San Antonio College Library

This 1939 musical about plantation life in the antebellum South features lyrics by the great African-American poet Langston Hughes. The movie is a curious period piece with a somewhat unrealistic attitude toward the treatment of African-American slaves, but the perspective is fascinating and the music and singing memorable.

This interpretation of the African-American experience in the South emphasizes the evolution of slavery over time and the emergence of a rich, hybrid African-American culture.

By examining the mutual influence of history and folk culture, Shared Traditions reveals the essence of southern culture in the complex and dynamic interactions of descendants of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans. The book covers a broad spectrum of southern folkgroups, folklore expressions, and major themes of southern history, including antebellum society, slavery, the coming of the Civil War, economic modernization in the Appalachians and...

Centers on the extended visit of Helen Wentworth, a New England teacher, to a childhood friend's plantation, where she witnesses African slaves' arrivals and their sale and gross mistreatment at the hands of coffee and sugar planters. Juanita is a beautiful mulatta slave with whom the plantation owner's son falls in love. Extending the tradition of Gothic fiction in the Americas, Mann's novel raises questions about the relation of slavery in the Caribbean...