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William Kauffman Scarborough has produced a work of incomparable scope and depth, offering the challenge to see afresh one of the most powerful groups in American history—the wealthiest southern planters who owned 250 or more slaves in the census years of 1850 and 1860. The identification and tabulation in every slaveholding state of these lords of economic, social, and political influence reveals a highly learned class of men who set the tone for southern society while also involving themselves in the wider world of capitalism. Scarborough examines the demographics of elite families, the educational philosophy and religiosity of the nabobs, gender relations in the Big House, slave management methods, responses to secession, and adjustment to the travails of Reconstruction and an alien postwar world.
Muslims beyond the Arab World explores the vibrant tradition of writing African languages using the modified Arabic script ('Ajami) alongside the rise of the Muridiyya Sufi order in Senegal. The book demonstrates how the development of the 'Ajami literary tradition is entwined with the flourishing of the Muridiyya into one of sub-Saharan Africa's most powerful and dynamic Sufi organizations. It offers a close reading of the rich hagiographic and didactic written, recited, and chanted 'Ajami texts of the Muridiyya, works largely unknown to scholars. The texts describe the life and Sufi odyssey of the order's founder, Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba Mbakke (1853-1927), his conflicts with local rulers and ...
This definitive study of the U.S. Consular Service examines its history from the Revolutionary War until its integration with the Foreign Service in 1924. As a British colony, Americans relied on the British consular system to take care of their sailors and merchants. But after the Revolution they scrambled to create an American service. While the American diplomatic establishment was confined to the world’s major capitals, U.S. consular posts proliferated to most of the major ports where the expanding American merchant marine called. Mostly untrained political appointees, each consul was a lonely individual relying on his native wits to provide help to distressed Americans. Appointments w...
In this magisterial history of intellectual life, Michael O'Brien analyzes the lives and works of antebellum Southern thinkers and reintegrates the South into the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history. O'Brien finds that the evolution of Southern intellectual life paralleled and modified developments across the Atlantic by moving from a late Enlightenment sensibility to Romanticism and, lastly, to an early form of realism. Volume 1 describes the social underpinnings of the Southern intellect by examining patterns of travel and migration; the formation of ideas on race, gender, ethnicity, locality, and class; and the structures of discourse, expressed in manuscripts a...