San Antonio College Library

"Owens' fascinating study explores the personality and behavior of the slave within the context of what it meant to be a slave. Based on a variety of plantation records, diaries, slave narratives, travelers' accounts, and other items bearing on the slave's experiences in his relationships to slaveholders, it concentrates on the years between 1770 and 1865"--Publisher's description.

"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...

Covers the effects of dealing with slavery on the growth of the federal government: the navy grew to intercept slave ships after 1808, the army grew to clear Indians out of the way to keep slave markets stable, the federal government rented slaves, and a new kind of partnership between the government and the private sector emerged to found the colony of Liberia. Many scholars believe that the existence of slavery stymied the development of the American...

"The idea of preparing this book developed as I worked on my dissertation on slave archaeology. It became increasingly apparent to me as I did my own work that most of the research which was being done by others on the subject was being published in serials of very limited distribution, seriously inhibiting the disclosure of findings, especially to students and scholars in related fields. What was desperately needed, I realized, was a volume surveying...

"In When Slavery Was Called Freedom, author John Patrick Daly astutely dissects the evangelical defense of slavery at the heart of the nineteenth century's sectional crisis. He brings a new understanding to the role of religion in the Old South and the ways in which religion was put to use in the Confederacy. Southern evangelicals argued that their unique region was destined for greatness, and their rhetoric gave expression and a degree of coherence...