Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of American Racism

An utterly revelatory work. Unprecedented in scope, detail, and ambition.

In Lost Tribes and Promised Lands, celebrated historian and cultural critic Ronald Sanders offers a compelling and ideology-shattering history of racial prejudice and myth as shaped by political, religious, and economic forces from the 14th Century to the present day. Written with clear-eyed vigor, Sanders draws on a broad history of art, psychology, politics, and religion to inform his striking and soundly-reasoned assertions.

Lost Tribes and Promised Lands nimbly zig-zags through space and time, doggedly chipping away at the myopic history of discovery and righteous conquest that has been reiterated for decades by the same ideological forces responsible for centuries of mythological prejudice and racial strife. Placing 14th Century Spanish intolerance (specifically anti-Semitism) as the origins of American racism toward African and Native Americans, Sanders elegantly weaves complex threads of colonial economics, religious exceptionalism, and xenophobia into a heady and often-infuriating thesis on the history of racism.

Finally back in print in a complete and cost-accessible edition (when the book was out of print, demand for this important work was so intense that used copies sold for thousands of dollars). Find out why! Lost Tribes and Promised Lands is a gripping and hegemony-exploding treatise on the history of race in the New World.