Nell Irvin Painter, American history professor emerita at Princeton University, presents a history of white race theory, an 18th century notion created by Northern Europeans that assigned the ideal of beauty to Caucasians. Ms. Painter reports on the importation of these ideas to North America, championed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his book, English Traits, who defined Americans as Anglo-Saxon and deemed others “guano races.” The author examines American’s fear of immigrants evidenced in the beliefs of Henry Ford to Theodore Roosevelt and opined in news publications such as the Saturday Evening Post. Nell Irvin Painter discussed her book at Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.