Masters of Violence

Masters of Violence PDF Author: Tristan Stubbs
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611178851
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
From trusted to tainted, an examination of the shifting perceived reputation of overseers of enslaved people during the eighteenth century. In the antebellum southern United States, major landowners typically hired overseers to manage their plantations. In addition to cultivating crops, managing slaves, and dispensing punishment, overseers were expected to maximize profits through increased productivity—often achieved through violence and cruelty. In Masters of Violence, Tristan Stubbs offers the first book-length examination of the overseers—from recruitment and dismissal to their relationships with landowners and enslaved people, as well as their changing reputations, which devolved from reliable to untrustworthy and incompetent. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, slave owners regarded overseers as reliable enforcers of authority; by the end of the century, particularly after the American Revolution, plantation owners viewed them as incompetent and morally degenerate, as well as a threat to their power. Through a careful reading of plantation records, diaries, contemporary newspaper articles, and many other sources, Stubbs uncovers the ideological shift responsible for tarnishing overseers’ reputations. In this book, Stubbs argues that this shift in opinion grew out of far-reaching ideological and structural transformations to slave societies in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia throughout the Revolutionary era. Seeking to portray slavery as positive and yet simultaneously distance themselves from it, plantation owners blamed overseers as incompetent managers and vilified them as violent brutalizers of enslaved people. “A solid work of scholarship, and even specialists in the field of colonial slavery will derive considerable benefit from reading it.” —Journal of Southern History “A major achievement, restoring the issue of class to societies riven by racial conflict.” —Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne “Based on a detailed reading of overseers’ letters and diaries, plantation journals, employer’s letters, and newspapers, Tristan Stubbs has traced the evolution of the position of the overseer from the colonial planter’s partner to his most despised employee. This deeply researched volume helps to reframe our understanding of class in the colonial and antebellum South.” —Tim Lockley, University of Warwick

Masters of Violence

Masters of Violence PDF Author: Tristan Stubbs
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611178851
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book

Book Description
From trusted to tainted, an examination of the shifting perceived reputation of overseers of enslaved people during the eighteenth century. In the antebellum southern United States, major landowners typically hired overseers to manage their plantations. In addition to cultivating crops, managing slaves, and dispensing punishment, overseers were expected to maximize profits through increased productivity—often achieved through violence and cruelty. In Masters of Violence, Tristan Stubbs offers the first book-length examination of the overseers—from recruitment and dismissal to their relationships with landowners and enslaved people, as well as their changing reputations, which devolved from reliable to untrustworthy and incompetent. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, slave owners regarded overseers as reliable enforcers of authority; by the end of the century, particularly after the American Revolution, plantation owners viewed them as incompetent and morally degenerate, as well as a threat to their power. Through a careful reading of plantation records, diaries, contemporary newspaper articles, and many other sources, Stubbs uncovers the ideological shift responsible for tarnishing overseers’ reputations. In this book, Stubbs argues that this shift in opinion grew out of far-reaching ideological and structural transformations to slave societies in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia throughout the Revolutionary era. Seeking to portray slavery as positive and yet simultaneously distance themselves from it, plantation owners blamed overseers as incompetent managers and vilified them as violent brutalizers of enslaved people. “A solid work of scholarship, and even specialists in the field of colonial slavery will derive considerable benefit from reading it.” —Journal of Southern History “A major achievement, restoring the issue of class to societies riven by racial conflict.” —Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne “Based on a detailed reading of overseers’ letters and diaries, plantation journals, employer’s letters, and newspapers, Tristan Stubbs has traced the evolution of the position of the overseer from the colonial planter’s partner to his most despised employee. This deeply researched volume helps to reframe our understanding of class in the colonial and antebellum South.” —Tim Lockley, University of Warwick

Masters of Violence

Masters of Violence PDF Author: Tristan Stubbs
Publisher: Carolina Lowcountry and the At
ISBN: 9781611178845
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The overseer performed a role of singular importance to the plantation economies of the eighteenth-century South. Ultimately the responsibility for a profitable return on his employer's investment in land and human property fell to him, ahead of the estate steward or planter's agent, both of whom were superior in the management hierarchy. Stubbs's book contends that eighteenth-century overseeing is integral to understanding the development of slaveholder paternalism in the nineteenth century"--

Masters of Terror

Masters of Terror PDF Author: Richard Tanter
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742538344
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
The terror campaign by pro-Indonesian armed groups before, during, and after East Timor's independence referendum in 1999 was a blatant challenge to the international community as many of the acts of murder, political intimidation, destruction, and mass deportation took place before the eyes of the world. Yet still the ultimate responsibility has been denied and obscured. Masters of Terror provides an authoritative analysis and documentation of the brutal operations carried out by the Indonesian army and its East Timorese allies. The authors carefully assemble detailed accounts of the actions of the major Indonesian officers and East Timorese militia commanders accused of gross human rights violations. This indispensable work explores a horrific frontal attack on democracy and calls for the establishment of an international tribunal for crimes against humanity in East Timor.

