Download or read book A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War written by Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An excellent prelude to the well-known wartime diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut and Emma Holmes, the diary of Keziah Brevard documents one plantation mistress's personal reflections on the events that were to shape both her world and her Southern homeland for years to come: the election of Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina's secession convention, and the attack on Fort Sumter." "In 1860 Keziah Brevard was a fifty-seven-year-old widow living nine miles from Columbia, South Carolina, with her slaves as her only companions. She kept a diary to record thoughts and a great variety of matters - from dramatic events of national importance to her management of three plantations and a grist mill. Brevard reacted strongly to the political ferment of the period. Entries during the month of October 1860 were outright assaults on "the rabble of the North." And her words of November 9 showed extreme emotion: "Oh My God!!! This morning heard that Lincoln was elected." The act of secession, however, failed to stir similar passions; nor did the firing on Fort Sumter elicit extensive comment. But her relatively long entries of January and February are quite another matter; during those weeks in early 1861 Brevard wrestled privately with the morality of secession and slavery." "In the difficult times of the Old South's twilight, Keziah Brevard had several distinct advantages including a keen mind, shrewd business sense, relatively good health, and substantial financial resources. Her diary reveals a competent, no-nonsense woman capable of successfully leading a large household as well as several business enterprises."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book The Plantation Mistress written by Catherine Clinton and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 1984-02-12 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering study of the much-mythologized Southern belle offers the first serious look at the lives of white women and their harsh and restricted place in the slave society before the Civil War. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of hundreds of planter wives and daughters, Clinton sets before us in vivid detail the daily life of the plantation mistress and her ambiguous intermediary position in the hierarchy between slave and master. "The Plantation Mistress challenges and reinterprets a host of issues related to the Old South. The result is a book that forces us to rethink some of our basic assumptions about two peculiar institutions -- the slave plantation and the nineteenth-century family. It approaches a familiar subject from a new angle, and as a result, permanently alters our understanding of the Old South and women's place in it.

Download or read book A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War written by Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An excellent prelude to the well-known wartime diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut and Emma Holmes, the diary of Keziah Brevard documents one plantation mistress's personal reflections on the events that were to shape both her world and her Southern homeland for years to come: the election of Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina's secession convention, and the attack on Fort Sumter." "In 1860 Keziah Brevard was a fifty-seven-year-old widow living nine miles from Columbia, South Carolina, with her slaves as her only companions. She kept a diary to record thoughts and a great variety of matters - from dramatic events of national importance to her management of three plantations and a grist mill. Brevard reacted strongly to the political ferment of the period. Entries during the month of October 1860 were outright assaults on "the rabble of the North." And her words of November 9 showed extreme emotion: "Oh My God!!! This morning heard that Lincoln was elected." The act of secession, however, failed to stir similar passions; nor did the firing on Fort Sumter elicit extensive comment. But her relatively long entries of January and February are quite another matter; during those weeks in early 1861 Brevard wrestled privately with the morality of secession and slavery." "In the difficult times of the Old South's twilight, Keziah Brevard had several distinct advantages including a keen mind, shrewd business sense, relatively good health, and substantial financial resources. Her diary reveals a competent, no-nonsense woman capable of successfully leading a large household as well as several business enterprises."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book Tara Revisited Women War the Plantation Legend written by Catherine Clinton and published by WW Norton. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutting through romantic myth, this captivating volume combines period photographs and illustrations with new documentary sources to tell the real story of southern women during the Civil War. Drawing from a wealth of poignant letters, diaries, slave narratives, and other accounts, Catherine Clinton provides a vivid social and cultural history of the diverse communities of Southern women during the Civil War: the heroic African-American women who struggled for freedom, the tireless nurses who faced gruesome duties, the intriguing handful who donned uniforms, and those brave women who spied and even died for the Confederacy. Photographs, drawings, prints, and other period illustrations bring this buried chapter of Civil War history to life, taking the reader from the cotton fields to the hearthsides, from shrapnel-riddled mansions to slave cabins. Clinton places these women within the context of war, illuminating both legendary and anonymous women along the way. Tracing oral traditions and Southern literature from Reconstruction through our era, the author demonstrates how a deadly mix of sentiment and fabrication perpetuates tales of idyllic plantations inhabited by benevolent masters and contented slaves. The book concludes with Clinton's perceptive and often witty discussion of how, over the years, we continue to embrace mythic figures like Scarlett and Mammy in aspects of popular culture ranging from Hollywood epics to pancake syrup.

