• "With Strategies for Survival William Dusinberre
solidifies his reputation as one of our finest historians of southern
slavery. His unusually sensitive reading of interviews with Virginia's
ex-slaves returns us to basic questions, but offers startling fresh
answers. Like his classic study of slavery on the rice plantations,
Strategies for Survival will quickly become a must-read for
all students of antebellum American history." —James Oakes,
author of Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South
"This remarkable study of antebellum Virginia slavery displays
all the qualities we have come to expect from William Dusinberre—
impeccable research, creative questioning, elegant writing, and
persuasive interpretations. This is a major contribution from a
major historian." —Charles Joyner, author of Down By the
Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community
|
Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in
Antebellum Virginia |
| |
| William Dusinberre |
| 264 pages, 6 x 9 |
| 2 maps. 2 tables |
| Cloth ISBN 978-0-8139-2822-7 • $40.00 |
| Carter
G. Woodson Institute Series
|
| September 2009 |
 |
Strategies for Survival conveys the experience of bondage
through the words of former slaves themselves. The interviews—conducted
in Virginia in 1937 by WPA interviewers—are considered among
the most valuable of the WPA interviews because in Virginia the
interviewers were almost all African Americans; thus the interviewees
almost certainly spoke more frankly than they would otherwise
have done. Dusinberre uses the interviews to assess the strategies
by which slaves sought to survive, despite the severe constrictions
bondage imposed upon their lives. Religion and escape were common
means of coping with the indignity of family disruption, contempt,
and the harsh realities of slavery. However, while Dusinberre
recognizes the creativity and variety of slaves' responses to
oppression, he acknowledges the dispiriting realities of the limits
of slave resistance and agency.
William Dusinberre, Reader in History,
Emeritus, at the University of Warwick in England, is the author
of Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk,
Henry Adams: The Myth of Failure (Virginia) and the award-winning
Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps.
|
