Books by Andrew S. Curran
Who’s Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race
by Henry Louis, Jr. Gates, Andrew S. Curran, Gates, Henry Louis (edt); Curran, Andrew S. (edt)
“A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism.”
―Publishers Weekly
“The eighteenth-century essays published for the first time in Who’s Black and Why? contain a world of ideas―theories, inventions, and fantasies―about what blackness is, and what it means. To read them is to witness European intellectuals, in the age of the Atlantic slave trade, struggling, one after another, to justify atrocity.”
―Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of black skin―an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.
In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of “blackness.” What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of Black degeneration, the contest announcement asked. Sixteen essays, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why.
Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced. The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions. Some affirm that Africans had fallen from God’s grace; others that blackness had resulted from a brutal climate; still others emphasized the anatomical specificity of Africans. All the submissions nonetheless circulate around a common theme: the search for a scientific understanding of the new concept of race. More important, they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings.
These never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux’s municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.
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$29.95
Who’s Black and Why?: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race
by Henry Louis, Jr. Gates, Andrew S. Curran, Gates, Henry Louis (edt); Curran, Andrew S. (edt)
2023 PROSE Award in European History
“An invaluable historical example of the creation of a scientific conception of race that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.”
―Washington Post
“Reveals how prestigious natural scientists once sought physical explanations, in vain, for a social identity that continues to carry enormous significance to this day.”
―Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People
“A fascinating, if disturbing, window onto the origins of racism.”
―Publishers Weekly
“To read [these essays] is to witness European intellectuals, in the age of the Atlantic slave trade, struggling, one after another, to justify atrocity.”
―Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of “blackness.” What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of Black degeneration, the contest announcement asked. Sixteen essays, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why. Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced.
The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions, which nonetheless circulate around a common theme: the search for a scientific understanding of the new concept of race. More important, they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings.
These never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux’s municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.
Copies
-
$19.95
Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
Best Book of the Year – Kirkus Reviews
A spirited biography of the prophetic and sympathetic philosopher who helped build the foundations of the modern world.
Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world’s first comprehensive Encyclopédie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity–for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality. One of Diderot’s most attentive readers during his lifetime was Catherine the Great, who not only supported him financially, but invited him to St. Petersburg to talk about the possibility of democratizing the Russian empire.
In this thematically organized biography, Andrew S. Curran vividly describes Diderot’s tormented relationship with Rousseau, his curious correspondence with Voltaire, his passionate affairs, and his often iconoclastic stands on art, theater, morality, politics, and religion. But what this book brings out most brilliantly is how the writer's personal turmoil was an essential part of his genius and his ability to flout taboos, dogma, and convention.
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Biography of a Dangerous Idea A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson
An engaging investigation of how 13 key Enlightenment figures shaped the concept of race, from the acclaimed author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely.
Over the course of the 18th century, Christianity began to loosen its grip on the story of humankind. Yet centuries of xenophobia, religious intolerance, and proto-biological speculation were not cast aside. Instead, this raw material was increasingly reworked by secularly minded thinkers intent on redefining what it meant to be human. By 1800, Enlightenment naturalists and classifiers had sorted humanity into rigid racial categories for the first time in history.
Prize-winning biographer Andrew S. Curran retraces this misunderstood history through the lives and ideas of 13 pivotal figures. Moving from the gilded halls of Versailles to the slave plantations of the Caribbean, from the court of the Mughal Empire to the drawing rooms of Jefferson’s Monticello, this sweeping narrative reveals how the Enlightenment’s audacious quest for knowledge became entangled with systems of empire and oppression—while offering a bold new reassessment of the era’s most celebrated luminaries.
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$39.99