Race Changes: Stories of Shifting Identity in World History

Society is accustomed to thinking of primary identities—racial, ethnic, national, religious—as if they were permanent, essential, unalterable features of individuals and groups. Paul Spickard gently upends this accepted notion in his new history of how individuals, families, and collectives have gone about the work of constructing their identities—and how they’ve transformed them, sometimes by choice and sometimes under compulsion.

Built on a lifetime of research, Race Changes tells the stories of over fifty people, families, and ethnic groups across time and place. It seeks to discover what kinds of circumstances produce identity change, what those changes reveal about society, and why they matter.