Condition: Acceptable. Please see the images for more details. May show signs of wear such as:
• Shelf wear or scuffing on the cover
• Creases, marks, or tears on pages or dust jacket
• Possible remainder marks or previous owner’s name/notes inside
Cover art: Tim Gaydos
Blurb: “Researching literary narratives, memoirs, plantation documents, and
autobiographies, the author reinterprets the stereotyped master-slave relationship. He shows conclusively that within his own quarters the slave led a rich cultural and family life that was deliberately kept hidden from his white masters. In this study the slave emerges with a clearly defined personality made up of an unusual combination of strengths and weaknesses.
"Professor Blassingame has successfully filled a major gap in the historical literature of the antebellum South... we obtain for the first time a detailed examination of the daily lives of the slaves on large planta-tions, with some intelligent speculation about the forces to which they were subjected.... Blassingame's book is strengthened by more than fifty judiciously chosen illustrations interspersed at appropriate places throughout the text. The note on sources, discussing the strengths and limitations of the slave narratives, is itself an important essay on historical methodology. Well written besides. ..." The History Teacher
"Doubly welcome, both for its intrinsic worth in describing slavery as it must have been for those 'inside' and for its meaning for scholarship....
Based largely on the autobiographies of fugitive slaves and survivors of slavery, The Slave Community shatters the notion that slaves were molded by a common experience into a common mold of shuffling sub-serviency... a book all American historians could read with profit." Willie Lee Rose, the Johns Hopkins University, in The Journal of American History
"This is the volume on American Slavery that students are soon likely to find as required reading ... Blassingame has done more than anyone else to penetrate the life and mind of the slave community..." Walter B.
Weare, University of Wisconsin, in Civil War History
"A sober and sane treatment of an aspect of Negro slavery which has usually been neglected or distorted." Kenneth Wiggins Porter, Arizona State University, in The Journal of Southern, History About the author
John W. Blassingame is Associate Professor of History at Yale Univer-sity. He was associate editor, with Louis Harlan, of The Autobiographical Writings of Booker T. Washington, and is the editor of New Perspectives on Black Studies, and the co-editor of in Search of America.”