In this ambitious work, William L. Van Deburg offers the first inter-disciplinary survey of American popular culture and its historical attitudes toward slavery and race. Spanning more than three centuries, from the colonial era to the present, Van Deburg's overview analyzes the works of American historians, dramatists, novelists, poets, lyricists, and filmmakers, and exposes, through those artists' often disquieting perceptions, the cultural underpinnings of our current racial attitudes and divisions. Anyone interested in American history, Afro-American studies, slavery, mass culture, or literature will find this work to be essential reading, both as far-ranging cultural history and as an important study of how we came to be a nation still enslaved by popular stereotypes,