Them Dark Days is a study of the callous, capitalistic nature of the vast rice plantations along the southeastern coast. It is essential reading for anyone whose view of slavery’s horrors might be softened by the current historical emphasis on slave community and family and slave autonomy and empowerment. Looking at Gowrie and Butler Island plantations in Georgia and Chicora Wood in South Carolina, William Dusinberre considers a wide range of issues related to daily life and work there: health, economics, politics, dissidence, coercion, discipline, paternalism, and privilege. Based on overseers’ letters, slave testimonies, and plantation records, Them Dark Days offers a vivid reconstruction of slavery in action and casts a sharp new light on slave history.
Philadelphia, before the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter, was not simply a "Northern" city. Unlike proslavery Washington but also unlike antislavery Boston, Philadelphia lay in the "Northern border area," where mixed sympathies led to divided loyalties and to frequent convulsions over the great issues that preceded the war. In Civil War Issues in Philadelphia, 1856-1865, author William Dusinberre examines three traditional interpretations of the war and shows how each has to be modified to fit Philadelphia's experience. In Part I he portrays the fundamental Philadelphia attitudes as they appeared in 1856 and the two main controversies—the fugitive slave question and the territorial issue—as they developed until 1858. Part II is devoted to the John Brown affair and the secession crisis. Part III analyzes wartime issues: the treatment of dissenters, the Negro question, and the recruitment of short-term soldiers when Confederate armies approached Pennsylvania. From this investigation emerges a vivid portrait of the North's second greatest city and its leading citizens—racist sympathizers with the South, cautious conciliators, firm conservatives, unconstrained anti-Southerners, outnumbered idealists—contending with the crisis of the Civil War periods.
Strategies for Survival conveys the experience of bondage through former enslaved people's own words. The source of this landmark content is a remarkable series of interviews conducted in Virginia in 1937 by WPA workers. Most of the interviewers were themselves Black; as a result, the subjects spoke with exceptional candor. William Dusinberre explores these interviews to re-create for the modern reader enslaved people's strategies for survival within the severe constrictions bondage imposed upon their lives. Religion and escape were the chief ways of coping with the indignity of family disruption, contempt, and the harsh realities of slavery. We see great creativity and variety in such responses to oppression, but we are forced to acknowledge the dispiriting realties of enslaved existence and the limits of enslaved people's resistance and agency.
James Polk was President of the United States from 1845 to 1849, a time when slavery began to dominate American politics. Polk's presidency coincided with the eruption of the territorial slavery issue, which within a few years would lead to the catastrophe of the Civil War. Polk himself owned substantial cotton plantations-- in Tennessee and later in Mississippi-- and some 50 slaves. Unlike many antebellum planters who portrayed their involvement with slavery as a historical burden bestowed onto them by their ancestors, Polk entered the slave business of his own volition, for reasons principally of financial self-interest. Drawing on previously unexplored records, Slavemaster President recreates the world of Polk's plantation and the personal histories of his slaves, in what is arguably the most careful and vivid account to date of how slavery functioned on a single cotton plantation. Life at the Polk estate was brutal and often short. Fewer than one in two slave children lived to the age of fifteen, a child mortality rate even higher than that on the average plantation. A steady stream of slaves temporarily fled the plantation throughout Polk's tenure as absentee slavemaster. Yet Polk was in some respects an enlightened owner, instituting an unusual incentive plan for his slaves and granting extensive privileges to his most favored slave. Startlingly, Dusinberre shows how Polk sought to hide from public knowledge the fact that, while he was president, he was secretly buying as many slaves as his plantation revenues permitted. Shortly before his sudden death from cholera, the president quietly drafted a new will, in which he expressed the hope that his slaves might be freed--but only after he and his wife were both dead. The very next day, he authorized the purchase, in strictest secrecy, of six more very young slaves. By contrast with Senator John C. Calhoun, President Polk has been seen as a moderate Southern Democratic leader. But Dusinberre suggests that the president's political stance toward slavery-- influenced as it was by his deep personal involvement in the plantation system-- may actually have helped precipitate the Civil War that Polk sought to avoid.
