; some were soldiers who fought for the freedom of their brethren and for equal rights; some were reporters who covered the defeat of their oppressors. Here, for the first time, are collected the testimonies of African Americans who witnessed the Civil War. They include the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass on the meaning of the war; Martin R. Delany on his meeting with Lincoln to gain permission to raise an army of African Americans; Susie King Taylor on her life as a laundress and nurse to a Union regiment in the deep South; Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln's s ..