**NATIONAL BESTSELLER "This book, I suspect, will detonate over certain corners in America.... Darkology is a major and thrilling work of American history." —Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review, cover story As Heard on NPR's Fresh Air: "Quite enlightening." —Terry Gross "Tremendous.... Barnes has corralled the chaos, contradiction, and surprise of American social reality; evaded mythology; and made... the ‘unwritten’ legible.... [A] painfully necessary autopsy of the nation’s soul." —Walton Muyumba, Boston Globe Named one of the Best Books of the Month by the New York Times, TIME, and Kirkus Reviews** A groundbreaking history, decades in the making, that chronicles how blackface dominated American society culturally, financially, and racially for nearly two centuries. Never before has the disturbing story of blackface and its piercing reflection of American society been so comprehensively told. With Darkology, Princeton historian Rhae Lynn Barnes meticulously unravels the complex, subterranean, and all-too-often expunged history of “Darkology”—the insidious study, commodification, and dehumanization of Black life, through which performers caricatured the enslaved and formerly enslaved for their supposed subservience and happy demeanor. Given the extraordinary research reflected in Darkology, it’s not surprising that Barnes spent twenty years tracking down “fading photographs, old movies, bureaucratic detritus, moldy scripts, and living witnesses, assembling an impressive archive that allowed her to demonstrate the astonishingly broad reach of blackface minstrelsy” (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich). Painstakingly piecing together these scattered shards of evidence, Barnes reveals the shocking extent to which blackface took center stage in every era of American history. This was not a fringe activity. By 1830, as political resistance to slavery grew, blackface exploded from a niche performance into a venomous national export.