Race Life and Race Religions: Modern Light on Their Growth, Their Shaping and Their Future

Los Angeles: Pacific Publishing Company, 1936. First edition. The penultimate work by Joseph Widney (1841-1938), physician, religious leader, historian, and educator, in which he outlines the "growth of the Man Spiritual in his efforts to keep pace with the Man Industrial and the Man Intellectual" (p. xi). Part I. contains a survey of different racial groups and their migrations, comminglings, degrees of civilization, and racial death; Part II. explores the Race Religions of these various peoples. Widney employs the word ‘Race' in the most generic sense, and unlike many of his peers was not a supremacist. He wrote admiringly of the contributions and traits of blacks, Hispanics, and other peoples.
Widney was a physician during the Civil War before moving to Los Angeles where he spent the rest of his 96 years. He was the second President of USC, and a dominant medical, religious, civic and cultural leader who ceaselessly promoted the history and future of Los Angeles. His best known book was Race Life of the Aryan Peoples (1907), which was also his only commercially published title. He self-published all of his other books through his Pacific Publishing Company.

8vo.; blind-ruled, green buckram boards, gilt-stamped spine; xvii, [2], 2-253 p., frontis of the author w/ tissue guard. Light wear to boards, small stain to the bottom page edge, about Near Fine.