The award-winning art historian and founder of Vision & Justice uncovers a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime. In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions that shored up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them.  The surprising catalyst was the Caucasian War―the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War. Images from the Caucasus captivated Americans but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.  To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising whatever did not serve the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what Americans were conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant,  The Unseen Truth  shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy―and offers a way to begin to dismantle it. “[A] masterwork of research…the overarching evidence [Lewis] presents points to how unsettled and migratory the hierarchy, category, and formation of whiteness was and continues to be worldwide.” ― Emmanuel Iduma , Art in America “[Lewis’s] brilliant intervention…pries open the fissures running across popular understandings of race and sight…Through reproductions of paintings, photographs, posters, and maps, Lewis brings a woefully understudied time period to light…[this] book more than rectifies this, offering a necessary reorientation for ethnic studies scholars, art historians, and everyday readers alike to learn from.” ― Lakshmi Rivera Amiin , Hyperallergic “Lewis is a disrupter, too, though she detonates her truth bombs with a quiet control.” ― Brooke Hauser , Boston Globe “A bold intellectual history.” ― Erin L. Thompson , The Nation “Signals the emergence of a new approach to race and representation in the context of the anti-black racism and antiracist discourse that have defined the last decade in the US…this is the book art historians working in the US urgently need now, as we learn to apply our critical tools―from close looking to socio-historical analysis―to understanding and undermining systemic racism in America.” ― Tanya Sheehan , caa.reviews “A searing, important read that helps unpack the current moment and future of our country, and also a feat of detective work that uncovers historical events that profoundly changed the course of the world.” ― Town & Country “A single book can remap your world. Exhibit A: [this book], no less than a revelatory history of how, from the Civil War to the early 20th century, Americans crafted images of race, filtering out contradictions to arrive at something simplified.” ― Christopher Borrelli , Chicago Tribune “[This] book should be read as a herald for a new era of critical vision. The Unseen Truth is nothing short of a prayer for our times: May we all speak with urgency about that which we see, as well as that which we are encouraged not to.” ― Nora Lessersohn , American Historical Review “Magisterial…Lewis presents a range of compelling visual evidence and analysis…What has been traced in this book is as untold history that many have refused to see, and some thought unworthy of seeing. The story of race in American can only be told while being attuned to the precise consideration of information that falls off the edges of our vision.” ― Audrey Wu Clark , Society for U.S. Intellectual History “Drawing on abundant scholarship, Lewis investigates images that contributed to Americans’ conception of race from the Civil War through the Jim Crow era…A fresh, authoritative historical inquiry.” ― Kirkus Reviews “A work of searing perspective…exposes ongoing historical narratives about who belongs in American society, revealing the skewed perceptions behind fiction-based racial systems.” ― Erika Harlitz Kern , Foreword Reviews “Absolutely brilliant. Uniquely astute. Sarah Lewis grows The Unseen Truth from her superb Vision and Justice project into a work of stunning originality. There is so much here as Lewis ‘unsilences’ the past in a voice both informative and seductive. Her astonishing cast of characters stars Caucasians, Circassians, and most revealingly, Woodrow Wilson. Each chapter exposes the ‘racial detailing’ that has constructed a repressive racial regime that, once seen, can be undone.” ― Nell Irvin Painter, author of the New York Times bestseller The History of White People “