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Angela D Dillard

“An excellent overview” of African American, LGBT, and other minority-group conservatives (The New Republic).
 
 In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? Angela Dillard offers the first comparative analysis of a modern conservatism that cuts across boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
 
 To be an African-American and a conservative, or a Latino who is also a conservative and gay, is to occupy an awkward and contested political position. Dillard explores the philosophies, politics, and motivation of minority conservatives such as Ward Connerly, Glenn Loury, Linda Chavez, Clarence Thomas, and Bruce Bawer, as well as their tepid reception by both the left and right. Welcomed cautiously by the conservative movement, they have also frequently been excoriated by those African Americans, Latinos, women, and LGBT people who view their conservatism as betrayal.
 
 Dillard’s comprehensive study, among the first to take the history and political implications of multicultural conservatism seriously, is a vital source for understanding contemporary American conservatism in all its forms.
 
 “Dillard analyzes the famous (Clarence Thomas, Linda Chavez), the obscure (Elizabeth Wright’s black conservative newsletter, Issues and Views) and the in-between (the memoirs of the gay conservative Marvin Liebman).” —The New York Times

NYU Press

American History and Culture

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now?: Multicultural Conservatism in America

Brian P Luskey

“This fascinating portrait of American striving . . . locates the origins of white-collar culture in the precarious world of the antebellum clerk” (Timothy B. Spears, author of Chicago Dreaming).

 In the mid-nineteenth-century, ambitious young men found a path to wealth and respect by working as clerks in the bustling cities of the American Northeast. At stores and commercial offices, these strivers and “counter jumpers” also found opportunities for self-gratification in their new identities as independent men. But being “on the make” in a volatile capitalist economy and fluid urban society was fraught with uncertainty. 

 In On the Make, Brian P. Luskey illuminates at once the power of the ideology of self-making and the important contests over the meanings of respectability, manhood, and citizenship that helped to determine who clerks were and who they would become. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, including clerks’ diaries, newspapers, credit reports, census data, advice literature, and fiction, Luskey argues that a better understanding of clerks and clerking helps make sense of the culture of capitalism and the society it shaped in this pivotal era.

On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America