-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Robert G. Lee, Joshua Paddison. American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Page 860, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.860
- Share Icon Share
Extract
When Bret Harte published the poem “Plain Language from Truthful James” in 1870, he made the sobriquet “Heathen Chinee” virtually synonymous with Chinese in American popular parlance. Harte drew, with satirical intent, on a raging debate that swirled around the status of Chinese immigrants as unconverted and potentially unconvertible pagans in an imagined Christian nation.
In this slim but deeply illuminating volume, Joshua Paddison focuses our attention on the centrality of religion in the processes of racial formation immediately following the Civil War. Focusing on Reconstruction in California, he shows how debates over the status of Chinese immigrants and Native American Indians were inextricably bound up with those over the citizenship and civil rights of emancipated African Americans and recent European immigrants. Paddison understands the rise and fall of Reconstruction to have been a multiracial rather than biracial process and the concomitant triumph of white Christian male supremacy as a national rather than regional project.