Remembering Enslavement explores plantation museums as sites for contesting and reforming public interpretations of slavery in the American South. Emerging out of a three-year National Science Foundation grant (2014–17), the book turns a critical eye toward the growing inclusion of the formerly enslaved within these museums, specifically examining advances but also continuing inequalities in how they narrate and memorialize the formerly enslaved. Using assemblage theory as a framework, Remembering Enslavement offers an innovative approach for studying heritage sites, retelling and remapping the ways that slavery and the enslaved are included in southern plantation museums. It examines multiple plantation sites across geographic areas, considering the experiences of a diversity of actors: tourists, museum managers/owners, and tour guides/interpreters. This approach allows for an understanding of regional variations among plantation museums, narratives, and performances, as well as more in-depth study of the plantation tour experience and public interpretations. The authors conclude the book with a set of questions designed to help professionals reassemble plantation museum narratives and landscapes to more justly position the formerly enslaved at their center.

Working Cures explores black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts.

Provides information about what daily life was like on a southern plantation, including how slaves worked and dressed and what they ate.

"As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation in early British America was a serious and brutal enterprise. Beyond resources and weapons, a plantation required a significant force of cruel and rapacious men men who, as Trevor Burnard sees it, lacked any better options for making money. In the contentious Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic because to speak bluntly it worked. These economically successful and ethically monstrous plantations required racial divisions to exist, but their successes were always measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Burnard argues that the best example of plantations functioning as intended is not those found in the fractious and poor North American colonies, but those in their booming and integrated commercial hub, Jamaica. Sure to be controversial, this book is a major intervention in the scholarship on slavery, economic development, and political power in early British America, mounting a powerful and original argument that boldly challenges historical orthodoxy."--

In the first-ever comprehensive analysis of violence among enslaved people in the antebellum South, Jeff Forret challenges persistent notions of slave communities as sites of unwavering harmony and solidarity. Though existing scholarship shows that intraracial black violence did not reach high levels until after Reconstruction, contemporary records bear witness to its regular presence among enslaved populations. Using a vast array of primary sources, Slave against Slave explores the roots of and motivations for such violence and the ways in which slaves, masters, churches, and civil and criminal laws worked to hold it in check. Far from focusing on violence alone, the book also deepens understanding of morality among the enslaved, revealing how they sought to prevent violence and punish those who engaged in it. With this groundbreaking work, Forret has opened a new line of inquiry into the study of American slavery.

How is slavery presented at the public and private plantation museums in the American South, almost 150 years after the Civil War? Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small investigated this question in Virginia, Georgia, and Louisiana by touring more than one hundred plantation museums; twenty locations organized and run by African Americans; and eighty general history sites. Their findings indicate that the experience and legacy of slavery is still inadequately presented within the larger discourse surrounding race, racism, and national identity. The vast majority of slavery sites construct narratives of history that valorize a white elite of the pre-emancipation South and trivialize the experience of slavery for both enslaved people and their enslavers. Through systematic analysis of richly textured data, the authors of Representations of Slavery have developed a typology of primary representational/discursive strategies used to discuss slavery and the enslaved. They clearly demonstrate how these strategies are linked to representations and practices in the larger social and political arenas. Eichstedt and Small found counter narratives at sites organized and staffed by African Americans, and a small number of white-organized sites have made efforts to incorporate African American experiences of slavery as part of their presentations. But the predominant framework of the “white-centric exhibition narrative” persists, and the authors draw from contemporary literature on racialization, museums, cultural studies, and collective memory to make a case for public debate and intervention.

This bold and precedent-setting study details numerous slave rebellions against white masters, drawn from planters' records, government petitions, newspapers, and other documents. The reactions of white slave owners are also documented. 15 halftones.