Domestic Affairs

Domestic Affairs PDF Author: Kristina Straub
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801895111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
From Daniel Defoe’s Family Instructor to William Godwin’s political novel Caleb Williams, literature written for and about servants tells a hitherto untold story about the development of sexual and gender ideologies in the early modern period. This original study explores the complicated relationships between domestic servants and their masters through close readings of such literary and nonliterary eighteenth-century texts. The early modern family was not biologically defined. It included domestic servants who often had strong emotional and intimate ties to their masters and mistresses. Kristina Straub argues that many modern assumptions about sexuality and gender identity have their roots in these affective relationships of the eighteenth-century family. By analyzing a range of popular and literary works—from plays and novels to newspapers and conduct manuals—Straub uncovers the economic, social, and erotic dynamics that influenced the development of these modern identities and ideologies. Highlighting themes important in eighteenth-century studies—gender and sexuality; class, labor, and markets; family relationships; and violence—Straub explores how the common aspects of human experience often intersected within the domestic sphere of master and servant. In examining the interpersonal relationships between the different classes, she offers new ways in which to understand sexuality and gender in the eighteenth century.

Masters of the Lost Land

Masters of the Lost Land PDF Author: Heriberto Araujo
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063024284
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
“Gripping. … Araujo’s accretion of detail has a powerful effect, demonstrating how deeply the culture of violence has seeped into the social fabric of Amazonia — and how hard it will be to eradicate.” — New York Times Book Review "A raw account of the critical struggle between law and lawlessness on the world’s last great frontier." — Christian Science Monitor In the tradition of Killers of the Flower Moon, a haunting murder mystery revealing the human story behind one of the most devastating crimes of our time: the ruthless destruction of the Amazon rain forest—and anyone who stands in the way Deep in the heart of the Amazon, the city of Rondon do Pará, Brazil, lived for decades in the shadow of land barons, or fazendeiros, who maintained control of the region through unscrupulous land grabs and egregious human rights violations. They razed and burned the jungle, expelled small-scale farmers and Indigenous tribes from their lands, and treated their farmhands as slaves—all with impunity. The only true opposition came from Rondon’s small but robust farmworkers’ union, led by the charismatic Dezinho, who fought to put power back into the hands of the people who called the Amazon home. But when Dezinho was assassinated in cold blood, it seemed the farmworkers’ struggle had come to a violent and fruitless end. What no one anticipated was that this event would bring forth an unlikely hero: Dezinho’s widow. Against great odds, and at extreme personal risk, Maria Joel, now a single mother of four young children, used her ingenuity and unwavering support from union members to bring her husband’s killer to account in court. Her campaign gained unexpected momentum, helping to bring international attention to the dire situation in Rondon, from Brazil’s president Lula to international celebrities and civil rights groups. Maria Joel’s fight for justice had far-reaching implications: it unearthed a chilling world of corruption and lawlessness rooted in Brazil’s quest to turn the largest rain forest on earth into an economic frontier. As more details came out, it began to look increasingly likely that Dezinho’s killer, a reluctant and inexperienced gunman, was just one piece of a larger criminal consortium, with ties leading all the way up to one of the region’s most powerful and notorious fazendeiros of all. Featuring groundbreaking revelations and exclusive interviews, this gripping work of narrative nonfiction is the culmination of journalist Heriberto Araujo’s years-long investigation in the heart of the Amazon. Set against the backdrop of appalling deforestation rates and resultant superfires, Masters of the Lost Land vividly reveals the human story behind the loss of—and fierce crusade to protect—one of our greatest resources in the fight against climate change and one of the last wild places on earth.

Slave Patrols

Slave Patrols PDF Author: Sally E. Hadden
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674012348
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
"Obscured from our view of slaves and masters in America is a critical third party: the state, with its coercive power. This book completes the grim picture of slavery by showing us the origins, the nature, and the extent of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late seventeenth century through the end of the Civil War. Here we see how the patrols, formed by county courts and state militias, were the closest enforcers of codes governing slaves throughout the South. Mining a variety of sources, Sally Hadden presents the views of both patrollers and slaves as she depicts the patrols, composed of “respectable” members of society as well as poor whites, often mounted and armed with whips and guns, exerting a brutal and archaic brand of racial control inextricably linked to post–Civil War vigilantism and the Ku Klux Klan. City councils also used patrollers before the war, and police forces afterward, to impose their version of race relations across the South, making the entire region, not just plantations, an armed camp where slave workers were controlled through terror and brutality."

