Slavery, Secession, and Southern History

For generations, Civil War historians have debated the causes of our great national conflict. They have argued about the centrality of slavery to disunion, the nature of master-slave relations in the Old South, and the impact of the war on postbellum race relations, politics, and culture. Slavery, Secession, and Southern History advances these and other debates by bringing together ten original interpretive essays by twelve prominent scholars.Perhaps no historian has had greater impact on the study of the antebellum South during the past quarter century than Eugene Genovese. The authors assembled for this volume engage, directly or indirectly, Genovese's work, reinforcing, revising, and challenging its central preoccupations. Reflecting interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives, the essays explore the problems of slavery and slave resistance; the origin of the task system in South Carolina; the economics of John C. Calhoun; the divergent mind of the Old South on states' rights; the revolutionary impact of the Civil War on gender, class, and race relations; Faulkner's misleading representation of southern health and physical well-being; and Mary Chesnut's treatments of African American women.The volume also contains as appendices an exhaustive compilation of Genovese's writings and a previously unpublished interview in which Genovese reflects on his own career as a historian and on the writing of history.