Review by Choice Review
Historian Wilder (MIT) examines the emergence of American higher education from approximately the early 1600s to the mid-1840s. Among the book's many contributions, it frames America's earliest colleges as agents of Native conquest and assimilation as well as beneficiaries of the wealth created by the African slave trade. Most notably, Wilder illuminates how Harvard, America's oldest and most prestigious higher education institution, initially languished but flourished after it began to actively recruit and cater to the sons of the South's slaveholding elite. It is common knowledge that US universities were racially segregated until the late 20th century. However, Wilder reveals that enslaved blacks had a substantial presence on Colonial and antebellum college campuses as personal attendants for students, staff, and administrators. Wilder shows not only that the earliest colleges in the US benefited from uncompensated slave labor, but also how they bolstered slavery by advancing theories of black inferiority that would later become known as scientific racism. This relatively unknown, sobering story of the development of higher education in the US should find a wide audience among college students and faculty at all levels, and should be required reading for everyone, particularly researchers interested in the history of race in the US. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. K. K. Hill Texas Tech University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Not only were many of America's most prestigious colleges founded and supported by slaveholders, but the colleges also provided much of the scholarly and cultural basis of support for slavery. Historian Wilder documents the uncomfortable truth of the inextricable tie between slavery and the ivory tower, how venerable colleges, including Harvard, Princeton, William and Mary, Yale, and others, vied for the attention, land, sons, and money of plantation owners. Slavery provided financial support to the colleges and secure career prospects for many of their graduates, and many colleges owned slaves used for work, trade, and sale. What began for many universities as an ostensible mission of civilizing savages Native Americans and Africans later morphed into support for the establishment and development of colonies and territorial expansion. In the growing debate about slavery, abolition, and the movement to return Africans to Africa, prestigious universities and scholars helped to frame and address questions of theology, economics, medicine, history, and other areas of study in the growing debate around the issue, many legitimizing slavery and racism even as they benefited from it. This is a well-researched and revealing look at the connection between American academia and American slavery.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Wilder (American history, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology; A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn) probes the links between higher education in the United States and the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. He traces how the founding, financing, and growth of America's early colleges intertwined with economic and social forces that created regional slave-based economies. His prolog, eight chapters, and epilog show that more than merely prospering from the wealth that Atlantic slavery created, American colleges actively abetted slavery by forging pernicious pseudoscience theories of human difference and social doctrines of biological inferiority to propagate popular belief in divinely ordained white supremacy. America's colleges, Wilder argues, joined hand in hand with church and state to build a nation based on bondage and promote a political culture rooted in racism. VERDICT Extending the insights in Caribbean historian and statesman Eric Williams's 1944 classic Capitalism and Slavery, Wilder's copiously documented argument exposes how deeply implicated American higher education has been in racial exploitation that has dispossessed and subjugated peoples of color so as to invest whites beyond measure. His is a study deserving of serious attention from anyone interested in America's history, institutions, or intellectual development. [See Prepub Alert, 3/25/13.]-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An eye-opening examination of how America's colonial-era colleges were rooted in slave economies and "stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage." Wilder (History/MIT; In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City, 2002, etc.) establishes the interrelationship between slave-cultivated plantations and the academic institutions that lived off the rents gathered through endowments, leases, mortgage debts and other instruments of feudal-style bondage. At first, land holdings were acquired through conquest of native populations, followed by successive phases of clearance and resettlement. "The Indians-for-African trade reduced the risk of enslaved Indians fleeing to their own lands or inciting conflicts," writes Wilder, "and brought a population of African slaves who lacked knowledge of the local geography and languages but possessed important agricultural skills, particularly in rice production." The slave trade developed in complexity as it grew in scale. Universities and colleges not only required their own endowments of land as sources of income and supplies, but also served to educate the leaders and administrators of the colonial settlements, who often became apologists for slavery. Wilder provides an excellent exploration of the role of the College of New Jersey and the Rev. John Witherspoon in the education of the leaders (James Madison and Patrick Henry, among many others) and their successors (John Marshall and James Monroe), who formulated the Indian Removal Act of 1830. His detailed elaboration of how Northern colleges spread the slave system into colonies like South Carolina and Georgia is equally thorough, and he also documents how race science took root in American academia. A groundbreaking history that will no doubt contribute to a reappraisal of some deep-rooted founding myths.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
