You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
None
None
According to an oft repeated legend, during Christmas before the Civil War, all enslaved people in the American South enjoyed lengthy vacations of a week or more depending on how long an oversized “Yule log” burned in their master’s fireplace. As long as the log held out, slaves escaped heavy labor and their masters’ whips and enjoyed a rare freedom of movement to go and do what they wished as well as gorge themselves on food and drink they never got the rest of the year. No wonder they soaked those logs in swamps to make them burn even longer. But is it true? In this book historian Robert May takes readers on a detective caper as he investigates a story that reaches back to colonial...
Anglo-Americans wrestled with some profound cultural contradictions as they shifted from the hierarchical and patriarchal society of the seventeenth-century frontier to the modern and fluid class democracy of the mid-nineteenth century. How could traditional inequality be maintained in the socially leveling environment of the early colonial wilderness? And how could nineteenth-century Americans pretend to be equal in an increasingly unequal society? Bowing to Necessities argues that manners provided ritual solutions to these central cultural problems by allowing Americans to act out--and thus reinforce--power relations just as these relations underwent challenges. Analyzing the many sermons,...
None
None
This previously unpublished diary is the best-surviving firsthand account of life in Civil War-era Atlanta. Bookseller Samuel Pearce Richards (1824-1910) kept a diary for sixty-seven years. This volume excerpts the diary from October 1860, just before the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, through August 1865, when the Richards family returned to Atlanta after being forced out by Sherman's troops and spending a period of exile in New York City. The Richardses were among the last Confederate loyalists to leave Atlanta. Sam's recollections of the Union bombardment, the evacuation of the city, the looting of his store, and the influx of Yankee forces are riveting. Sam was a Unionist unti...