Becoming Free in the Cotton South

Becoming Free in the Cotton South

by Susan Eva O'Donovan
Becoming Free in the Cotton South
Becoming Free in the Cotton South

Becoming Free in the Cotton South

by Susan Eva O'Donovan

eBook

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Overview

This book challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, O'Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674041608
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 07/01/2009
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 384
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Susan O'Donovan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Memphis

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Doing the Master’s Bidding 2. Civil War in the Land of Goshen 3. Finding Freedom’s Edges 4. Black Women and the Domestication of Free Labor 5. To Make a Laborers’ State Coda: That Strange Land of Shadows Notes Index

What People are Saying About This

James C. Scott

As an exposition of how land, labor, and gender structured a hard slavery and a 'hard' emancipation as well, O'Donovan's analytical narrative is hard to beat. An exceptionally rich and textured study that never loses sight of the larger stakes.
James C. Scott, Yale University

Ira Berlin

The seismic shifts set in motion by the emancipation reached into every corner of the American South. In exploring one small corner, Becoming Free reveals how the earthquake that accompanied freedom's arrival shifted gender relations in the household, field, and hustings and in the process changed much more. Susan O'Donovan's small story is a big story, an original one, and an important one.
Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone and Generations of Captivity

Stanley L. Engerman

Susan O'Donovan details the major changes for the slave and free black population of Southwest Georgia in the years of settlement, of the Civil War, and of the economic and political adaptations to emancipation. Of particular importance are the different impacts these changes had upon black men and black women, and upon the relations between belief and behavior in slavery and then in freedom.
Stanley L. Engerman, University of Rochester

Orlando Patterson

With meticulous and probing scholarship, O'Donovan's work acutely demonstrates the tragic continuities between slavery and freedom in the American South. Her analysis of the intersection of ethno-racial, economic and gender domination immediately after slavery illuminates a crucial period in African American history and radically alters conventional scholarly interpretations of the development of the black family. This exquisitely accomplished and engagingly written work is surely one of the most important studies in African American and Southern histories to appear in years.

Orlando Patterson, author of Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries

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