Brett Gadsden. Between North and South

Delaware may be the First State, but its prominence has receded steadily since that auspicious beginning. Brett Gadsden seeks to show us not only that Delaware matters, but that this tiny state's desegregation struggle challenges powerful myths about race and region in modern American history. As the book's title implies, Gadsden adds his voice to the growing chorus of historians who have concluded that scholarly and popular assumptions of sectionalism have distorted and impoverished our understanding of race and politics in modern America. But while the most vocal members of that cohort have challenged the regional binary by comparing racial struggles in North and South, Gadsden fixes our attention on a single place suspended between the two. By focusing on a border state that straddles so many historical dichotomies—slave and free, agrarian South and urban North, de jure and de facto segregation—Gadsden argues convincingly that these dualistic “imaginaries” cannot adequately explain America's, let alone Delaware's, complicated racial history.

Art · Chorus · De facto · Desegregation · Economic history · Ethnology · Mythology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Sociology · State (computer science) · American History and Culture · Classics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies