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207 pages

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A survey and interpretive study of one of the defining issues in America's past Americans have vigorously debated and interpreted the role of slavery in American life for as long as enslaved people and their descendants have lived in North America. Contemporaries and later writers and scholars up to the present day have explored the meaning of slavery as a system of labor, an ideological paradox in a "free" political and social order, a violent mode of racial exploitation, and a global system of human commodification and trafficking.To fully understand the various ways in which slavery has been depicted and described is a difficult task. Like any other important historical issue, this requires a thorough grasp of the underlying history, methodological developments over time, and the contemporary politics and culture of historians' own times. And the case of slavery is further complicated, of course, by changes in the legal and political status of African Americans in the 20th and 21st centuries.Slavery: Interpreting American History, like other volumes in the Interpreting American History series, surveys interpretations of important historical eras and events, examining both the intellectual shifts that have taken place and various catalysts that drove those shifts. While the depth of Americans' historiographical engagement with slavery is not surprising given the turbulent history of race in America, the range and sheer volume of writing on the subject, spanning more than two centuries, can be overwhelming. Editors Aaron Astor and Thomas Buchanan, together with a team of expert contributors, highlight here the key debates and conceptual shifts that have defined the field. The volume will be an especially helpful guide for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, professional historians new to the field, and other readers interested in the study of American slavery.

