‘My master and Miss … warn’t nothing but poor white trash’ : poor white slaveholders and their slaves in the antebellum South

While the majority of enslaved people lived on large plantations, there were a significant minority who lived on smaller farms where they and their families were the only slaves owned by their master (or mistress). This article uses 22 Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews conducted in the 1930s with former slaves from across the South to investigate the lives of enslaved people living with masters or mistresses that they described as ‘poor’, and argues that enslaved experiences on small farms owned by poor whites varied widely, but were marked particularly by violence, material deprivation, and intense loneliness

Historical insights: teaching North American History using images and material culture

Historical insights: teaching North American History using images and material cultur

Teaching African American Studies in the US and the UK

This is the first in what the Associate Editors hope will become a series of transatlantic exchanges about American Studies pedagogy. Conducted in the four months between January and April 2017, the discussion encompasses the political significance of African American Studies, the role of identity in the shaping of curricula and student responses to those curricula, and the challenges encountered by teachers at a variety of career stages and in a range of educational and geographic locations

Performances of honour : manhood and violence in the Mississippi slave insurrection scare of 1835

In early July, 1835, rumours of a slave insurrection swept central Mississippi. Deviant white men, with bad characters and dishonourable motives, were—or so the residents of the small towns along the Big Black River in Madison County believed—plotting to incite the slaves to rebellion so that during the resulting panic they could rob the banks and plunder the cities. These rumours were entirely unfounded, but within a few weeks, groups of white citizens calling themselves ‘committees of safety’ had examined and tortured an unknown number of men (both white and black) whom they thought to be involved in the conspiracy, and by the end of July about a dozen white men and around twenty or thirty slaves had been put to death in Mississippi. As a moment during which white men not only articulated their notion of what it meant to be a ‘man,’ but also demonstrated and violently enforced it, the insurrection scare is an opening, a window, into the lives of men in the antebellum South. Through this window, we can see how Southern white men conceived of their identity as white men and constructed a notion of manhood—one of honour—to which all white men, regardless of class, could aspire. While Northerners emphasised restraint, and inner feelings of honour, Southern manhood was defined almost entirely by public display. Honour had to be performed. Further, because all white men could attempt to give a performance of honour, there existed in the South a sense of equality amongst all white men—a herrenvolk democracy—despite the vast differences in wealth and status that existed. African Americans, on the other hand, could make no claims to honour in the eyes of white men because to have honour was to have power.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceArts and Humanities Research Council (Great Britain) (AHRC)Economic History Society (EHS)Royal Society (Great Britain) (RS)University of Warwick. Dept. of History (UoW)GBUnited Kingdo

Performances of honour: manhood and violence in the Mississippi slave insurrection scare of 1835

In early July, 1835, rumours of a slave insurrection swept central Mississippi. Deviant white men, with bad characters and dishonourable motives, were—or so the residents of the small towns along the Big Black River in Madison County believed—plotting to incite the slaves to rebellion so that during the resulting panic they could rob the banks and plunder the cities. These rumours were entirely unfounded, but within a few weeks, groups of white citizens calling themselves ‘committees of safety’ had examined and tortured an unknown number of men (both white and black) whom they thought to be involved in the conspiracy, and by the end of July about a dozen white men and around twenty or thirty slaves had been put to death in Mississippi. As a moment during which white men not only articulated their notion of what it meant to be a ‘man,’ but also demonstrated and violently enforced it, the insurrection scare is an opening, a window, into the lives of men in the antebellum South. Through this window, we can see how Southern white men conceived of their identity as white men and constructed a notion of manhood—one of honour—to which all white men, regardless of class, could aspire. While Northerners emphasised restraint, and inner feelings of honour, Southern manhood was defined almost entirely by public display. Honour had to be performed. Further, because all white men could attempt to give a performance of honour, there existed in the South a sense of equality amongst all white men—a herrenvolk democracy—despite the vast differences in wealth and status that existed. African Americans, on the other hand, could make no claims to honour in the eyes of white men because to have honour was to have power