Southern Character: Essays in Honor of Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Honoring a Giant in Southern History I vividly remember the first time I read Bertram Wyatt-Brown\u27s Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1982, we had a small but vital group of scholars working in southern history. From word of mo...

Slavery and Plantation Capitalism in Louisiana's Sugar Country

Sugar planters in the antebellum South managed their estates progressively, efficiently, and with a political economy that reflected the emerging capitalist values of nineteenth-century America. By fusing economic progress and slave labor, sugar planters revolutionized the means of production and transformed the institution of slavery. Slaveholders and bondspeople redefined the parameters of paternalism and recast the master-slave relationship along a novel path. Louisiana slaves accommodated the machine, holding no torch for Luddism while concurrently shaping the agro-industrial revolution to achieve modest economic independence and relative autonomy within the plantation quarters