";s:4:"text";s:4935:" This book doesn't sugarcoat those aspects, but as other reviews have pointed out, it does a good job of illustrating how slaves could exert limited amounts of agency despite being forcibly transformed into commodities and victims of American capitalism. Symbols & Motifs. Get started. Johnson looks at gender, whiteness, and class and gives us a window into slave markets.
Powerful, too, in the way that it uses different viewpoints - slave testimonies, court records, slave-holder accounts - to illuminate the economic, social and psychological aspects of the everyday operations of the slave markets; and, more broadly, the socially- and ideologically-constructed 'markets' of slavery.This was a good historical work but it was even better if you were interested in marketing. these ideas had less to do with the real people they would meet in the market, however, than they did with the slaveholder’s themselves, about the type of people they would become by buying slaves. Nor was it exactly an easy way: There were many risks and problems, with the merchandise getting sick, dying, running away, or in general not cooperating. Powerful piece of work, thank you Walter Johnson.A horrifying and illuminating look at the New Orleans slave trade. Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade.
He also describes the atmosphere of the slave purchase it self. It is easy to think of the plantation, and so that is the image that people tend to have. I read it for History before 1877. Admittedly, the slave market is not what contemporary people tend to think of the most when they think of slavery.
I had no idea that the slave-trading, buying and selling process was basically an economy in itself. It also usually proceeds from a perspective that slave owners and traders thought of slaves as animals, no different or little different thIf I could rate separately on content and meaning versus writing and readability, this would get five stars for the former and four for the latter. As the instructor teaching the seminar for which I read this book put it, each chapter is refracted around the chattel principle, but … There are so many different situations described that it really allowed me to think about what it was like for each of these people and the motivations behind their actions. Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. The thesis, as I understood it, is that slavery is usually considered using a perspective that ignores the agency of the enslaved people. We’d love your help.
And yet the consequences are everywhere from the White House built with slave labor and today inhabited by a first lady who is descended from both master and slave to our prisons filled with black men and the number of black children living in poverty.
It also usually proceeds from a perspective that slave owners and traders thought of slaves as animals, no different or little different than cattle. Powerful, too, in the way that it uses different viewpoints - slave testimonies, court records, slave-holder accounts - to illuminate the economic, social and psychological aspects of the everyday operations of the slave markets; and, more broadly, the socially- and ideologically-constructed 'markets' of slavery.An excellent read - very well written, and full of fascinating material.
Somehow I find describing these things academically while more precise in language somehow makes the book sound in a way inauthentic. I recommend anyone to read the final chapter, which encapsulates the rest of the book, and I recommend the entire book to anyone interested in the 19th century, or our own, who feels their own education on slavery and the period of slavery expansion (just before the Civil War) lacked depth and rigor.I liked this book.