In The Barber of Natchez, Edwin Adams Davis and William Ransom Hogan tell the remarkable story of William Johnson, a slave who rose to freedom, business success, and high community standing in the heart of the South—all before 1850. Emancipated as a young boy in 1820, Johnson became a barber’s apprentice and later opened several profitable barber shops of his own. As his wealth grew, he expanded into real estate and acquired large tracts of nearby farm and timber land. The authors explore in detail Johnson’s family, work, and social life, including his friendships with people of both races. They also examine his wanton murder and the resulting trial of the man accused of shooting him. More than the story of one individual, the narrative also offers compelling insight into the southern code of honor, the apprentice system, and the ownership of slaves by free blacks. Based on Johnson’s two-thousand-page diary, letters, and business records, this extraordinary biography reveals the complicated life of a freedman in Mississippi and a new perspective on antebellum Natchez.

Winner of the Jules and Frances Landry Award Historians have long considered the diary of William Johnson, a wealthy free Black barber in Natchez, Mississippi, to be among the most significant sources on free African Americans living in the antebellum South. Timothy R. Buckner’s The Barber of Natchez Reconsidered reexamines Johnson’s life using recent scholarship on Black masculinity as an essential lens, demonstrating a complexity to Johnson previously overlooked in academic studies. While Johnson’s profession as a barber helped him gain acceptance and respectability, it also required his subservience to the needs of his all-white clientele. Buckner’s research counters earlier assumptions that suggested Johnson held himself apart from Natchez’s Black population, revealing instead a man balanced between deep connections to the broader African American community and the necessity to cater to white patrons for economic and social survival. Buckner also highlights Johnson’s participation in the southern performance of manliness to a degree rarely seen in recent studies of Black masculinity. Like many other free Black men, Johnson asserted his manhood in ways beyond simply rebelling against slavery; he also competed with other men, white and Black, free and enslaved, in various masculine pursuits, including gambling, hunting, and fishing. Buckner’s long-overdue reevaluation of the contents of Johnson’s diary serves as a corrective to earlier works and a fascinating new account of a free African American business owner residing in the prewar South.

Winner of the Jules and Frances Landry Award Historians have long considered the diary of William Johnson, a wealthy free Black barber in Natchez, Mississippi, to be among the most significant sources on free African Americans living in the antebellum South. Timothy R. Buckner’s The Barber of Natchez Reconsidered reexamines Johnson’s life using recent scholarship on Black masculinity as an essential lens, demonstrating a complexity to Johnson previously overlooked in academic studies. While Johnson’s profession as a barber helped him gain acceptance and respectability, it also required his subservience to the needs of his all-white clientele. Buckner’s research counters earlier assumptions that suggested Johnson held himself apart from Natchez’s Black population, revealing instead a man balanced between deep connections to the broader African American community and the necessity to cater to white patrons for economic and social survival. Buckner also highlights Johnson’s participation in the southern performance of manliness to a degree rarely seen in recent studies of Black masculinity. Like many other free Black men, Johnson asserted his manhood in ways beyond simply rebelling against slavery; he also competed with other men, white and Black, free and enslaved, in various masculine pursuits, including gambling, hunting, and fishing. Buckner’s long-overdue reevaluation of the contents of Johnson’s diary serves as a corrective to earlier works and a fascinating new account of a free African American business owner residing in the prewar South.

