The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders / Edition 1

by James Oakes

Overview

"A sweeping and spirited history of Southern slaveholders."—David Herbert Donald

This pathbreaking social history of the slaveholding South marks a turn in our understanding of antebellum America and the coming of the Civil War. Oakes's bracing 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 for white males. The Civil War was not an inevitable conflict between civilizations on different paths but the crack-up of a single system, the result of people and events.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393317053
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/17/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

James Oakes is one of our foremost Civil War historians and a two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize for his works on the politics of abolition. He teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Editorial Reviews

"Invaluable."

|Los Angeles Times