Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share James Q. Whitman, “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton UP, 2017)
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
James Q. Whitman, “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton UP, 2017)
James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School, began researching the book that became Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press, 2017) by wondering whether Jim Crow laws in the U.S. had any impact on the development of the Nuremberg Laws. Some scholars have denied any influence. Professor Whitman came to a very different conclusion, and what he learned deserves to be much more widely appreciated than it is. For the United States was the global pioneer of explicitly racist law–and not just, by any means, in the Jim Crow South.
Strikingly, American law was most helpful to the most radical Nazi jurists. In the early years of the Third Reich, 1933 to 1936, conservative nationalist lawyers in Germany debated with Nazi radicals about how to create a body of anti-Semitic law, but one consonant with German legal traditions, which emphasized strict adherence to carefully-articulated concepts. The radicals found their model in U.S. citizenship and anti-miscegenation law, and in a legal culture that, from their point of view, was refreshingly open to innovation.
Yet even the most radical Nazi jurists found the notorious one-drop rule, and the extreme punishments some U.S. states meted out for entering into racially-mixed marriages, too harsh and inhumane.
Professor Whitman’s unsettling, learned, and deeply-engaging book deserves a large audience.
Monica Black is Associate Professor and Lindsay Young Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She teaches courses in modern European and German history.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
View all episodes
By Marshall Poe
4.3
3232 ratings
James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School, began researching the book that became Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press, 2017) by wondering whether Jim Crow laws in the U.S. had any impact on the development of the Nuremberg Laws. Some scholars have denied any influence. Professor Whitman came to a very different conclusion, and what he learned deserves to be much more widely appreciated than it is. For the United States was the global pioneer of explicitly racist law–and not just, by any means, in the Jim Crow South.
Strikingly, American law was most helpful to the most radical Nazi jurists. In the early years of the Third Reich, 1933 to 1936, conservative nationalist lawyers in Germany debated with Nazi radicals about how to create a body of anti-Semitic law, but one consonant with German legal traditions, which emphasized strict adherence to carefully-articulated concepts. The radicals found their model in U.S. citizenship and anti-miscegenation law, and in a legal culture that, from their point of view, was refreshingly open to innovation.
Yet even the most radical Nazi jurists found the notorious one-drop rule, and the extreme punishments some U.S. states meted out for entering into racially-mixed marriages, too harsh and inhumane.
Professor Whitman’s unsettling, learned, and deeply-engaging book deserves a large audience.
Monica Black is Associate Professor and Lindsay Young Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She teaches courses in modern European and German history.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies
More shows like New Books in Genocide Studies
View all
History Extra podcast
3,182 Listeners
New Books in History
204 Listeners
The History of England
4,324 Listeners
New Books in Psychoanalysis
193 Listeners
New Books in Military History
161 Listeners
New Books in Islamic Studies
30 Listeners
New Books in African American Studies
161 Listeners
New Books in Environmental Studies
24 Listeners
New Books in Political Science
62 Listeners
New Books in Literary Studies
22 Listeners
New Books in Philosophy
109 Listeners
In Our Time: History
1,869 Listeners
New Books in Intellectual History
61 Listeners
Dan Snow's History Hit
4,635 Listeners
Tides of History
6,285 Listeners
Bad Gays
485 Listeners
Real Dictators
5,145 Listeners
The Ancients
3,089 Listeners
The Rest Is History
13,110 Listeners
The Alexei Sayle Podcast
42 Listeners
On Auschwitz
171 Listeners
American History Hit
1,413 Listeners
Empire
2,136 Listeners
Past Present Future
302 Listeners
The Holocaust History Podcast
61 Listeners