The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade

In this powerful memoir, Charles Dew, one of America’s most respected historians of the South—and particularly its history of slavery—turns the focus on his own life, which began not in the halls of enlightenment but in a society unequivocally committed to segregation.

Dew re—creates the midcentury American South of his childhood—in many respects a boy’s paradise, but one stained by Lost Cause revisionism and, worse, by the full brunt of Jim Crow. Through entertainments and "educational" boo...