Sujets

Sociologie, société et politique

USA

Social group

History of the Americas

États-Unis

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Publié par	The Kent State University Press
Date de parution	04 mai 2021
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781631014499
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1700€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Slavery
INTERPRETING AMERICAN HISTORY
Brian D. McKnight and James S. Humphreys, series editors
T HE A GE OF A NDREW J ACKSON
Edited by Brian D. McKnight and James S. Humphreys
T HE N EW D EAL AND THE G REAT D EPRESSION
Edited by Aaron D. Purcell
R ECONSTRUCTION
Edited by John David Smith
T HE N EW S OUTH
Edited by James S. Humphreys
S LAVERY
Edited by Aaron Astor and Thomas C. Buchanan
SLAVERY
INTERPRETING AMERICAN HISTORY
Edited by A ARON A STOR AND T HOMAS C. B UCHANAN
© 2021 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
A LL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Catalog Number 2021005744
ISBN 978-1-60635-422-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Astor, Aaron, 1973- editor. | Buchanan, Thomas C., 1967- editor.
Title: Slavery: interpreting American history / edited by Aaron Astor and Thomas C. Buchanan.
Other titles: Interpreting American history series.
Description: Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2021. | Series: Interpreting American history | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021005744 | ISBN 9781606354223 (paperback) | ISBN 9781631014499 (epub) | ISBN 9781631014505 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Slavery--United States--Historiography. | Slavery--United States--History. | African Americans--Social conditions.
Classification: LCC E441 .S6355 2021 | DDC 306.3/620973--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005744
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Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1 Slavery Historiography: Overview of Contemporaries and Historians
Aaron Astor
2 American Slavery and the Economy
Calvin Schermerhorn
3 American Slavery and Politics
Ryan A. Quintana
4 American Slavery and Gender
Katherine Chilton
5 American Slavery and Families
Sean Condon
6 American Slavery and Resistance
Walter C. Rucker
7 American Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade
Colleen A. Vasconcellos
8 American Slavery and Free African Americans
Kelly Birch and Thomas C. Buchanan
9 American Slavery and Emancipation
Aaron Astor
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Foreword
Interpreting American History Series
Of all the history courses taught on college campuses, historiography is one of the most challenging. The historiographic essays most often available are frequently too specialized for broad teaching and sometimes too obtuse for the average undergraduate student. Every day, frustrated scholars and students search for writings that offer both breadth and depth in their approach to the historiography of different eras and movements. As young scholars grow more intellectually mature, they remain wedded to the lessons taught within the pages of historiographic studies. As graduate students prepare for seminar presentations, comprehensive examinations, and dissertation work, they often wonder why that void has remained. Then, when they complete the studies and enter the profession, they find themselves less intellectually connected to those ideas of which they once showed a mastery, and they again ask about the lack of meaningful and succinct studies of historiography … and the circle continues.
Within the pages of this series, innovative young scholars discuss the different interpretations of the important eras and events of history, not only focusing on the intellectual shifts that have taken place, but on the various catalysts that drove these shifts. It is the hope of the series editors that these volumes fill those aforementioned intellectual voids and speak to the young scholars in a way that will supplement their other learning; that the same pages that speak to undergraduate students will also remind the established scholar of his or her historiographic roots; that a difficult subject is made more accessible to curious minds; that ideas are not lost among the details offered within the classroom.
B RIAN D. M C K NIGHT , the University of Virginia’s College at Wise J AMES S. H UMPHREYS , Murray State University
Introduction
In the 1979 preface to the second edition of The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South , historian John Blassingame confessed his puzzlement over a source’s portrayal of a Giles County, Tennessee, slave preacher named George Bentley. The African Repository in 1859 described Bentley as a “regular Southern pro-slavery person” and “preacher in charge” of a congregation of local slaveholders. 1 Blassingame had read about Bentley before but assumed that this account was a hoax or otherwise unreliable. The Repository ’s depiction of Bentley as “unwilling to be sold out of his master’s family” certainly did not reflect the autonomous communities of resistance that Blassingame had emphasized in his original 1972 publication of Slave Community. 2 Where could a man like Bentley fit within Blassingame’s narrative of collective struggle and defiance?
To understand a figure like George Bentley meant coming to grips with the “intriguing, complex, opaque” institution of slavery as a whole. “The more the student of the peculiar institution reads,” Blassingame wrote in the second edition, “the more the conviction grows that antebellum Southerners persisted in deviating from the beliefs and behavioral patterns historians have ascribed to them.” 3 In fact, Blassingame’s original thesis had been critiqued from the beginning. In the years following the first edition’s publication, scholars like Herbert Gutman, Leslie Howard Owens, George Rawick, Eugene Genovese, Albert Raboteau, Stanley Engerman, and Earl Thorpe challenged Blassingame’s depiction of singular and unrelenting community resistance. Responding to these critics, Blassingame examined newer primary sources on African American religion and folk life to better understand and contextualize a figure like George Bentley, who had negotiated his own position within the slave system. Blassingame also began to look more critically at white antebellum religious institutions to better assess relationships like Bentley’s with the white community of Lynn Creek, Tennessee. Over the course of the 1970s, one of the giants in the study of slavery found himself confronting a field that was changing rapidly in response to newer methodologies, newer sources, and newer contemporary political realities.
The study of any field’s historiography can be daunting, in that it requires a thorough understanding of the underlying history, methodological developments over time, and contemporary politics and culture of historians’ own times. This is especially the case with the historiography of slavery, which reflects, among other things, changes in the legal and political status of African Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Americans have vigorously debated and interpreted the role of slavery in American life since enslaved people first landed on North American shores and long since after. Contemporaries and later writers and scholars up to the present day have explored the meaning of slavery as a system of labor, an ideological paradox in an ostensibly free political and social order, a violent mode of racial exploitation, and a global system of human commodification and trafficking.
Although the depth of Americans’ historiographical engagement with slavery is not surprising given the turbulent history of race in America, the range and sheer volume of the writing on the subject, spanning over two centuries, can be overwhelming to someone encountering the field for the first time. Slavery: Interpreting American History introduces key themes of this historiography at a level suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, professional historians new to the field, and other readers interested in the study of American slavery. Whereas not every historian of American slavery is included in the pages that follow, contributors have worked to highlight the key debates and conceptual shifts that have defined the field. Aaron Astor begins with an overview of the historiography of slavery, highlighting the key interpretive developments over time. Calvin Schermerhorn then addresses historians’ assessments of the economics of American slavery, and especially its role within global capitalism. Ryan Quintana’s chapter considers how historians have interpreted the politics of slavery from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Katherine Chilton examines the use of gender as a category of historical analysis of slavery, an approach that did not emerge in full until the 1980s. Sean Condon explores the especially contested historiography of slavery and the family, with many of its debates directly affected by contemporary politics of the Black family. Walter Rucker’s chapter reviews the literature on slave resistance, taking into account the work of scholars like Blassingame as well as those who draw explicit comparisons with other areas of the Black diaspora. Likewise, Colleen Vasconcellos incorporates Atlantic world scholarship as she takes the measure of the historiography of the Atlantic slave trade. Kelly Birch and Thomas Buchanan assess the literature on free African Americans and their complex relationship to slave society. Finally, Aaron Astor surveys the historiography of emancipation during the American Civil War, and especially the debates over the roles enslaved people played in their own liberation.
These chapters certainly do not encompass all themes of slavery studies. For example, there are no specific chapters dedicated to varieties of labor, constructions of race, or the development of an internal slave trade; these and other key themes are incorporated into the chapters as appropriate. Note also that this volume is dedicated to the stu