Lost Tribes and Promised Lands

In Lost Tribes and Promised Lands, celebrated historian and cultural critic Ronald Sanders offers a compelling and ideology-shattering history of racial prejudice and myth as shaped by political, religious, and economic forces from the 14th Century to the present day. Written with clear-eyed vigor, Sanders draws on a broad history of art, psychology, politics, and religion to inform his striking and soundly-reasoned assertions. The book nimbly zig-zags through space and time, doggedly chipping away at the myopic history of discovery and righeous conquest that has been reiterated for decades by the same ideological forces responsible for centuries of mythological prejudice and racial strife. Placing 14th Century Spanish intolerance (especially anti-Semitism) as the origins of American racism toward African and Native Americans, Sanders elegantly weaves complex threads of colonial economics, religious exceptionalism, and xenophobia into a heady and often-infuriating thesis on the history of racism.