These essays introduce the complexities of researching and analyzing race. This book focuses on problems confronted while researching, writing and interpreting race and slavery, such as conflict between ideological perspectives, and changing interpretations of the questions.

Volume 2.

Spanning more than three centuries, from the colonial era to the present, Van Deburg's overview analyzes the works of American historians, dramatists, novelists, poets, lyricists, and filmmakers -- and exposes, through those artists' often disquieting perceptions, the cultural underpinnings of American current racial attitudes and divisions. Crucial to Van Deburg's analysis is his contrast of black and white attitudes toward the Afro-American slave experience. There has, in fact, been a persistent dichotomy between the two races' literary, historical, and theatrical representations of slavery. If white culture-makers have stressed the "unmanning" of the slaves and encouraged such steteotypes as the Noble Savage and the comic minstrel to justify the blacks' subordination, Afro-Americans have emphasized a counter self-image that celebrates the slaves' creativity, dignity, pride, and assertiveness. ISBN 0-299-09634-3 (pbk.) : $12.50.

This bibliography of 20th century literature focuses on slavery and slave-trading from ancient times through the 19th century. It contains over 10,000 entries, with the principal sections organizing works by the political/geographical frameworks of the enslavers.

Most of the research on the South ties the region to the North, emphasizing racial binaries and outdated geographical boundaries, but The American South and the Atlantic World seeks a larger context. Helping to define “New” Southern studies, this book?the first of its kind?explores how the cultures, contacts, and economies of the Atlantic World shaped the South.

This book analyses the impact of American Revolutionary ideology upon conceptions of the place of slavery in American society. The ambivalence involved in a libertarian revolution occurring in a slave society was as obvious to eighteenth-century Americans as it is to twentieth-century historians yet the obvious sincerity of Southern Republicanism and the persistence of slavery have presented a paradox with which historians have hardly come to terms.

"By using an ever-widening comparative method, Fredrickson is able to illustrate the depth of institutional and intellectual incorporation of racism, and he keeps alive the possibility of moral and political reform."—Thomas Bender, New York University