Learn basic history by visiting communities from our past. Each book is filled with photos and reconstruction artwork covering topics such as food, clothing, shelter, education, play, communication, and family life. View important political and geographical events through the lens of everyday life.
Illustrated with more than 300 color photographs, including many details and back views, What Clothes Reveal treats not only elegant, high-style clothing in colonial America but also garments for everyday and work, the clothing of slaves, and maternity and nursing apparel.".
Fifteen years after its hardcover debut, the FSG Classics reissue of the celebrated work of narrative nonfiction that won the National Book Award and changed the American conversation about race, with a new preface by the author The Ball family hails from South Carolina—Charleston and thereabouts. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Between 1698 and 1865, close to four thousand black people were born into slavery under the Balls or were bought by them. In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. Part historical narrative, part oral history, part personal story of investigation and catharsis, Slaves in the Family is, in the words of Pat Conroy, "a work of breathtaking generosity and courage, a magnificent study of the complexity and strangeness and beauty of the word ‘family.'"
This pioneering study of the much-mythologized Southern belle offers the first serious look at the lives of white women and their harsh and restricted place in the slave society before the Civil War. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of hundreds of planter wives and daughters, Clinton sets before us in vivid detail the daily life of the plantation mistress and her ambiguous intermediary position in the hierarchy between slave and master. "The Plantation Mistress challenges and reinterprets a host of issues related to the Old South. The result is a book that forces us to rethink some of our basic assumptions about two peculiar institutions -- the slave plantation and the nineteenth-century family. It approaches a familiar subject from a new angle, and as a result, permanently alters our understanding of the Old South and women's place in it.
Discusses everyday life, family roles, cooking methods, most important foods, and celebrations of people on southern plantations before the Civil War. Includes recipes.
Once the lifeblood of large estates and farms throughout the American South and East, antebellum plantations today serve as windows into one of the most controversial eras of U.S. history. Though many of these grand homes have been lost, scores more still exist, some as National Memorial sites, National Historic Landmarks, or National Historic Places. Award-winning historian Robin Lattimore explores the history of antebellum plantations in this concise guide to the working estates that dotted the U.S. landscape before the Civil War, many of which still remain. Whether Greek Revival, Federal, or Tidewater in style, antebellum plantations were grand and stately, reflecting the wealth and power of their often slave-owning landowners. From an examination of the architecture of antebellum plantations to a look at the plantation system and its effects on the South, Southern Plantations is a beautiful account of these windows to the past.
When one places 'Wednesday's Child' under the microscope it plainly reveals that Marcus Green was failing in the American way of life during the early 1970's, and chose to leave the Country of his birth , rather than to continue dwelling in the land which had brought about the demise of the three young black men whom he had known since childhood. Each of them had been drawn into the world of drugs and supposedly easy money , only to discover that all that really awaited them was an early ticket to the graveyard. Marcus choosing to span an ocean could not know what awaited him on the other side of that great expanse of water. Suddenly thrust into a culture as different as chalk is to cheese he had to adapt or perish. In a world where money, education, and social connections are enabled to bring even the most naive person safe harbor and protection, Marcus was bereft in every area. He truly became a child of providence and one dependent on the wind blowing in the right direction. This is as much about the sometimes invisible goodness of God, as it is about the visible kindness and open generosity of the elderly German woman who received him into her home, without an ulterior motive. Further to this tale of wonderment, it is also about innocent love, and how such love can be found with those outside of ones league, or realm of understanding, causing Marcus to challenge his personal strengths and weaknesses with a woman of unusual power, virtually on a daily basis. Also an underlying story of the sophisticated and worldly African American society living in Great Britain during the nineteen seventies, and how Marcus had to strap himself in for the jet set ride of his young life, which he had unexpectedly stumbled upon. Finally losing at love, yet gaining in prosperity and notoriety he is forced to return to the United States, ostensibly to bask in the limelight, but really to meet the true love of his life, and his real destiny as a human being.
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.
Learn what men, women, and children have worn—and why—in American history, beginning with the classical styles worn in the early American republic through the hoop skirts and ready-made clothes worn before the Civil War. Authors Ann Buermann Wass and Michelle Webb Fandrich provide information on fabrics, materials, and manufacturing; a discussion of levels of society, daily life, and dress; and the types of clothes worn by men, women, and children, including American Indians and enslaved people. The authors have painstakingly researched such primary sources as diaries, letters, and wills of the people of the time, in addition to secondary resources. Just a few of the topics include: • The constant problems of getting fabrics, such as wool, or cotton, in the late eighteenth centuries • The types of clothes that slave men, women, and children were allowed to wear • The beginnings of patterns and the mass production of clothing in the mid nineteenth century. The volume features numerous illustrations, helpful timelines, resource guides recommending websites, videos, and print publications, and extensive glossaries.
The great majority of the South's plantation homes have been destroyed over time, and many have long been forgotten. In Lost Plantations of the South, Marc R. Matrana weaves together photographs, diaries and letters, architectural renderings, and other rare documents to tell the story of sixty of these vanquished estates and the people who once called them home. From plantations that were destroyed by natural disaster such as Alabama's Forks of Cypress, to those that were intentionally demolished such as Seven Oaks in Louisiana and Mount Brilliant in Kentucky, Matrana resurrects these lost mansions. Including plantations throughout the South as well as border states, Matrana carefully tracks the histories of each from the earliest days of construction to the often contentious struggles to preserve these irreplaceable historic treasures. Lost Plantations of the South explores the root causes of demise and provides understanding and insight on how lessons learned in these sad losses can help prevent future preservation crises. Capturing the voices of masters and mistresses alongside those of slaves, and featuring more than one hundred elegant archival illustrations, this book explores the powerful and complex histories of these cardinal homes across the South.