"Sarah Lewis deciphers the hugely popular nineteenth-century images that failed to dislodge Americans' faith in the mythical white homeland of the Caucasus. Actual Caucasians little resemble race science's ideals of whiteness, so Americans learned to manipulate their visual regime-and visual media-to suppress evidence of race's incoherence."--

Ungrounding: the Caucasian War and the second founding of the United States -- Racial adjudication: Frederick Douglass and the Circassian beauties -- Unsilencing the past: the production of race, culture, and history -- Negative assembly: mapping racial regimes and the cartography of liberation -- The unseen dream: racial detailing and the legacy of Federal segregation in the United States -- Epilogue: it takes so long to see