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Forrest G. Wood is an American historian. He is the author of Black Scare, a history of race relations in the United States in the late 19th century (1968), and The Arrogance of Faith (1990), a book on the relationship between Christianity and racism in the United States.

Career
As of 1969 Wood was based at Fresno State College; in 1990 he was a professor of history at California State University, Bakersfield.

Black Scare (1968)
Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction was published in 1968 by the University of California Press.

Black Scare is a study of the racist literature of the Reconstruction era.

Black Scare includes a review of racism in the 19th century United States, then details the racist response to emancipation, black soldiers, and black suffrage and political participation over a ten-year period beginning with the Emancipation Proclamation and ending with the 1872 presidential election.

Wood's sources include around a dozen racist periodicals and over 100 pamphlets.

He draws particular attention to John H. Van Evrie's Weekly Day Book and the 1864 miscegenation controversy.

Wood's study synthesizes the findings of historians including Leon Litwack, James M. McPherson, Kenneth M. Stampp and C. Vann Woodward.

In Black Scare Wood argues that racism in the 19th century United States intensified concurrently with abolitionist gains as the prospect of emancipation led to uncertainty among white people who believed that black people were inherently inferior. Racism, in Wood's view, became a national political phenomenon after the Battle of Appomattox when Radical Republicans began to push for black political participation in the South, which in turn raised the prospect of black migration to the North. The ensuring "Black Scare" climaxed in 1868.

He also argues that Westerners may have been the "complete" white supremacists, as their prejudice extended not only to black people but also Asian Americans, Native Americans and Mexicans.

Wood analyzes the sexual anxieties underlying white opposition to black equality, and identifies three groups of voters – Irish Americans, voters in border states, and white Southerners – who were especially sensitive to issues of race. He argues that the politicians and press of the Democratic Party played an especially significant role in agitating the issue.

In assessing the racism of white Northerners, at a time when few believed in racial equality, Wood distinguishes between those who were "active" racists, who agitated for white supremacy and found race to be central to most events, and those who were not. In light of this distinction Wood argues that the outburst of racism that followed Emancipation was the product of a minority.

He also seeks to expose the inconsistencies and misconceptions of the racists by countering their thought with 20th-century historical, sociological and scientific knowledge.

The book is dedicated to the memory of three civil rights workers who were killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi a century after the events described in Black Scare.

Writing in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Faith K. Pizor wrote that "What Mr. Wood has to say is important and he says it well" and noted that the racist thought said by Wood to have peaked in 1868 continued to play a role a century later in the elections of 1964 and 1968. She suggested that the book's scope may be too broad, and its coverage of some topics too superficial, but concluded that Black Scare is "a very fine survey of racism in a an important period of American history".
 * Positive

In The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science the historian Benjamin Arthur Quarles questioned Wood's decision not to analyze for comparative purposes the figure of the "active racist" but characterized the book as "carefully planned, as well as soundly buttressed".

Writing in The Journal of Negro History, historian Geoffrey Blodgett described Black Scare as "ambitious, timely and engrossing" and cited its "vivid testimony illustrating the over-reaction of Northerners to the slim chance that genuine radical intimacy might ensue from the war" as its strength; but noted flaws in Wood's attempt to relate racism to formal political chronology. Writing in The American Historical Review, historian Louis R. Harlan praised Wood for "plumb[ing] the depths of the racist argument ... with the cool expertise of a professional diver exploring a dark pool, with his wits about him but undistracted by any need to moralize or editorialize." Harlan questioned, though, Wood's inattentiveness to events after 1872 and to Southern publications.
 * Positive/mixed

Richard O. Curry in The Journal of American History praised Wood's "fresh insights concerning the sexual aspects of racism" and described Black Scare as "an excellent introduction to racism in mid-nineteenth-century America"; but criticized Wood's failure to "add substantially to our knowledge of the political dynamics of the period" (including Republicans' motivations in endorsing the Fifteenth Amendment and Democrats' inability to build a national majority from the race issue) and the book's lack of "original insight".
 * Mixed/negative

Herbert Shapiro, writing in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, questioned Wood's perceived inattentiveness to the Reconstruction period (including his acceptance of James Shepherd Pike as an objective source and his assertion that the emergence of the Liberal Republican Party reflected a decline in the importance of race), and concluded that "Black Scare is an uneven book" which fails to adequately contextualize the evidence if provides for the birth of contemporary racism.

V. Jacque Voegeli, writing in Civil War History, found that "dubious interpretations and errors of fact mar [Black Scare] in places" and argued that Wood's study lacked sufficient depth to be convincing, in part due to its focus on "active" racists.



The Era of Reconstruction (1975)
The Era of Reconstruction, 1863–77 was published by Crowell in 1975 as part of a series intended for use in the teaching of American history in colleges and universities. Wood argues that "The most compelling issue" of the Reconstruction Era "was not political, legal, or economic&mdash;it was racial. Reviewing the book in The Journal of American History, Richard N. Current questioned Wood's account of racism in the Republican Party but described the book as likely to "interest at least the brighter students in the undergraduate survey course and help to give them a sense of history as a continuing colloquy rather than an agreed upon collection of facts."

The Arrogance of Faith (1991)
The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century was published in 1991 by Northeastern University Press.

In The Arrogance of Faith Wood argues that over the five centuries since Christianity arrived in the New World it has been "fundamentally racist in its ideology, organization, and practice" and that among the world religions Christianity has been uniquely preoccupied with attempting to push its ideas on the unwilling due to a Biblical mandate to spread "the word".

Because of this, American society in Wood's view is and has always been fundamentally racist.

He argues that slavery and the persecution of Native Americans were not deviations from Christianity but expressions of it: "English North Americans", Wood writes, "embraced slavery because they were Christians, not in spite of it".

Wood maintains that the Judeo-Christian tradition, rather than being divinely inspired, was created by humans and expressed the worst human instincts, including a tendency toward exclusivity (for example in the theme of the chosen people).

Christianity's judgmental attitude toward other religions and cultures serves, in Wood's view, as an incubator of racism.

Wood cites evidence including Puritan preachers' claims that Native people were agents of Satan and that the smallpox epidemic that killed tens of thousands of Native people was divinely ordained; and the theological justifications for slavery found by Christians including the Curse of Ham.

Looking at 19th century debates over slavery, Wood distinguishes between Christians who owned slaves and Christians who advocated abolition, but notes that the latter group nonetheless sought to Christianize black people and eradicate African culture.

Wood also critiques the work of other writers on Christianity, including Eugene Genovese, Lawrence W. Levine, David Brion Davis and Winthrop Jordan, who he argues failed to appreciate its moral failures.

In The New York Times the journalist George Johnson wrote that "though the book is engagingly written, there is finally something wearing about the zeal with which Mr. Wood prosecutes his case" and noted that Christianity, despite its flaws, "helped lay the foundation for the moral code that led people to question slavery in the first place."
 * Mixed/negative

Howard A. Barnes, writing in History: Reviews of New Books, praised Wood's explanation of the Curse of Ham, his discussion of the North–South schisms in the Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist churches, and the book's "amazingly wide range of information", but cited "Wood's animus toward Christianity", his failure to reconcile Christian abolitionism with the view of Christianity as inherently racist, and his view that Christianity did Native people and slaves "no good at all" as significant problems.

John B. Boles, writing in The Journal of American History, criticized Wood's "simpleminded analysis" of Christianity and "Pollyannaish view of other religions and cultures". Noting that "Understanding the past is more complex than either justifying or attacking it", Boles described The Arrogance of Faith as "one-sided, contentious, contradictory, filled with errors, misleading, and profoundly ahistorical."
 * Negative