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Crafting the Overseer's Image
The first book-length study of the overseer in four decades, Wiethoff's study bridges historical, legal, and rhetorical scholarship to present a provocative investigation into the multifaceted roles of this oft-forgotten figure in plantation society. Wiethoff canvasses the period from 1650 through 1865 and across a southern expanse that stretches to include the Upper and Deep South. Overseers left scant written evidence about their lives and times, but Wiethoff unearths characterizations constructed by friends and enemies, neighbors and strangers. He also mines the legal record to gauge the impact of legislative and case law rhetoric on public memory.
Brainwashed
“Black people are not dark-skinned white people,” says advertising visionary Tom Burrell. In fact, they are a lot more. They are survivors of the Middle Passage and centuries of humiliation and deprivation, who have excelled against the odds, constantly making a way out of “no way!” At this point in history, the idea of black inferiority should have had a “Going-Out-of-Business Sale.” After all, Barack Obama has reached the Promised Land. Yet, as Brainwashed: Erasing the Myth of Black Inferiority testifies, too much of black America is still wandering in the wilderness. In this powerful examination of “the greatest propaganda campaign of all time”—the masterful marketing of...
Double Character
In a groundbreaking study of the day-to-day law and culture of slavery, Ariela Gross investigates the local courtrooms of the Deep South where ordinary people settled their disputes over slaves. Buyers sued sellers for breach of warranty when they considered slaves to be physically or morally defective; owners sued supervisors who whipped or neglected slaves under their care. Double Character seeks to explain how communities dealt with an important dilemma raised by these trials: how could slaves who acted as moral agents be treated as commodities? Because these cases made the character of slaves a central legal question, slaves' moral agency intruded into the courtroom, often challenging th...
Fathers of Conscience
Fathers of Conscience examines high-court decisions in the antebellum South that involved wills in which white male planters bequeathed property, freedom, or both to women of color and their mixed-race children. These men, whose wills were contested by their white relatives, had used trusts and estates law to give their slave partners and children official recognition and thus circumvent the law of slavery. The will contests that followed determined whether that elevated status would be approved or denied by courts of law. Bernie D. Jones argues that these will contests indicated a struggle within the elite over race, gender, and class issues--over questions of social mores and who was truly family. Judges thus acted as umpires after a man's death, deciding whether to permit his attempts to provide for his slave partner and family. Her analysis of these differing judicial opinions on inheritance rights for slave partners makes an important contribution to the literature on the law of slavery in the United States.
Before the Rhetorical Presidency
Since its identification in 1981, the rhetorical presidency has drawn both defenders and critics. Chief among those critical of the practice is political theorist Jeffrey K. Tulis, whose 1987 book, The Rhetorical Presidency, helped popularize the construct and set forth a sustained analysis of the baleful effects that have allegedly accompanied the shift from a “constitutional” presidency to a “rhetorical” one. Tulis locates this shift in the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, arguing that the rhetorical presidency is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Yet not all scholars agree with this assessment. Before the Rhetorical Presidency is an attempt to investigate how U...
A Journey in Brazil
A Journey in Brazil: Henry Washington Hilliard and the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society is an investigative account of the vital career of Henry Washington Hilliard, who had a long and complicated relationship with slavery. A native Southerner, he was a former slave owner and Confederate soldier, but as a member of Congress Hilliard strongly opposed secession. Hilliard supported the constitutional legality of slavery; however, as a moderate he acknowledged the status quo and warned of the dangers of radical positions concerning the issue. Throughout a diverse career that spanned six decades, Hilliard’s personal challenges, moderated by his faith in Divine Providence, eventually allowed him t...
Machiavellian Rhetoric
Historians of political thought have argued that the real Machiavelli is the republican thinker and theorist of civic virtù. Machiavellian Rhetoric argues in contrast that Renaissance readers were right to see Machiavelli as a Machiavel, a figure of force and fraud, rhetorical cunning and deception. Taking the rhetorical Machiavel as a point of departure, Victoria Kahn argues that this figure is not simply the result of a naïve misreading of Machiavelli but is attuned to the rhetorical dimension of his political theory in a way that later thematic readings of Machiavelli are not. Her aim is to provide a revised history of Renaissance Machiavellism, particularly in England: one that sees th...
Old Age and American Slavery
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.
Postracial Fantasies and Zombies
This book understands the postracial as a genre--like the zombie apocalypse--that signals a disturbance in society that is felt as terrifying and exciting. The postracial is repetitive and reproduces blackened biothreat bodies, rituals of securitization, and fantasies of the reclamation of white masculine sovereignty. Eric King Watts examines key moments when Blackness became an object of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, preparing the "scientific" and philosophical ground for interpreting zombie lore. The book treats the "Greater Caribbean" as a transformative space in which an antiblack infrastructure arose and interrogates the US's militarized domination of Haiti that was the context in which the zombie emerged. Watts traces variations of the form and function of the zombie to contemplate how it matters to our contemporary struggles with racism and pandemic policies.
A Degraded Caste of Society
A Degraded Caste of Society traces the origins of twenty-first-century cases of interracial violence to the separate and unequal protection principles of the criminal law of enslavement in the southern United States. Andrew T. Fede explains how antebellum appellate court opinions and statutes, when read in a context that includes newspaper articles and trial court and census records, extended this doctrine to the South’s free Black people, consigning them to what South Carolina justice John Belton O’Neall called “a degraded caste of society,” in which they were “in no respect, on a perfect equality with the white man.” This written law either criminalized Black insolence or privi...
