Eugene D. Genovese

A definitive account of slave life in the Old South and the role of the slaves in fashioning a Black national culture.

The World the Slaves Made

Roll, Jordan, Roll

A stimulating analysis of the society and economy in the slave south.

Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South

The Political Economy of Slavery

Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage 

A seminal and original work that delves deeply into what slaveholders thought.

Two Essays in Interpretation

The World the Slaveholders Made

In one of his most important books, the renowned historian Eugene D. Genovese examines slave revolts in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil, placing them in the context of modern world history. By studying the conditions that favored these revolts and the history of slave guerrilla warfare throughout the Western Hemisphere, he connects the ideology of the revolts to the ideology of the great revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century. Genovese finds that the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, constituted a turning point in the history of the slave revolts and, indeed, in the history of the human spirit. By claiming for his enslaved brothers and sisters the same right to human dignity that the French bourgeoisie claimed for itself during the French Revolution, Toussaint began the process by which slave uprisings changed from secessionist rebellions to revolutionary demands for liberty, equality, and justice.

Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World

From Rebellion to Revolution

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

The Mind of the Master Class tells of America's greatest historical tragedy. A great many of the slaveholding men and women were intelligent, honorable, and pious; yet, these very people, admirable in so many ways, presided over a social system that proved itself an enormity and inflicted horrors on their slaves. Even now, there is much to be learned from their moral and political reflections on their times--and ours.

History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview

The Mind of the Master Class

The fall of the Confederacy proved traumatic for a people who fought with the belief that God was on their side. Yet, as Eugene D. Genovese writes in A Consuming Fire, Southern Christians continued to trust in the Lord's will. The churches had long defended "southern rights" and insisted upon the divine sanction for slavery, but they also warned that God was testing His people, who must bring slavery up to biblical standards or face the wrath of an angry God. In the eyes of proslavery theorists, clerical and lay, social relations and material conditions affected the extent and pace of the spread of the Gospel and men's preparation to receive it. For proslavery spokesmen, "Christian slavery" offered the South, indeed the world, the best hope for the vital work of preparation for the Kingdom, but they acknowledged that, from a Christian point of view, the slavery practiced in the South left much to be desired. For them, the struggle to reform, or rather transform, social relations was nothing less than a struggle to justify the trust God placed in them when He sanctioned slavery. The reform campaign of prominent ministers and church laymen featured demands to secure slave marriages and family life, repeal the laws against slave literacy, and punish cruel masters. A Consuming Fire analyzes the strength, weakness, and failure of the struggle for reform and the nature and significance of southern Christian orthodoxy and its vision of a proper social order, class structure, and race relations.

The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South

A Consuming Fire

The Mind of the Master Class tells of America's greatest historical tragedy. It presents the slaveholders as men and women, a great many of whom were intelligent, honorable, and pious. It asks how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that proved itself an enormity and inflicted horrors on their slaves. The South had formidable proslavery intellectuals who participated fully in transatlantic debates and boldly challenged an ascendant capitalist ('free-labor') society. Blending classical and Christian traditions, they forged a moral and political philosophy designed to sustain conservative principles in history, political economy, social theory, and theology, while translating them into political action. Even those who judge their way of life most harshly have much to learn from their probing moral and political reflections on their times - and ours - beginning with the virtues and failings of their own society and culture.

As much a work of political and moral philosophy as one of history, The Southern Tradition offers an in-depth look at the tenets and attitudes of the Southern-conservative worldview. Opening a powerful new perspective on today's politics, Eugene D. Genovese traces a distinct type of conservatism to its sources in Southern tradition.

The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism

The Southern Tradition

This book examines the home and leisure life of planters in the antebellum American South. Based on a lifetime of research by the late Eugene Genovese (1930–2012), with an introduction and epilogue by Douglas Ambrose, The Sweetness of Life presents a penetrating study of slaveholders and their families in both intimate and domestic settings: at home; attending the theatre; going on vacations to spas and springs; throwing parties; hunting; gambling; drinking and entertaining guests, completing a comprehensive portrait of the slaveholders and the world that they built with slaves. Genovese subtly but powerfully demonstrates how much politics, economics, and religion shaped, informed, and made possible these leisure activities. A fascinating investigation of a little-studied aspect of planter life, The Sweetness of Life broadens our understanding of the world that the slaveholders and their slaves made; a tragic world of both 'sweetness' and slavery.

Southern Planters at Home

The Sweetness of Life

American slaveholders used the wealth and leisure that slave labor provided to cultivate lives of gentility and refinement. This study provides a vivid portrait of slaveholders at home and at play as they built a tragic world of both 'sweetness' and slavery.

Eugene D. Genovese

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