A01=Whitney Nell Stewart
African American women
Alabama
antebellum southern history
Author_Whitney Nell Stewart
Category=JBS
Category=JBSL
Category=NHB
domestic life of enslaved and enslaving southerners
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Gaineswood Plantation
historic plantation sites
material culture of slavery and plantations
Montpelier Plantation
nineteenth-century Black southerners
nineteenth-century southern history
North Carolina
plantation architecture in the US South
plantation life in the US South
public history
race relations in the antebellum South
Redcliffe Plantation
slave families
Slavery in the US South
South Carolina
Stagville Plantation
Texas
Varner-Hogg Plantation
Virginia
Product details
- ISBN 9781469675671
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 155 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 14 Nov 2023
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The cultural memory of plantations in the Old South has long been clouded by myth. A recent reckoning with the centrality of slavery to the US national story, however, has shifted the meaning of these sites. Plantations are no longer simply seen as places of beauty and grandiose hospitality; their reality as spaces of enslavement, exploitation, and violence is increasingly at the forefront of our scholarly and public narratives. Yet even this reckoning obscures what these sites meant to so many forced to live and labor on them: plantations were Black homes as much as white.
Insightfully reading the built environment of plantations, considering artifact fragments found in excavations of slave dwellings, and drawing on legal records and plantation owners' papers, Whitney Nell Stewart illuminates how enslaved people struggled to make home amid innumerable constraints and obstacles imposed by white southerners. By exploring the material remnants of the past, Stewart demonstrates how homemaking was a crucial part of the battle over slavery and freedom, a fight that continues today in consequential confrontations over who has the right to call this nation home.
Insightfully reading the built environment of plantations, considering artifact fragments found in excavations of slave dwellings, and drawing on legal records and plantation owners' papers, Whitney Nell Stewart illuminates how enslaved people struggled to make home amid innumerable constraints and obstacles imposed by white southerners. By exploring the material remnants of the past, Stewart demonstrates how homemaking was a crucial part of the battle over slavery and freedom, a fight that continues today in consequential confrontations over who has the right to call this nation home.
Whitney Nell Stewart is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas.