With its explorations of sexual ambivalence, As You Like It speaks directly to the twenty-first century. Juliet Dusinberredemonstrates that Rosalind's authority in the play grows from new ideas about women and reveals that Shakespeare's heroine reinvents herself for every age. But the play is also deeply rooted in Elizabethan culture and through it Shakespeare addresses some of the hotly debated issues of the period."This will be the definitive edition of As You Like It for many years to come" - Phyllis Rackin, University of Pennsylvania
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Both a witty satire of literary cliché and a tender meditation on the varieties of love, As You Like It continues to be one of Shakespeare’s most beloved and widely performed comedies. In the introduction to this new edition, David Bevington traces the complex relationships between the characters in the play, and explores the history of its criticism from Samuel Johnson to the twenty-first century. As part of the newly launched Broadview Press / Internet Shakespeare Editions series, this edition features a variety of interleaved materials—from facsimile pages, diagrams, and musical scores to illustrations and extended discussions of myth and folklore—that provide a context for the social and cultural allusions in the play. Appendices offer excerpts from Shakespeare’s key sources and influences, including Thomas Lodge’s Rosalind and Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humor. A collaboration between Broadview Press and the Internet Shakespeare Editions project at the University of Victoria, the editions developed for this series have been comprehensively annotated and draw on the authoritative texts newly edited for the ISE. This innovative series allows readers to access extensive and reliable online resources linked to the print edition.
William Kauffman Scarborough's absorbing biography, The Allstons of Chicora Wood, chronicles the history of a South Carolina planter family from the opulent antebellum years through the trauma of the Civil War and postwar period. Scarborough's examination of this extraordinarily enterprising family focuses on patriarch Robert R. F. W. Allston, his wife Adele Petigru Allston, and their daughter Elizabeth Allston Pringle Scarborough. Scarborough shows how Allston, in the four decades before the Civil War, converted a small patrimony into a Lowcountry agricultural empire of seven rice plantations, all the while earning an international reputation for the quality of his rice and his expertise. Scarborough also examines Allston's twenty-eight-year career in the state legislature and as governor from 1856 to 1858. Upon his death in 1864, Robert Allston's wife of thirty-two years, Adele, found herself at the head of the family. Scarborough traces how she successfully kept the family plantations afloat in the postwar years through a series of decisions that exhibited her astute business judgment and remarkable strength of character. In the next generation, one of the Allstons' five children followed a similar path. Elizabeth "Bessie" Allston took over management of the remaining family plantations upon the death of her husband and, in order to pay off the plantation mortgages, embarked on a highly successful literary career. Bessie authored two books, the first treating her experiences as a woman rice planter and the second describing her childhood before the war. A major contribution to southern history, The Allstons of Chicora Wood provides a fascinating look at a prominent southern family that survived the traumas of war and challenges of Reconstruction.
In 1593 Shakespeare awoke and found himself famous. Lines from his comic, erotic, tragic poem Venus and Adonis were on everyone's lips.The appearance in 1594 of the darkly reflective and richly descriptive Rape of Lucrece confirmed his fame as 'Sweet Master Shakespeare', Elizabethan England's most brilliant non-dramatic poet. Shorter poems in this volume testify further to Shakespeare's versatility and to his poetic fame. Some, like the much-debated `Phoenix and Turtle', pose problems of meaning; others raise questions about authorship and authenticity. Detailed annotation and a full Introduction seek to resolve such difficulties while also locating Shakespeare's poems in their literary context, which includes his own career as a playwright.
William Kauffman Scarborough has produced a work of incomparable scope and depth, offering the challenge to see afresh one of the most powerful groups in American history—the wealthiest southern planters who owned 250 or more slaves in the census years of 1850 and 1860. The identification and tabulation in every slaveholding state of these lords of economic, social, and political influence reveals a highly learned class of men who set the tone for southern society while also involving themselves in the wider world of capitalism. Scarborough examines the demographics of elite families, the educational philosophy and religiosity of the nabobs, gender relations in the Big House, slave management methods, responses to secession, and adjustment to the travails of Reconstruction and an alien postwar world.
