OAH Distinguished Lecturer Profile
Daryl Michael Scott is a historian of black-white relations in America since the Civil War, southern history, and African American history. A professor of history at Howard University, he is also the author of Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (1997). He is currently researching a work that reexamines white supremacy and Jim Crow entitled “The Lost World of White Nationalism in the American South,” and is also preparing a collection of essays on the sui generis treatment of nationalism in American historiography.
The lecture makes the case that white supremacy was a white nationalist ideology in the South from the origins of the United States until 1965. It takes issue with most of the tendency to view America as lacking a nationalism, especially one based on white belonging, revealing how federalism allowed Southerners (a white ethnic group) to govern themselves and all who lived in what they considered to be there homeland.
