Today slavery is at the center of Americans’ official history, with race the central concept in the country’s official self-understanding. Never before the 1960s was this the case. For almost all of American history, racial conflict was understood as a set of episodes—some shameful, some glorious—set against a larger story about building a constitutional republic. After the 1960s, the constitutional republic was sometimes discussed as if it were a mere set of tools for resolving larger conflicts about race and human rights.