Masters of Doom

Masters of Doom PDF Author: David Kushner
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588362892
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Masters of Doom is the amazing true story of the Lennon and McCartney of video games: John Carmack and John Romero. Together, they ruled big business. They transformed popular culture. And they provoked a national controversy. More than anything, they lived a unique and rollicking American Dream, escaping the broken homes of their youth to co-create the most notoriously successful game franchises in history—Doom and Quake—until the games they made tore them apart. Americans spend more money on video games than on movie tickets. Masters of Doom is the first book to chronicle this industry’s greatest story, written by one of the medium’s leading observers. David Kushner takes readers inside the rags-to-riches adventure of two rebellious entrepreneurs who came of age to shape a generation. The vivid portrait reveals why their games are so violent and why their immersion in their brilliantly designed fantasy worlds offered them solace. And it shows how they channeled their fury and imagination into products that are a formative influence on our culture, from MTV to the Internet to Columbine. This is a story of friendship and betrayal, commerce and artistry—a powerful and compassionate account of what it’s like to be young, driven, and wildly creative. “To my taste, the greatest American myth of cosmogenesis features the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boy who, in the insular laboratory of his own bedroom, invents the universe from scratch. Masters of Doom is a particularly inspired rendition. Dave Kushner chronicles the saga of video game virtuosi Carmack and Romero with terrific brio. This is a page-turning, mythopoeic cyber-soap opera about two glamorous geek geniuses—and it should be read while scarfing down pepperoni pizza and swilling Diet Coke, with Queens of the Stone Age cranked up all the way.”—Mark Leyner, author of I Smell Esther Williams

Stuart: A Life Backwards

Stuart: A Life Backwards PDF Author: Alexander Masters
Publisher: Delacorte Press
ISBN: 0440336120
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
In this extraordinary book, Alexander Masters has created a moving portrait of a troubled man, an unlikely friendship, and a desperate world few ever see. A gripping who-done-it journey back in time, it begins with Masters meeting a drunken Stuart lying on a sidewalk in Cambridge, England, and leads through layers of hell…back through crimes and misdemeanors, prison and homelessness, suicide attempts, violence, drugs, juvenile halls and special schools–to expose the smiling, gregarious thirteen-year-old boy who was Stuart before his long, sprawling, dangerous fall. Shocking, inspiring, and hilarious by turns, Stuart: A Life Backwards is a writer’s quest to give voice to a man who, beneath his forbidding exterior, has a message for us all: that every life–even the most chaotic and disreputable–is a story worthy of being told.

They Were Her Property

They Were Her Property PDF Author: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300251831
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History A bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy “Compelling.”—Renee Graham, Boston Globe “Stunning.”—Rebecca Onion, Slate “Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

Slave Against Slave

Slave Against Slave PDF Author: Jeff Forret
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807161128
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
In the first-ever comprehensive analysis of violence between slaves in the antebellum South, Jeff Forret challenges persistent notions of slave communities as sites of unwavering harmony and solidarity. Though existing scholarship shows that intraracial black violence did not reach high levels until after Reconstruction, contemporary records bear witness to its regular presence among enslaved populations. Slave against Slave explores the roots of and motivations for such violence and the ways in which slaves, masters, churches, and civil and criminal laws worked to hold it in check. Far from focusing on violence alone, Forret’s work also adds depth to our understanding of morality among the enslaved, revealing how slaves sought to prevent violence and punish those who engaged in it. Forret mines a vast array of slave narratives, slaveholders’ journals, travelers’ accounts, and church and court records from across the South to approximate the prevalence of slave-against-slave violence prior to the Civil War. A diverse range of motives for these conflicts emerges, from tensions over status differences, to disagreements originating at work and in private, to discord relating to the slave economy and the web of debts that slaves owed one another, to courtship rivalries, marital disputes, and adulterous affairs. Forret also uncovers the role of explicitly gendered violence in bondpeople’s constructions of masculinity and femininity, suggesting a system of honor among slaves that would have been familiar to southern white men and women, had they cared to acknowledge it. Though many generations of scholars have examined violence in the South as perpetrated by and against whites, the internal clashes within the slave quarters have remained largely unexplored. Forret’s analysis of intraracial slave conflicts in the Old South examines narratives of violence in slave communities, opening a new line of inquiry into the study of American slavery.