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 Here

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 Terror

Masters of Terror PDF Author: Richard Tanter
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461640040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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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.

Accounting for Slavery

Accounting for Slavery PDF Author: Caitlin Rosenthal
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674241657
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
A Five Books Best Economics Book of the Year A Politico Great Weekend Read “Absolutely compelling.” —Diane Coyle “The evolution of modern management is usually associated with good old-fashioned intelligence and ingenuity...But capitalism is not just about the free market; it was also built on the backs of slaves.” —Forbes The story of modern management generally looks to the factories of England and New England for its genesis. But after scouring through old accounting books, Caitlin Rosenthal discovered that Southern planter-capitalists practiced an early form of scientific management. They took meticulous notes, carefully recording daily profits and productivity, and subjected their slaves to experiments and incentive strategies comprised of rewards and brutal punishment. Challenging the traditional depiction of slavery as a barrier to innovation, Accounting for Slavery shows how elite planters turned their power over enslaved people into a productivity advantage. The result is a groundbreaking investigation of business practices in Southern and West Indian plantations and an essential contribution to our understanding of slavery’s relationship with capitalism. “Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally reprehensible—and very profitable business...Rosenthal argues that slaveholders...were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts. Techniques that are still used by businesses today.” —Marketplace “Rosenthal pored over hundreds of account books from U.S. and West Indian plantations...She found that their owners employed advanced accounting and management tools, including depreciation and standardized efficiency metrics.” —Harvard Business Review

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.

Mountain Masters

Mountain Masters PDF Author: John C. Inscoe
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870499333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Antebellum Southern Appalachia has long been seen as a classless and essentially slaveless region - one so alienated and isolated from other parts of the South that, with the onset of the Civil War, highlanders opposed both secession and Confederate war efforts. In a multifaceted challenge to these basic assumptions about Appalachian society in the mid-nineteenth century, John Inscoe reveals new variations on the diverse motives and rationales that drove Southerners, particularly in the Upper South, out of the Union. Mountain Masters vividly portrays the wealth, family connections, commercial activities, and governmental power of the slaveholding elite that controlled the social, economic, and political development of western North Carolina. In examining the role played by slavery in shaping the political consciousness of mountain residents, the book also provides fresh insights into the nature of southern class interaction, community structure, and master-slave relationships.

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.

Drug War Addiction

Drug War Addiction PDF Author: Bill Masters
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781888118094
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


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.

The Lost Masters

The Lost Masters PDF Author: Curt Sampson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145160436X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Of all the games ever played in a sporting competition, never has an event been so bizarre and yet so fitting for its historical moment: the 1968 Masters. Anger gripped America's heart in April 1968. Vietnam and a bitter presidential contest sharpened the divides between races and generations, while protests and violence poisened the air. Then an assassin's bullet took the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Cities burned. The smoke had barely cleared when the Masters began. Never was the country more ready for distraction and escape--but could the orderly annual excitement of Palmer versus Nicklaus provide it? For a while, it could and it did--except that instead of a duel between golf's superstars, several unlikely members of the chorus stepped forward with once-in-a-lifetime performances. There was blunt-talking Bob Goalby, a truck driver's son from Illinois and former star football player; loveable Roberto De Vicenzo from Argentina, who charmed the galleries and media all week; and Bert Yancey, a Floridian who'd dropped out of West Point to face his private demons of mental illness. Just as the competition reached a thrilling crescendo, it all fell apart. The Masters, the best-run tournament in the world, devolved into a heart-wrenching tangle of rules, responsibility, and technicality. In a fascinating narrative that stops in Augusta, Buenos Aires, and Belleville, Illinois, bestselling author Curt Sampson finds the truth behind The Lost Masters. It's a story you'll never forget.