Forbidden Love is a pathbreaking book that only a master historian could write. The first work for younger readers to describe the true history of racial mixing in America, it exposes how desperately some people have fought to guard our racial borderlines.

Gary Nash, a past president of the Organization of American Historians, has been instrumental in rethinking how history should be taught in schools. Now, starting with John Rolfe and Pocahontas, pausing to compare the United States with Canada and Mexico, and ending with his own multiracial classrooms, he shows how racial mixing, and the fear of it, is at the heart of American history.