Download or read book Mistresses and Slaves written by Marli Frances Weiner and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marli Weiner challenges much of the received wisdom on the domestic realm of the nineteenth-century southern plantation--a world in which white mistresses and female slaves labored together to provide food, clothing, and medicines to the larger plantation community. Although divided by race, black and white women were joined by common female experiences and expectations of behavior. Because work and gender affected them as much as race, mistresses and female slaves interacted with one another very differently from the ways they interacted with men. Supported by the women's own words, Weiner offers fresh interpretations of the ideology of domesticity that influenced women's race relations before the Civil War, the gradual manner in which they changed during the war, and the harsher behaviors that resulted during Reconstruction. A volume in the series Women in American History, edited by Anne Firor Scott, Nancy A. Hewitt, and Stephanie Shaw

Download or read book The Dangers of Christian Practice written by Lauren F. Winner and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the central place that “practices” have recently held in Christian theology, Lauren Winner explores the damages these practices have inflicted over the centuries Sometimes, beloved and treasured Christian practices go horrifyingly wrong, extending violence rather than promoting its healing. In this bracing book, Lauren Winner provocatively challenges the assumption that the church possesses a set of immaculate practices that will definitionally train Christians in virtue and that can’t be answerable to their histories. Is there, for instance, an account of prayer that has anything useful to say about a slave-owning woman’s praying for her slaves’ obedience? Is there a robustly theological account of the Eucharist that connects the Eucharist’s goods to the sacrament’s central role in medieval Christian murder of Jews? Arguing that practices are deformed in ways that are characteristic of and intrinsic to the practices themselves, Winner proposes that the register in which Christians might best think about the Eucharist, prayer, and baptism is that of “damaged gift.” Christians go on with these practices because, though blighted by sin, they remain gifts from God.

Download or read book Southern Communities written by Steven E. Nash and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2019-05 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Community is an evolving and complex concept that historians have applied to localities, counties, and the South as a whole in order to ground larger issues in the day-to-day lives of all segments of society. These social networks sometimes unite and sometimes divide people, they can mirror or transcend political boundaries, and they may exist solely within the cultures of like-minded people. This volume explores the nature of southern communities during the long nineteenth century. The contributors build on the work of scholars who have allowed us to see community not simply as a place but instead as an idea in a constant state of definition and redefinition. They reaffirm that there never has been a singular southern community. As editors Steven E. Nash and Bruce E. Stewart reveal, southerners have constructed an array of communities across the region and beyond. Nor do the contributors idealize these communities. Far from being places of cooperation and harmony, southern communities were often rife with competition and discord. Indeed, conflict has constituted a vital part of southern communal development. Taken together, the essays in this volume remind us how community-focused studies can bring us closer to answering those questions posed to Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!: “Tell [us] about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”

Download or read book Out of the House of Bondage written by Thavolia Glymph and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where 'gentle' mistresses ministered to 'loyal' slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.

Download or read book Women in the American Civil War 2 volumes written by Lisa . Tendrich Frank and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2007-12-03 with total page 775 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating work tells the untold story of the role of women in the Civil War, from battlefield to home front. Most Americans can name famous generals and notable battles from the Civil War. With rare exception, they know neither the women of that war nor their part in it. Yet, as this encyclopedia demonstrates, women played a critical role. The book's 400 A–Z entries focus on specific people, organizations, issues, and battles, and a dozen contextual essays provide detailed information about the social, political, and family issues that shaped women's lives during the Civil War era. Women in the American Civil War satisfies a growing interest in this topic. Readers will learn how the Civil War became a vehicle for expanding the role of women in society. Representing the work of more than 100 scholars, this book treats in depth all aspects of the previously untold story of women in the Civil War.

Download or read book The Uncompromising Diary of Sallie McNeill 1858 1867 written by Sallie McNeill and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gives insight into an elite planter-class Texas woman's loneliness and hunger to experience the non-traditional world of a Southern Belle. Her contextual observations on slavery, family relations, and the Civil War contribute to Southern history.

Download or read book Love and Duty written by Angela Esco Elder and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2022-03-10 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1861 and 1865, approximately 200,000 women were widowed by the deaths of Civil War soldiers. They recorded their experiences in diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and pension applications. In Love and Duty, Angela Esco Elder draws on these materials—as well as songs, literary works, and material objects like mourning gowns—to explore white Confederate widows' stories, examining the records of their courtships, marriages, loves, and losses to understand their complicated relationship with the Confederate state. Elder shows how, in losing their husbands, many women acquired significant cultural capital, which positioned them as unlikely actors to gain political influence. Confederate officialdom championed a particular image of white widowhood—the young wife who selflessly transferred her monogamous love from her dead husband to the deathless cause for which he'd fought. But a closer look reveals that these women spent their new cultural capital with great shrewdness and variety. Not only were they aware of the social status gained in widowhood; they also used that status on their own terms, turning mourning into a highly politicized act amid the battle to establish the Confederacy's legitimacy. Death forced all Confederate widows to reconstruct their lives, but only some would choose to play a role in reconstructing the nation.

Download or read book Civil War Eyewitnesses written by Garold Cole and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bibliographical guide to recently published Civil War diaries, journals, letters, and memoirs.

Download or read book All that Makes a Man written by Stephen William Berry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the realities of the war became apparent, however, the letters and diaries turned from idealized themes of honor and country to solemn reflections on love and home."--Jacket.

Download or read book The Home Voices Speak Louder Than the Drums written by Wanda Easter Burch and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Soldier mortals would not survive if they were not blessed with the gift of imagination and the pictures of hope,” wrote Confederate Private Henry Graves in the trenches outside Petersburg, Virginia. “The second angel of mercy is the night dream.” Providing fresh perspective on the human side of the Civil War, this book explores the dreams and imaginings of those who fought it, as recorded in their letters, journals and memoirs. Sometimes published as poems or songs or printed in newspapers, these rarely acknowledged writings reflect the personalities and experiences of their authors. Some expressions of fear, pain, loss, homesickness and disappointment are related with grim fatalism, some with glimpses of humor.

Download or read book The Rhetoric of Rebel Women written by Kimberly Harrison and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the American Civil War, southern white women found themselves speaking and acting in unfamiliar and tumultuous circumstances. With the war at their doorstep, women who supported the war effort took part in defining what it meant to be, and to behave as, a Confederate through their verbal and nonverbal rhetorics. Though most did not speak from the podium, they viewed themselves as participants in the war effort, indicating that what they did or did not say could matter. Drawing on the rich evidence in women’s Civil War diaries, The Rhetoric of Rebel Women recognizes women’s persuasive activities as contributions to the creation and maintenance of Confederate identity and culture. Informed by more than one hundred diaries, this study provides insight into how women cultivated rhetorical agency, challenging traditional gender expectations while also upholding a cultural status quo. Author Kimberly Harrison analyzes the rhetorical choices these women made and valued in wartime and postwar interactions with Union officers and soldiers, slaves and former slaves, local community members, and even their God. In their intimate accounts of everyday war, these diarists discussed rhetorical strategies that could impact their safety, their livelihoods, and those of their families. As they faced Union soldiers in attempts to protect their homes and property, diarists saw their actions as not only having local, immediate impact on their well-being but also as reflecting upon their cause and the character of the southern people as a whole. They instructed themselves through their personal writing, allowing insight into how southern women prepared themselves to speak and act in new and contested contexts. The Rhetoric of Rebel Women highlights the contributions of privileged white southern women in the development of the Confederate national identity, presenting them not as passive observers but as active participants in the war effort.

Download or read book The Women s War In the South written by Martin Harry Greenberg and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 1999-02-01 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Women's War in the South: Recollections and Reflections of the American Civil War, edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg, recounts the manner in which Southern women experienced the war and the changes it brought about in their lives. Filled with excerpts from the letters, books, diaries, and postwar writings the women left behind, it reveals the other side of the war—the women's war—through first-person accounts of women running farms, buying and selling goods, working outside the home, serving as spies, and even participating in combat in disguise.

Download or read book At the Precipice written by Shearer Davis Bowman and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bowman explores the different ways in which Americans, North and South, black and white, understood their interests, rights, and honor during the secession period. He examines the lives and thoughts of key figures and provides an especially vivid glimpse into what less famous men and women in both sections thought about themselves and the worlds in which they lived, and how their thoughts informed their actions during this time. Both sides glorified the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, yet they interpreted those sacred documents in markedly different ways and held very different notions of what constituted "American" values.