Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made

[5fish]

Here is another book from the 1970s that has survived its criticisms.

Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made

Amazon review:
This landmark history of slavery in the South—a winner of the Bancroft Prize—challenged conventional views of slaves by illuminating the many forms of resistance to dehumanization that developed in a slave society.

Rather than emphasizing the cruelty and degradation of slavery, historian Eugene Genovese investigates the ways that slaves forced their owners to acknowledge their humanity through culture, music, and religion. Not merely passive victims, the slaves in this account actively engaged with the paternalism of slaveholding culture in ways that supported their self-respect and aspirations for freedom. Roll, Jordan, Roll covers a vast range of subjects, from slave weddings and funerals to the language, food, clothing, and labor of slaves, and places particular emphasis on religion as both a major battleground for psychological control and a paradoxical source of spiritual strength. Displaying keen insight into the minds of both slaves and slaveholders, Roll, Jordan, Roll is a testament to the power of the human spirit under conditions of extreme oppression.

“Row, Jordan, Row” notes specially trained dogs, often owned by poor whites, tracked runaways, maiming and killing if not pulled quickly from the escaping slaves.

 

[pool boy]

Here is another book from the 1970s that has survived its criticisms.

Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made

Amazon review:
This landmark history of slavery in the South—a winner of the Bancroft Prize—challenged conventional views of slaves by illuminating the many forms of resistance to dehumanization that developed in a slave society.

Rather than emphasizing the cruelty and degradation of slavery, historian Eugene Genovese investigates the ways that slaves forced their owners to acknowledge their humanity through culture, music, and religion. Not merely passive victims, the slaves in this account actively engaged with the paternalism of slaveholding culture in ways that supported their self-respect and aspirations for freedom. Roll, Jordan, Roll covers a vast range of subjects, from slave weddings and funerals to the language, food, clothing, and labor of slaves, and places particular emphasis on religion as both a major battleground for psychological control and a paradoxical source of spiritual strength. Displaying keen insight into the minds of both slaves and slaveholders, Roll, Jordan, Roll is a testament to the power of the human spirit under conditions of extreme oppression.

“Row, Jordan, Row” notes specially trained dogs, often owned by poor whites, tracked runaways, maiming and killing if not pulled quickly from the escaping slaves.

Interesting guy. Went from a young Commie to a GOP voter in the 90’s. Would be controversial with today’s activist bottom-up historians, which he despised, even for his views in the early years. He saw the light. Good for him.

 

[pool boy]

“Though Genovese made a very public retreat from Marxist politics later in life and became a conservative Catholic, his belief that the paternalistic slave South stood apart from the rise of American capitalism remained constant. His last book, The Sweetness of Life, published posthumously with the editorial help of his former student, Douglas Ambrose, makes this clear, while also confirming what critics have long suspected: that Genovese harboured a genuine admiration for the South’s planter class. The planters were not, as he writes in his brief introduction, “blood-sucking sadists, interested solely in economic gain”, but “thoughtful, educated critics of the nineteenth-century society and moral order”. They “courageously” defended their society, he writes, because they believed its paternalistic foundation was “measurably more humane than the emergent world capitalist system”. They were the nation’s bulwarks against industrial capitalism – reasonable men who had a legitimate critique of the bourgeois individualism taking root in the Northern states. To the end, Genovese admired their principled stance (though, to be fair, he did not admire slavery itself). And, as if a parting gift to his critics, he confirmed that “Yes, I do ‘like them’”

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/historian-admired-slavers/amp/