TY - JOUR
AU - Vaughan, Alden T.
AB - From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian ALDEN T. VAUGHAN WHEN THOMASJEFFERSON WROTE his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), he professed to draw heavily "on what I have seen of man, white, red, and black." Here, as elsewhere, ]efferson demonstrated a knack for phraseology: he was probably the first public spokesman to use the tricolor metaphor that has flourished, with minor rearrangement, ever since.' And now, with the historical profession's increasing attention to race and ethnicity, "red, white, and black" is enjoying a rhetorical boom. Attracted by the color trilogy's symmetry and symbolism, scholars have recently employed it in numerous book and article titles. Color terminology is as firmly fixed in writings on early America as it is in conversations about modern race relations.i The tacit justification for using the chromatic metaphor in colonial and early national studies-apart from its ironic parody of "red, white, and blue"-is basically sound: Indians, Europeans, and Africans played central roles in early America, and the commonly accepted color labels are convenient and unambiguous, even though they exaggerate human complexions. Implicitly, if not explicitly, such usage further A preliminary version of this essay was presented to an 
TI - From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian
JF - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1086/ahr/87.4.917
DA - 1982-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/from-white-man-to-redskin-changing-anglo-american-perceptions-of-the-abyaB6bFs1
SP - 917
EP - 953
VL - 87
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -