The pursuit of whiteness: Property, terror, and expansion, 1790-1860

Roediger uses a dramatic moment in the Abraham Lincoln-Frederick Douglas debates as a window through which to survey the strengths, weaknesses, and gaps of recent writings on whiteness, expansion, and terror in the early national and antebellum periods. Roediger emphasizes the necessity of considering white racial formation in the context of a settler colonial--and slaveholding--nation.