Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South. Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks—their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.
Buy this book at AmazonAd- Publisher
- UNC Press Books
- Year
- 2012
- ISBN-13
- 9798890874054
- Genre
- History
- Topics
- Slavery in colonial AmericaAfrican American cultureChesapeake and Lowcountry society
Awards
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize for HistoryShortlisted(1998)
Other awarded books from Philip D. Morgan
If you liked Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, you could also like these
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country
Philip D. Morgan
1 win · 8 score
American Slavery, American Freedom
Edmund S. Morgan
0 wins · 4 score
Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion
Peter H. Wood
0 wins · 4 score
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
Ira. Berlin
1 win · 15 score
Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865
Christopher Tomlins
1 win · 8 score
Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves
Ira Berlin
1 win · 5 score
New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America
Wendy Warren
0 wins · 4 score
Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom
Peter Kolchin
1 win · 8 score
In the Matter of Color: The Colonial Period
A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.
0 wins · 4 score
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
Simon Schama
1 win · 12 score
Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery
Seth Rockman
0 wins · 7 score
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
Eugene D. Genovese
2 wins · 17 score
COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War
Edda L. Fields-Black
1 win · 14 score
Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585–1763
Richard Beale Davis
1 win · 12 score
A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America
Jacqueline Jones
0 wins · 4 score
Similar Topics
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country
Philip D. Morgan
1 win · 8 score
Slavery in colonial AmericaAfrican American cultureChesapeake and Lowcountry societyAmerican Slavery, American Freedom
Edmund S. Morgan
0 wins · 4 score
Slavery in colonial AmericaBlack Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion
Peter H. Wood
0 wins · 4 score
Slavery in colonial America