This Was America, 1865-1965 : Unequal Citizens in the Segregated Republic

By examining Jewish experiences between the American Civil War and the African American Civil Rights Revolution, this book focuses on citizens who usually spent their daily lives in Black and white “peoplehoods.” Some of the white ones, commanding the nation’s “public square,” structured a segregated republic and capitalist economy that would experience WWII and the news about the Holocaust that murdered millions of Jews. This political economy sustained a hierarchy of privatized ethnic groups whose race and religion, in their norms of “ethnicking,” was used to deprive them of legal and equal collective standing. This Was America is a book about those privatized identities that the years of the Civil Rights Revolution would bring into the republic’s public square.

"A treasure-trove, the product of a lifetime of reading and, more important, deep reflection on one of the most vexing, contentious matters in American life. Gerd Korman is a historian of great knowledge and equally great heart.”

–Steven J. Zipperstein, Daniel E Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History, Stanford University; author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History

“This Was America is a magisterial work of history. Focusing mainly upon barriers facing Blacks and Jews in the ''public square'' of American life, but relevant as well to the flood of immigrants whose ethnicity clashed with nationalistic notions of what citizenry entailed, Gerd Korman brilliantly guides us through a century of conflict and segregation, promises made and broken, laws enacted and ignored. It’s a history involving activists and intellectuals, progressives and demagogues, as our nation moves haltingly in the direction of our better angels. Elegantly written, exhaustively researched, it will soon take its place on the bookshelves of ''must'' reads for understanding the American experience.”

–David Oshinsky, Director of Medical Humanities, NYU Langone Health; Winner, Pulitzer Prize for History, 2006