Even while slavery existed, Americans debated slavery. Was it a profitable and healthy institution? If so, for whom? The abolition of slavery in 1865 did not end this debate, and it still remains among the most hotly disputed topics in American history. Smith outlines the main contours of this debate, summarizes the contending viewpoints, and weighs the relative importance, strengths and weaknesses of the various interpretations. This book introduces an important topic in American history in a manner that is accessible to students.
Even while slavery existed, Americans debated slavery. Was it a profitable and healthy institution? If so, for whom? The abolition of slavery in 1865 ...
The Old South is a collection of primary documents and previously published essays introducing students to recent themes found in scholarship on the social and cultural history of the Old South. The documents are drawn directly from the essays not only to vividly illustrate the events, but also to show students how historians construct arguments based on archival evidence. Smith introduces the collection with a detailed essay, and provides study questions, suggestions for further reading, a map, and a chronology of significant events creating a highly useful student-friendly reader.
The Old South is a collection of primary documents and previously published essays introducing students to recent themes found in scholarship o...
The Old South is a collection of primary documents and previously published essays introducing students to recent themes found in scholarship on the social and cultural history of the Old South. The documents are drawn directly from the essays not only to vividly illustrate the events, but also to show students how historians construct arguments based on archival evidence. Smith introduces the collection with a detailed essay, and provides study questions, suggestions for further reading, a map, and a chronology of significant events creating a highly useful student-friendly reader.
The Old South is a collection of primary documents and previously published essays introducing students to recent themes found in scholarship o...
Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy's reliance on a premodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners--particularly masters and their slaves--came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival sources, Smith demonstrates that white southern slaveholders began to incorporate this new sense of time in the 1830s....
Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging tradition...
Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of history, Mark M. Smith contends that to understand what it meant to be northern or southern, slave or free--to understand sectionalism and the attitudes toward modernity that led to the Civil War--we must consider how antebellum Americans comprehended the sounds and silences they heard.
Smith explores how northerners and southerners perceived the sounds associated with antebellum developments including the market revolution, industrialization, westward expansion, and abolitionism. In northern modernization, southern slaveholders...
Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of history, Mark M. Smith contends that to understand what it meant to be northern or southern, slav...
"Hearing History" is a long-needed introduction to the basic tenets of what is variously termed historical acoustemology, auditory culture, or aural history. Gathering twenty-one of the field s most important writings, this volume will deepen and broaden our understanding of changing perceptions of sound and hearing and the ongoing education of our senses. The essays stimulate thinking on key questions: What is aural history? Why has vision tended to triumph over hearing in historical accounts? How might we begin to reclaim the sounds of the past?
With theoretical and practical essays on...
"Hearing History" is a long-needed introduction to the basic tenets of what is variously termed historical acoustemology, auditory culture, or aura...
The Slave Power, John E. Cairnes's seminal work on slavery, was widely acclaimed upon publication in 1862 as a brilliant attempt both to explain the essential cause of the American Civil War and to shape European policy concerning the struggle. It remains among the most important works on the political economy of Southern slavery. When Cairnes-one of the nineteenth century's preeminent classical liberal economists-characterized Southern slavery as inefficient and backward, his opinions carried enormous weight, earning him applause in the North and castigation in the slave- holding South....
The Slave Power, John E. Cairnes's seminal work on slavery, was widely acclaimed upon publication in 1862 as a brilliant attempt both to explain the e...
In the fall of 1739, as many as one hundred enslaved African and African Americans living within twenty miles of Charleston joined forces to strike down their white owners and march en masse toward Spanish Florida and freedom. More than sixty whites and thirty slaves died in the violence that followed. Among the most important slave revolts in colonial America, the Stono Rebellion also ranks as South Carolina's largest slave insurrection and one of the bloodiest uprisings in American history. Significant for the fear it cast among lowcountry slaveholders and for the repressive slave laws...
In the fall of 1739, as many as one hundred enslaved African and African Americans living within twenty miles of Charleston joined forces to strike do...
For at least two centuries, argues Mark Smith, white southerners used all of their senses--not just their eyes--to construct racial difference and define race. His provocative analysis, extending from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century, shows how whites of all classes used the artificial binary of "black" and "white" to justify slavery and erect the political, legal, and social structure of segregation.
Based on painstaking research, How Race Is Made is a highly original, always frank, and often disturbing book. After enslaved Africans were initially brought to...
For at least two centuries, argues Mark Smith, white southerners used all of their senses--not just their eyes--to construct racial difference and def...
Writing the American Past reproduces dozens of untranscribed, handwritten documents, offering students the opportunity to transcribe, decipher, and interpret primary sources.
Documents include diary entries from Massachusetts in the 1690s, a woman detailing the Great Awakening, an eighteenth-century treaty with Native Americans, a journal describing antebellum train travel, and a letter by a slave
Skillfully teaches students to engage with the raw material of pre-1877 US history: the written document
An introduction and headnotes to each document...
Writing the American Past reproduces dozens of untranscribed, handwritten documents, offering students the opportunity to transcribe, decipher,...
