Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America鈥檚 resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national conscience.
Against those seeking to maintain what Frederick Douglass called an 鈥渁ristocracy of the skin,鈥� Keidrick Roy shows how a group of Black thinkers, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hosea Easton, and Harriet Jacobs, challenged the medievalism in their midst鈥攁nd transformed the nation鈥檚 founding liberal tradition. He demonstrates how they drew on spiritual insight, Enlightenment thought, and a homegrown political philosophy that gave expression to their experiences at the bottom of the American social order. Roy sheds new light on how Black abolitionist writers and activists worked to eradicate the pernicious ideology of racial feudalism from American liberalism and renew the country鈥檚 commitment to values such as individual liberty, social progress, and egalitarianism.
American Dark Age reveals how the antebellum Black liberal tradition holds vital lessons for us today as hate groups continue to align themselves with fantasies of a medieval past and openly call for a return of all-powerful monarchs, aristocrats, and nobles who rule by virtue of their race.
Awards and Recognition
- Winner of the S-USIH Book Prize, Society for U.S. Intellectual History
- Winner of the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Research, Cultural Impact, and Storytelling, Sons and Daughters of the Middle Passage
- Winner of the Best Book Award, American Political Thought Section of the American Political Science Association
- Finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Center
- Winner of the International Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society Book Award, Government and Politics Category
"I just loved American Dark Age. . . . The book is just good scholarship. . . . I appreciated Roy’s excavation of the Black liberal tradition in American thought — giving voice to a group whose ideas deserve a renewed look in our own anti-democratic moment."鈥擹ack Beauchamp, Vox
"American Dark Age should become a watershed in our understanding of a crucial cohort of actors in American history, and also in rethinking the liberal political tradition."鈥擯aul Rosenberg, Salon
"Black liberalism is too long neglected, and Keidrick Roy’s American Dark Age brings black liberals back onto center stage where they belong."鈥擯aul Crider, Liberal Currents
"American Dark Age is a brilliant study of a dark chapter in American history. . . . Highly recommended."鈥�Choice
"American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism, and the Rise of Black Liberalism makes an impressive contribution to the scholarship on the political philosophy of race and the possibilities for African American social advancement."鈥擜lford A. Young, Jr., Ethnic and Racial Studies
"American Dark Age is an exceptional piece of both conceptual analysis and historical synthesis. It is unmissable reading for scholars of liberalism, American political thought, and Africana political theory."鈥擯hilip Yaure, Political Theory
"American Dark Age is a model monograph, and scholars of American political, racial, intellectual, and democratic history will benefit from wrestling with its ideas for some time to come."鈥擝enjamin E. Park, Journal of Southern History
"Pointing to how feudal imagery is still a mainstay of far-right ideologues . . . Roy makes a persuasive case that studying these antebellum thinkers is critical today. It’s a sophisticated reassessment of America’s political history."鈥�Publishers Weekly (Starred review)
“American Dark Age is a brilliant and provocative exploration of the ways in which the concept of feudalism shaped the views of nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectuals, both Black and White, about America’s racial landscape.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, author of On Juneteenth
“In this original work of political theory, Keidrick Roy develops the notion of racial feudalism, which flowered in the slave South and the Confederacy. Roy also shows how African American abolitionists confronted this reactionary medievalism by developing a distinct Black liberal tradition. American Dark Age astutely illuminates the contest that still roils American history and politics today.”—Manisha Sinha, author of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920
“Keidrick Roy illuminates the racial feudal obsessions of the generations that paradoxically celebrated the Declaration of Independence while ardently championing a slave system that betrayed its most revolutionary ideals. In exposing these medieval fascinations, Roy gives center stage to the Black abolitionists whose resistance ensured that the Civil War wasn’t just fought for the Union but for the values of liberal democracy. American Dark Age is a remarkably fresh and provocative work of scholarship, one worth serious consideration in our more ‘modern times.’”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
“American Dark Age is a book of both historical and philosophical importance. Roy provides a major intervention with his focused analysis of medieval feudalism in the American context, as well as careful elucidation of the importance of racial feudalism to the thinking of the ‘great democrat’ Thomas Jefferson and nineteenth-century African American thinkers.”—Melvin L. Rogers, author of The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought
