The Book Prize Index

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Ibram X. Kendi

Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America -- it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis. As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred.

Race & EthnicityRace & Ethnicity · medium confidenceRace & Ethnicity81 signalsLlm Classifier: Race & Ethnicity -> Race & EthnicityKeyword Classifier: American History -> American HistoryTopic Classifier: Intellectual Biography -> BiographyIntellectual BiographyBlack History & Culture

Award History

1 wins · 2 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
National Book Award for NonfictionMajor2016WinnerSecondary source
National Book Critics Circle Award for NonfictionMajor2016FinalistSecondary source
View all award history (2)
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

    • Cotton Mather85%
    Show lower-confidence suggestions

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

    • Angela Davis55%

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    Racist ideas in America are historically continuous and sophisticated, shaped by a long, lingering intellectual history rather than arising from ignorance or hatred.

    Model confidence 74%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    45 / 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: 72%.