The Book Prize Index

A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America

Jacqueline Jones

In 1656, a planter in colonial Maryland tortured and killed one of his slaves, an Angolan man named Antonio who refused to work the fields. Over three centuries later, a Detroit labor organizer named Simon Owens watched as strikebreakers wielding bats and lead pipes beat his fellow autoworkers for protesting their inhumane working conditions. Antonio and Owens had nothing in common but the color of their skin and the economic injustices they battled—yet the former is what defines them in America’s consciousness. In A Dreadful Deceit, award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of these two men and four other African Americans to reveal how the concept of race has obscured the factors that truly divide and unite us. Expansive, visionary, and provocative, A Dreadful Deceit explodes the pernicious fiction that has shaped American history.

Race & EthnicityRace & Ethnicity · medium confidenceRace & Ethnicity81 signalsLlm Classifier: Race & Ethnicity -> Race & EthnicityGoogle Books: History -> HistoryKeyword Classifier: American History -> American HistoryAfrica & the African DiasporaBlack History & CultureReconstruction

Award History

0 wins · 1 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
Pulitzer Prize in HistoryMajor2014FinalistSecondary source
View all award history (1)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Antonio42%
    • Simon Owens45%

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Maryland60%
    • Detroit55%

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    The book argues that the concept of race obscures the economic injustices and other real factors that divide and unite Americans.

    Model confidence 62%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    55 / 100 academic

    Trade / academic crossover

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 70%.