Product Description: In the troubled days before the American Civil War, both Northern protectionists and Southern free trade economists saw political economy as the key to understanding the natural laws on which every republican political order should be based...read more

Southern slaveholders proudly pronounced themselves orthodox Christians, who accepted responsibility for the welfare of the people who worked for them. They proclaimed that their slaves enjoyed a better and more secure life than any laboring class in the world. Now, did it not follow that the lives of laborers of all races across the world would be immeasurably improved by their enslavement? In the Old South but in no other slave society a doctrine emerged among leading clergymen, politicians, and intellectuals-- "Slavery in the Abstract," which declared enslavement the best possible condition for all labor regardless of race. They joined the Socialists, whom they studied, in believing that the free-labor system, wracked by worsening class warfare, was collapsing. A vital question: to what extent did the people of the several social classes of the South accept so extreme a doctrine? That question lies at the heart of this book.

Product Description: This landmark history of slavery in the South—a winner of the Bancroft Prize—challenged conventional views of slaves by illuminating the many forms of resistance to dehumanization that developed in slave society.Rather than emphasizing the cruelty and degradation of slavery, historian Eugene Genovese investigates the ways that slaves forced their owners to acknowledge their humanity through culture, music, and religion...read more

'This work is divided into five sections--'The Author at Work and Home,' 'On Place and Region,' 'On Fugitives, Agrarians, and New Critics,' 'On Individual Authors' and 'On Books and Schooling.' In the essays Montgomery discusses the importance of place in all serious literature, but especially in southern letters'--Provided by publisher.

Product Description: "Kingsley’s place in southern history and America’s endless debate over race, to say nothing of his astonishing life, is only now beginning to be appreciated and explored. . . . Dr. Stowell’s opening essay constitutes a splendid biographical and analytical introduction to the man and his work, and his editorial work in presenting these fascinating documents places professional historians and the general public deep in his debt...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The fall of the Confederacy proved traumatic for a people who fought with the belief that God was on their side. Yet, as Eugene D. Genovese writes in A Consuming Fire, Southern Christians continued to trust in the Lord's will. The churches had long defended "southern rights" and insisted upon the divine sanction for slavery, but they also warned that God was testing His people, who must bring slavery up to biblical standards or face the wrath of an angry God...read more

Product Description: In recent years American conservatism has found a new voice, a new way of picking up the political pieces left in the wake of liberal policies. But what seems innovative, Eugene Genovese shows us, may in fact have very old roots. Tracing a certain strain of conservatism to its sources in a rich southern tradition, his book introduces a revealing perspective on the politics of our day...read more

Product Description: In antebellum times slaveholders perceived themselves as thoroughly modern and moral men who were protecting human progress against the perversions spawned by the more radical aspects of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Space, place, distance and environment are readily understood as crucial components of the modern world. Their interaction has been equally important in the past in conditioning the histories of the peoples of the world. Yet fifteen years ago Edward Fox wrote, to general agreement: "History and geography were once assumed to be sister sciences so close in method and focus as to verge on representing two aspects of the single subjects...read more

Product Description: A seminal and original work that delves deeply into what slaveholders thought.

Examines the agricultural history of the ante bellum South in relation to social aspects of plantation slavery