| FB-52466-06 | Research Programs: Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars | Mark Emory Elliott | In Quest of a Color-Blind America: The Life and Times of Albion Tourgée | 1/1/2006 - 8/31/2006 | $40,000.00 | Mark | Emory | Elliott | | | | Wagner College | Staten Island | NY | 10301-4495 | USA | 2005 | U.S. History | Fellowships for College Teachers and Independent Scholars | Research Programs | 40000 | 0 | 24000 | 0 |
This book project examines the life and thought of Albion Tourgée who was one of the most committed proponents of “color blind citizenship” in post-Civil War America and who played a crucial role in bringing this phrase into the legal and political discourse. Using Tourgée as a lens into the nineteenth-century debates over the relationship of race to citizenship, I argue that the concept of civic “color-blindness” derived from a larger set of cultural beliefs about the nature of the self, and civic identity, that were rooted in the most individualistic strains of nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism that, for radicals like Tourgée, did not conflict with activist government policies for racial justice. |