Product Description

A 2006 report commissioned by Brown University revealed that institution's complex and contested involvement in slaverysetting off a controversy that leapt from the ivory tower to make headlines across the country. But Brown's troubling past was far from unique. In , Craig Steven Wilder, a rising star in the profession of history, lays bare uncomfortable truths about race, slavery, and the American academy.Many of America's revered colleges and universitiesfrom Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to Rutgers, Williams College, and UNCwere soaked in the sweat, the tears, and sometimes the blood of people of color. The earliest academies proclaimed their mission to Christianize the savages of North America, and played a key role in white conquest. Later, the slave economy and higher education grew up together, each nurturing the other. Slavery funded colleges, built campuses, and paid the wages of professors. Enslaved Americans waited on faculty and students; academic leaders aggressively courted the support of slave owners and slave traders. Significantly, as Wilder shows, our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained them is a powerful and propulsive study and the first of its kind, revealing a history of oppression behind the institutions usually considered the cradle of liberal politics.