San Antonio College Library

Introduction: Mr. Mellon's illuminating presentation of the views of some of the founding fathers on slavery and the Negro exposes the raw nerve of American democratic society. If the central theme of the American Revolution was freedom and equality, the impact of that epochal struggle upon the black man was at best peripheral. The Declaration of Independence had dedicated the Revolution to the proposition that "all men are created equal." There were...

"Slavery was a social and an economic institution of such power that it sustained and extended an economic system whose demands went far to determine the domestic and foreign policy of the "agrarian" party in our early history. For the agrarian politics of Jefferson, while possibly benefiting the small freeholder, very closely served the interests of the plantation system, at least as the planters conceived their interests"--From dust jacket.

"This book examines the home and leisure life of planters in the antebellum American South. Based on a lifetime of research by the late Eugene Genovese (1930-2012), with an introduction and epilogue by Douglas Ambrose, The Sweetness of Life presents a penetrating study of slaveholders and their families in both intimate and domestic settings: at home; attending the theatre; going on vacations to spas and springs; throwing parties; hunting; gambling;...

"This ... social history of the slaveholding South marks a turn in our understanding of antebellum America and the coming of the Civil War. Oakes's ... analysis breaks the myth that slaveholders were a paternalistic aristocracy dedicated to the values of honor, race, and section. Instead they emerge as having much in common with their entrepreneurial counterparts in the North: they were committed to free-market commercialism and political democracy...

"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage -- and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child -- but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation...

"Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives--including from before birth to after death--in the American domestic slave trades. Covering the full "life cycle" (including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior...

"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...

"A sourcebook of historical documents and texts, some by white authors but the majority by black authors"--Anthologies of African American writing website, viewed January 5, 2024.

"Eighteenth-century Jamaica, Britain's largest and most valuable slave-owning colony, relied on a brutal system of slave management to maintain its tenuous social order. Trevor Burnard provides insight into Jamaica's vibrant but harsh African and European cultures with the first comprehensive examination of the extraordinary diaries of plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood." "In Burnard's hands, Thistlewood's diary reveals a great deal not only about...