In his inaugural episode for Madison BookBeat, host George Dreckmann looks at our nation’s history of racism and white supremacy with author Dr. Stephen Kantrowitz.
Dr. Kantrowitz is professor of history at UW-Madison, where he researches race, indigeneity, politics, and citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on the antebellum, Civil War, and postbellum eras, and in the connections between the histories of enslaved people, emancipation, and Reconstruction and the dynamics of Native American life and U.S. conquest.
He is author of several books, including More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic (Penguin Press, 2012), which chronicles this epic struggle through the lived experiences of Black and white activists in and around Boston during the Reconstruction Era. His title Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (UNC Press, 2000) traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow.
He was the lead co-author of a 2018 report on the history of the Ku Klux Klan at UW-Madison, and is currently at work on a history of a history of the Ho-Chunk people.
