Who's Black and Why? - Henry Louis Gates Jr and Andrew S Curran

 Sub-title: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race

This book is a review and a reprint of letters written in the late 1700s for a contest that asked the question in the title.  It illustrates the evolution of the opinions that existed at the time.  The author's review explains how the writers explanations predicated the concepts of race that exists today.  I read the intro and reviews and a few of the translated letters.  There is a good chronology of the representation of Africans and race from ancient times up through 1890s.

Quote:

"By the end of the eighteenth century, the era we have come to know as the Enlightenment, another 4,5000,000 Africans were forced to leave their home continent for a life of brutal enslavement in plantations on the other side of the Atlantic.  See https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates. "

Published: 2022  Read: September 2022  Genre: History

The Nun - Denis Diderot

Where do I find this books?  Maybe I should start including pictures of the covers because in most cases that's contributes to my decision to pick them up from the used bookstores.

This is a very old book about a joke that was played on a soft-hearted gentleman.  His friends pretended to be a young woman forced into a convent who pleads with the gentleman to help her break her vows and leave the convent.  She tells her story of being a child of her mother's lover passed off as a daughter of her husband, but shunted to the cloistered life to prevent her from making claims on her family's estate.

It still has relevance for today because it illuminates the way women were treated as property to be bought or disposed of as desired.  It shows the strength of character required to stand up for oneself and stay true to your convictions.  A different read.

Published: 1972 (originally written 1760)  Read: September 2016  Genre: Fiction, Classics