They advocated economic independence from whites and founded insurance companies that became some of the largest black-owned corporations.--L. Diane Barnes "Alabama Review"

Eve's portrayal in the Bible as a sinner and a temptress seemed to represent -- and justify -- women's inferior position in society for much of history. During the Enlightenment, women challenged these traditional gender roles by joining the public sphere as writers, intellectuals, philanthropists, artists, and patrons of the arts. Some sought to reclaim Eve by recasting her as a positive symbol of women's abilities and intellectual curiosity. In Eve's Enlightenment, leading scholars in the fields of history, art history, literature, and psychology discuss how Enlightenment philosophies compared to women's actual experiences in Spain and Spanish America during the period. Relying on newspaper accounts, poetry, polemic, paintings, and saints' lives, this diverse group of contributors discuss how evolving legal, social, and medical norms affected Hispanic women and how art and literature portrayed them. Contributors such as historians Mónica Bolufer Peruga and María Victoria López-Cordón Cortezo, art historian Janis A. Tomlinson, and literary critic Rebecca Haidt also examine the contributions these women's experiences make to a transatlantic understanding of the Enlightenment. A common theme unites many of the essays: while Enlightenment reformers demanded rational equality for men and women, society increasingly emphasized sentiment and passion as defining characteristics of the female sex, leading to deepening contradictions. Despite clear gaps between Enlightenment ideals and women's experiences, however, the contributors agree that the women of Spain and Spanish America not only took part in the social and cultural transformations of the time but also exerted their own power and influence to help guide the Spanish-speaking world toward modernity. The first interdisciplinary collection published in English, Eve's Enlightenment offers a wealth of information for scholars of eighteenth-century Spanish history, literature, art history, and women's studies. An introduction by editors Catherine M. Jaffe and Elizabeth Franklin Lewis provides helpful historical and contextual information.

Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans examines the hidden histories behind one of the nineteenth-century South’s most famous maps: Norman’s Chart of the Lower Mississippi River, created by surveyor Marie Adrien Persac before the Civil War and used for decades to guide the pilots of river vessels. Beyond its purely cartographic function, Persac’s map depicted a world of accomplishment and prosperity, while concealing the enslaved and exploited laborers whose work powered the plantations Persac drew. In this collection, contributors from a variety of disciplines consider the histories that Persac’s map omitted, exploring plantations not as sites of ease and plenty, but as complex legal, political, and medical landscapes. Essays by Laura Ewen Blokker and Suzanne Turner consider the built and designed landscapes of plantations as they were structured by the logics and logistics of both slavery and the effort to present a façade of serenity and wealth. William Horne and Charles D. Chamberlain III delve into the political activity of formerly enslaved people and slaveholders respectively, while Christopher Willoughby explores the ways the plantation health system was defined by the agro-industrial environment. Jochen Wierich examines artistic depictions of plantations from the antebellum years through the twentieth century, and Christopher Morris uses the famed Uncle Sam Plantation to explain how plantations have been memorialized, remembered, and preserved. With keen insight into the human cost of the idealized version of the agrarian South depicted in Persac’s map, Charting the Plantation Landscape encourages us to see with new eyes and form new definitions of what constitutes the plantation landscape.

Extraordinarily wealthy and influential, Stephen Duncan (1787–1867) was a landowner, slaveholder, and financier with a remarkable array of social, economic, and political contacts in pre-Civil War America. In this, the first biography of Duncan, Martha Jane Brazy offers a compelling new portrait of antebellum life through exploration of Duncan's multifaceted personal networks in both the South and the North. Duncan grew up in an elite Pennsylvania family with strong business ties in Philadelphia. There was little indication, though, that he would become a cosmopolitan entrepreneur who would own over fifteen plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana, collectively owning more than two thousand slaves. With style and substance, Martha Jane Brazy describes both the development of Duncan's businesses and the lives of the slaves on whose labor his empire was constructed. According to Brazy, Duncan was a hybrid, not fully a southerner or a northerner. He was also, Brazy shows, a paradox. Although he put down deep roots in Natchez, his sphere of influence was national in scope. Although his wealth was greatly dependent on the slaves he owned, he predicted a clash over the issue of slave ownership nearly three decades before the onset of the Civil War. Perhaps more than any other planter studied, Duncan contradicts historians' definition of the southern slaveholding aristocracy. By connecting and contrasting the networks of this elite planter and those he enslaved, Brazy provides new insights into the slaveocracy of antebellum America.