Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Sarah Lewis, "The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America" (Harvard UP, 2024)
Description: In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now.The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War—revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region a...