Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South demonstrates the significance of internal divisions, comparison, and conflict in shaping gender and status in slave communities of the American South. David Stefan Doddington seeks to move beyond unilateral discussions of slave masculinity, and instead demonstrates how the repressions of slavery were both personal and political. Rather than automatically support one another against an emasculatory white society, Doddington explores how enslaved people negotiated identities in relation to one another, through comparisons between men and different forms of manhood held up for judgment. An examination of the framework in which enslaved people crafted identities demonstrates the fluidity of gender as a social and cultural phenomenon that defied monolithic models of black masculinity, solidarity, and victimization. Focusing on work, authority, honor, sex, leisure, and violence, this book is a full-length treatment of the idea of 'masculinity' among slave communities of the Old South.

This book focuses on slave ownership in Virginia as it was practiced by a variety of institutions.

Intended for high school and college students, teachers, adult educational groups, and general readers, this book is of value to them primarily as a learning and reference tool. It also provides a critical perspective on the actions and legacies of ordinary and elite blacks and their non-black allies.

This book explores how age shaped slavery as an institution and how the aging process affected the enslaved and enslaver alike. It challenges static models of enslaved resistance and enslaver dominance by emphasizing intergenerational conflict in the American South. Key reading for students and scholars of slavery in the US.

A new interpretation of the Underground Railroad that places violence at the center of the story.

Using slave trials from antebellum Virginia, Christopher H. Bouton offers the first in-depth examination of physical confrontations between slaves and whites. These extraordinary acts of violence brought the ordinary concerns of enslaved Virginians into focus. Enslaved men violently asserted their masculinity, sought to protect themselves and their loved ones from punishment, and carved out their own place within southern honor culture. Enslaved women resisted sexual exploitation and their mistresses. By attacking southern efforts to control their sexuality and labor, bondswomen sought better lives for themselves and undermined white supremacy. Physical confrontations revealed the anxieties that lay at the heart of white antebellum Virginians and threatened the very foundations of the slave regime itself. While physical confrontations could not overthrow the institution of slavery, they helped the enslaved set limits on their owners’ exploitation. They also afforded the enslaved the space necessary to create lives as free from their owners’ influence as possible. When masters and mistresses continually intruded into the lives of their slaves, they risked provoking a violent backlash. Setting Slavery’s Limits explores how slaves of all ages and backgrounds resisted their oppressors and risked everything to fight back.

Recent scholarship on slavery has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition. Camp discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp's insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties ("frolics") become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts. The culture of opposition created by enslaved women's acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.