HISTORY 605: READINGS IN AMERICAN SLAVERY
UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI
FALL 2012
Mondays: 4:00-6:30 P.M.
326 Bishop Hall
Professor Anne Twitty
303 Bishop Hall
Office Hours: Wednesdays, 3:00-5:00 P.M. and by appointment
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This graduate reading course will provide students with an intensive
introduction to the history and historiography of slavery in colonial America and the United
States with an eye toward placing the institution in a broader Atlantic context when possible.
Reading assignments are significant and students are expected to engage in meaningful debate
and discussion. Each student will prepare a 15-20 minute presentation designed to jump start
class discussion once during the semester. In their presentations, students should briefly
summarize the major issues at stake and pose a series of discussion questions.
Students will write reviews of two books chosen from the recommended reading lists or
suggested by the student and approved by the instructor. Reviews should be no more than 1,250
words or approximately five double-spaced pages. They should briefly summarize the argument
and content of the book under review and, more importantly, evaluate the author’s treatment of
the subject. If possible, each review should seek to place the book in the context of the course’s
assigned readings. The final writing assignment, a review essay of no more than 2,500 words or
approximately ten double-spaced pages, will seek to place two books into dialogue with one
another, using review essays in works like The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York
Times Review of Books, and Reviews in American History as a guide.
Students are expected to have a basic understanding of the history of slavery in colonial America
and the antebellum United States. If this is not the case, students will need to supplement their
knowledge of the subject with one of the two widely accepted syntheses:
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).
WEEK ONE  AUGUST 20
INTRODUCTIONS
WEEK TWO  AUGUST 27
THE NEW SOCIAL HISTORY AND THE HISTORIGRAPHY OF SLAVERY
Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
Recommended Reading:
Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1959).
Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro
Slavery (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1974).
U.B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1940).
Kenneth Stamp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York: Knopf,
1963).
WEEK THREE  SEPTEMBER 3
LABOR DAY  NO CLASS
FIELD TRIP TO BURNS BELFRY  DATE TBA
Ira Berlin, “American Slavery in History and Memory,” The Journal of American History 90
(March 2004): 1251-1268.
WEEK FOUR  SEPTEMBER 10
THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE
Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American
Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly 53 (1996): 251-288.
Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis,” The Journal of African
History 23 (1982), 473-501.
Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Recommended Reading:
Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern
(London: Verso, 1997).
Philip D. Curtain, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: Wisconsin University Press,
1972).
Joseph Inikori and Stanley Engerman, eds. The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies,
Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1992).
David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987).
David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York: Basic
Books, 2002).
Hebert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1985).
Markus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Peguin Books, 2008).
Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University
Press, 1972).
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John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Eric Williams, Slavery and Capitalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
WEEK FIVE  SEPTEMBER 17
THE COLONIAL SOUTH
Edmund Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” The Journal of American
History 59 (June 1972): 5-29.
Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and
Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Recommended Reading:
T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern
Shore, 1640-1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole
Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1992).
Allen Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake,
1680-1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975).
Mechal Sobel, The World they Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century
Virginia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
Betty Wood, The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1997).
Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono
Rebellion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974).
WEEK SIX  SEPTEMBER 24
THE COLONIAL NORTH
Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England,
1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
Wendy Anne Warren, “‘The Cause of Her Grief’: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,”
The Journal of American History 93 (March 2007), 1031-1049.
Recommended Reading:
Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged,
and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine, 2006).
Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century
Manhattan (New York: Vintage, 2006).
C.S. Manegold, Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009).
Edgar J. McManus, Black Bondage in the North (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973).
Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
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William D. Pierson, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in
Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
WEEK SEVEN  OCTOBER 1
RACE
Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review
181 (May/June 1990): 95-118.
Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).
James Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” The William and Mary
Quarterly 54 (1997): 143-166.
Alden T. Vaughn, “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in 17th century Virginia” The
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97 (July 1989): 311-354.
Recommended Reading:
Michael Banton, Racial Theories (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Carl Degler, Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United
States (New York: Macmillian Press, 1971).
George Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American
Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987).
George Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America (Upper Saddle Creek,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974).
Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (New York: Knopf, 1946).
Alden T. Vaughn, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995).
WEEK EIGHT  OCTOBER 8
THE MAKING OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE
Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in
the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1998).
Recommended Reading:
John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1972).
Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991).
Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1984).
Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from
Slavery to Freedom New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological
Perspective (Boston: Beacon, 1976).
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Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South
and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988).
Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
WEEK NINE  OCTOBER 15
RESISTANCE, REVOLT, AND REBELLION
Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of
the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).
Steven Hahn, “Did We Miss the Greatest Slave Rebellion in Modern History?” in The Political
Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 55-114.
Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37 (Fall 2003): 113-124.
Recommended Reading:
Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944).
Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London: Verso, 1998).
Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French
Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Douglas Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Peter Hinks, “To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren”: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum
Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
Peter Charles Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(New York: Random House, 1963).
Winthrop Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave
Conspiracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993).
Emilia Viotti-da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
WEEK TEN  OCTOBER 22
SLAVERY, GENDER, AND THE FAMILY
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2008).
Recommended Reading:
Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and
Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
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Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old
South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1985).
Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon,
1976).
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from
Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1985).
Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in NineteenthCentury Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
Joshua Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in
Virginia, 1787-1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Marli Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-1880
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Low Country
Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).
WEEK ELEVEN  OCTOBER 29
THE MORAL AND POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SLAVE SOUTH
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1999).
Thomas D. Russell, “Slave Auctions on the Courthouse Steps,” In Slavery and the Law, Paul
Finkelman, ed., 329-366. (Madison, Wisc.: Madison House, 1996).
Recommended Reading:
Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in
Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New Uork:
Oxford University Press, 1996).
Robert Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York:
W.W. Norton and Company, 1989).
Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the
Slave South Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).
Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang,
1992).
Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South
(Madison: University of Wisconsin University Press, 1989).
Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967).
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Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in
the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978).
WEEK TWELVE  NOVEMBER 5
SLAVEHOLDERS
James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Knopf, 1982).
Recommended Reading:
T.H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of
Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York:
Pantheon, 1984).
Eugene Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern
Conservative Thoughts, 1820-1860 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press,
1992).
Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (New York: Vintage, 1969).
James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1990).
Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and
Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2005).
James Roark, Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1977).
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Slavery in Black and White: Class and Race in the Southern
Slaveholders’ New World Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
WEEK THIRTEEN  NOVEMEBER 12
SLAVERY AND THE LAW
Walter Johnson, “Inconsistency, Contradiction, and Complete Confusion: The Everyday
Life of the Law of Slavery,” Law and Social Inquiry 22 (Spring 1997): 405-433.
Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the
Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
Recommended Reading:
Don Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
Ariela Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Melton McLaurin, Celia, a Slave (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).
Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996.
Mark Tushnet, The American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860: Considerations of Humanity and
Interest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
Mark, Tushnet, Slave Law in the American South: State v. Mann in History and Literature
(Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 2003).
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THANKSGIVING BREAK  NOVEMBER 19-23
WEEK FOURTEEN  NOVEMBER 26
EMANCIPATION
Laura Edwards, “‘The Marriage Covenant Is at the Foundation of All Our Rights’: The
Politics of Slave Marriages in North Carolina after Emancipation,” Law and History
Review 14 (Spring 1996): 81-124.
Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1983).
Recommended Reading:
Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race,
Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2000).
W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1935).
Barbara Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth
Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper
and Row, 1988).
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from
Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil
War (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage, 1980).
Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007).
Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and
its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Emancipation (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the
Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Additional Recommended Reading:
W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1997).
David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
Don Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s
Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Paul Finkleman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism, and Comity (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1981).
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Paul Finkleman, ed. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson
(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001).
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1993).
James Horton and Louise Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among
Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Michael Johnson and James Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1984).
Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1987).
Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
Paul Lovejoy, Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkley: University of California
Press, 1998).
Jonathan Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2004).
Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1998).
Donald L. Robinson, Slavery and the Structure of American Politics (New York: W.W. Norton,
1979).
David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill
and Wang, 2009).
Ronald Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
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