In this landmark effort to understand African-American people in the New World, Gunnar Myrdal provides deep insight into the contradictions of American democracy as well as a study of a people within a people. The touchstone of this classic is the jarring discrepancy between the American creed of respect for the inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity for all and the pervasive violations of the dignity of blacks. The appendices, Valuation and Belief, are issued here as a separate work and are a gold mine of information, theory, and methodology. When it first appeared, Robert S. Lynd called An American Dilemma "the most penetrating and important on contemporary American civilization".