The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features line-by-line commentaries and textual notes on the plays and poems. Introductions are regularly refreshed with accounts of new critical, stage and screen interpretations. For this second edition of The Tempest, David Lindley has thoroughly revised the Introduction to take account of the latest developments in criticism and performance. He has also added a completely new section on casting in recent productions of the play. The complex questions this new section raises about colonisation, racial and gender stereotypes and the nature of theatrical experience are explored throughout the introduction. Careful attention is paid to dramatic form, stagecraft, and the use of music and spectacle in The Tempest, a play that is widely regarded as one of Shakespeare's most elusive and suggestive. A revised and updated reading list completes the edition.
I wish I had copies like this at Drama School. Essential notes on the language for those who will get up and speak it, not purely for those who will sit and study it. An incredibly useful tool with room on every page to make notes. Next time I'm in rehearsal on a Shakespeare play, I have no doubt that a copy from this series will be in my hand.' ADRIAN LESTER, Actor, Director and Writer Arden Performance Editions are ideal for anyone engaging with a Shakespeare play in performance. With clear facing-page notes giving definitions of words, easily accessible information about key textual variants, lineation, metrical ambiguities and pronunciation, each edition has been developed to open the play's possibilities and meanings to actors and students. Each edition offers: -Facing-page notes -Short, clear definitions of words -Easily accessible information about key textual variants -Notes on pronunciation of difficult names and unfamiliar words -An easy to read layout -Space to write notes -A short introduction to the play
The Taming of the Shrew is unique among Shakespeare's plays and is a perennial and compelling success in the theatre. Its reception is marked, however, by ongoing polarised debate over the meaning and worth of the play. This edition disengages Shakespeare's exuberant and disturbing marital farce from the tangled history of its reception. It views the two sixteenth-century Shrew plays as textually independent but theatrically interdependent and so includes the full text of The Taming of A Shrew in an appendix. While the Introduction and Commentary focus on the critical and theatrical debate surrounding the play, the original and comprehensive editing of the playtext makes available a 'different' Shrew, more open to the reader's interpretation than is usually the case. Barbara Hodgdon is a distinguished feminist scholar whose reading of the play offers a stimulating array of ideas and questions about this enduringly popular yet challenging comedy.
A revised edition of this intriguing and complex play, updated to cover recent critical thinking and stage history. Troilus and Cressida is a tragedy often labelled a "problem" play because of its apparent blend of genres and its difficult themes. Set in the Trojan Wars it tells a story of doomed love and honour, offering a debased view of human nature in war-time and a stage peopled by generally unsympathetic characters. The revised edition makes an ideal text for study at undergraduate level and above.
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in HistoryCo-winner of the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American HistoriansWinner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Prize from the Agricultural History Society Deep Souths tells the stories of three southern regions from Reconstruction to World War II: the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, the eastern Piedmont of Georgia, and the Georgia Sea Islands and Atlantic coast. Though these regions initially shared the histories and populations we associate with the idea of a "Deep South"—all had economies based on slave plantation labor in 1860—their histories diverged sharply during the three generations after Reconstruction. With research gathered from oral histories, census reports, and a wide variety of other sources, Harris traces these regional changes in cumulative stories of individuals across the social spectrum. Deep Souths presents a comparative and ground-level view of history that challenges the idea that the lower South was either uniform or static in the era of segregation. By the end of the New Deal era, changes in these regions had prepared the way for the civil rights movement and the end of segregation.
The Arden Shakespeare is the established edition of Shakespeare's work. Justly celebrated for its authoritative scholarship and invaluable commentary, Arden editions guide you to a richer understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare's plays. This edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream provides a clear and authoritative text, detailed notes and commentary on the same page as the text and a full introduction discussing the critical and historical background to the play. The editor brings fresh perspectives on global productions and adaptations of this most-loved of Shakespeare's comedies.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
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