Syllabus: HSTY2034

Week 11: Life Under Slavery

Lecture 1: The Internal Slave Trade and Life Under Slavery
Lecture 2: Slave Revolts and the White Majority

Tutorial: Slave Narratives

Essential Reading:

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JACOBS/hj-site-index.htm Read ch. 1, 4-7, 10.
Jean Fagan Yellin, Introduction to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). (Course Reader).

Questions:

Who is Jacobs (Brent) writing for and how does this affect her narrative? What can this book tell us about life under slavery? What can it tell us about the psychology of slave ownership?   How does Jacobs rationalize Flint's relentless pursuit of her?   How would you explain it?   According to Jacobs, how did slavery affect America?

Further Reading: Slavery in the Old South

Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992).

John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South , rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1982).

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974).

Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Brenda Stevenson , Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Steven Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985).

Optional Assignment:

Watch Amistad , a 1997 film directed by Steven Spielberg; starring Morgan Freeman, Anthony Hopkins, and Djimon Hounsou. Based on the true story of an 1839 revolt by slaves bound for America on the Armistad and their subsequent trial.