Elderly Slaves of the Plantation South
Elderly Slaves of the Plantation South

Author: Stacey K. Close

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 99

ISBN-13: 1317944909

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Elderly slaves contributed substantially to the creation and perpetuation of the unique African American culture and antebellum plantation society in the South. Interwoven with this major argument are two subthemes. One centers on the fact that by the late antebellum period elderly slaves were some of the chief transmitters of Africanism; the other focuses on how gender based distinctions of the elderly became blurred. Although the roles of the elderly often changed, elderly slaves contributed to the plantation economy. It is also true that those old people who were incapacitated posed serious economic and social concerns for owners, although many of the problems of elderly care were solved by the compassion of slave community members (Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1992; revised with new preface and index)

They Were Her Property
They Were Her Property

Author: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-02-19

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0300245106

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Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History: a bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy “Stunning.”—Rebecca Onion, Slate “Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times “Bracingly revisionist. . . . [A] startling corrective.”—Nicholas Guyatt, New York Review of Books Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

My Brother Slaves
My Brother Slaves

Author: Sergio Lussana

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0813166969

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Trapped in a world of brutal physical punishment and unremitting, back-breaking labor, Frederick Douglass mused that it was the friendships he shared with other enslaved men that carried him through his darkest days. In this pioneering study, Sergio A. Lussana offers the first in-depth investigation of the social dynamics between enslaved men and examines how individuals living under the conditions of bondage negotiated masculine identities. He demonstrates that African American men worked to create their own culture through a range of recreational pursuits similar to those enjoyed by their white counterparts, such as drinking, gambling, fighting, and hunting. Underscoring the enslaved men's relationships, however, were the sex-segregated work gangs on the plantations, which further reinforced their social bonds. Lussana also addresses male resistance to slavery by shifting attention from the visible, organized world of slave rebellion to the private realms of enslaved men's lives. He reveals how these men developed an oppositional community in defiance of the regulations of the slaveholder and shows that their efforts were intrinsically linked to forms of resistance on a larger scale. The trust inherent in these private relationships was essential in driving conversations about revolution. My Brother Slaves fills a vital gap in our contemporary understanding of southern history and of the effects that the South's peculiar institution had on social structures and gender expression. Employing detailed research that draws on autobiographies of and interviews with former slaves, Lussana's work artfully testifies to the importance of social relationships between enslaved men and the degree to which these fraternal bonds encouraged them to resist.

Tobacco and Slaves
Tobacco and Slaves

Author: Allan Kulikoff

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2012-12-01

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 0807839221

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Tobacco and Slaves is a major reinterpretation of the economic and political transformation of Chesapeake society from 1680 to 1800. Building upon massive archival research in Maryland and Virginia, Allan Kulikoff provides the most comprehensive study to date of changing social relations--among both blacks and whites--in the eighteenth-century South. He links his arguments about class, gender, and race to the later social history of the South and to larger patterns of American development. Allan Kulikoff is professor of history at Northern Illinois University and author of The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism.

Within the Plantation Household
Within the Plantation Household

Author: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 0807864226

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Documenting the difficult class relations between women slaveholders and slave women, this study shows how class and race as well as gender shaped women's experiences and determined their identities. Drawing upon massive research in diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral histories, the author argues that the lives of antebellum southern women, enslaved and free, differed fundamentally from those of northern women and that it is not possible to understand antebellum southern women by applying models derived from New England sources.

Medicine and Slavery
Medicine and Slavery

Author: Todd Lee Savitt

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780252008740

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Widely regarded as the most comprehensive study of its kind, this volume offers valuable insight into the alleged medical differences between whites and blacks that translated as racial inferiority and were used to justify slavery and discrimination. In Medicine and Slavery, Todd L. Savitt evaluates the diet, hygiene, clothing, and living and working conditions of antebellum African Americans, slave and free, and analyzes the diseases and health conditions that afflicted them in urban areas, at industrial sites, and on plantations.

Closer to Freedom
Closer to Freedom

Author: Stephanie M. H. Camp

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2005-10-12

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0807875767

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Recent scholarship on slavery has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition. Camp discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp's insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties ("frolics") become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts. The culture of opposition created by enslaved women's acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.

Ar'n't I a Woman?
Ar'n't I a Woman?

Author: Deborah Gray White

Publisher: W. W. Norton

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9780393304060

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Exploration of the assumed roles within families and the community and the burdens placed on slave women.