Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

This important book challenges many current notions about antebellum southern women, white and black. Bound in a web of intimacy fraught with violence, the lives of slave women were intertwined, but they were never linked in sisterhood. Although mistresses and slaves shared a common household, they were radically different from each other, and Within the Plantation Household documents the difficult class relations between slaveholding and slave women.

The sixteen essays in this volume, all previously unpublished, address the little considered question of the role played by religion in the American Civil War. The authors show that religion, understood in its broadest context, as a culture and community of faith, was found wherever the war was found. Comprising essays by such scholars as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Drew Galpin Faust, Mark Noll, Reid Mitchell, Harry Stout, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and featuring an Afterword by James McPherson, this collection marks the first step towards uncovering this crucial yet neglected aspect of American history.

Combining established work with that of recent provocative scholarship on the antebellum South, this collection of essays puts students in touch with some of the central debates in this dynamic field. It includes substantial excerpts from the work of Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who lay out the influential interpretation of the South as a 'paternalistic' society and culture, and contributions from more recent scholars who provide dissenting or alternative interpretations of the relations between masters and slaves and men and women. The essays draw on a wide range of disciplines, including economics, psychology and anthropology to investigate the nature of plantation and family life in the South. Explanatory notes guide the reader through each essay and the Editor's introduction places the work in its historiographical context.