Prospectus for Deep Roots: The Political Legacy of Southern Slavery* Book Manuscript

How did American racial attitudes originate? How can we make sense of consistent and stubborn regional divides on race and race-related questions? Why is the South more conservative than other parts of the country? This book tackles these questions by arguing that contemporary politics is shaped in part by the historical persistence of political attitudes. To explain contemporary attitudes on race and politics in the South, we center our argument on the “peculiar institution” that drove the South’s economy and politics for nearly 250 years: chattel slavery. Using extensive quantitative analyses and a wide variety of data, we show that whites who live in parts of the South that were more reliant on slavery are todaymore conservative, more racially hostile, and less amenable to policies that could promote black progress. We also show that these