Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Interpretive Overview -- Prologue: Race and the Human Race -- PART 1 The Colonial Period -- 1. How the American Racial System Began: Atlantic Slavery Becomes Market-Driven and Color-Defined -- 2. Anglo Americans Adopt the Atlantic Racial System -- 3. The Construction of Planter Hegemony, 1676-1776 -- 4. The Era of the American Revolution: The Challenge to Slavery and the Compromise -- PART 2 The Antebellum Republic -- 5. The Old South's Triumph -- 6. The Old South's Crisis and the Emergence of the White Solidarity Myth -- 7. Emancipated but Black: Freedom in the Free States -- 8. The Planter and the "Wage Slave": A Reactionary Alliance -- 9. King Cotton's Jesters: The Minstrel Show Interprets Race for the White Working Class -- The War of the Cabins: The Struggle for the Soul of the "Common Man" -- PART 3 The Racial System Challenged and Revised -- 11. The Republican Revolution and the Struggle for a "New Birth of Freedom" -- 12. Reconstruction: The Radical Challenge, 1865-77 -- 13. Between Slavery and Freedom: The Conservative Quest for a Halfway House -- PART 4 The Racial System in a Rising Superpower -- 14. The Age of Segregation at Its Zenith: The Racial System in a World of Colonialism -- 15. Radical Challenge, Liberal Reform: African Americans Gain New Allies -- 16. The American Century, the American Dilemma -- 17. The Black Freedom Movement -- 18. The Racial System in the Age of Corporate Globalism, Technological Revolution, and Environmental Crisis -- Notes -- Index.