"A scholarly work but as readable as a novel, this is the first history of plantation life as experienced by the laborers themselves. The oppressive round-the-clock conditions under which they worked will make you glad they fought back in one huge strike; Takaki charts this conflict well." --San Francisco Chronicle

Old Plantation Days is a memoir in the form of a letter that Nancy Bostick writes reflecting on her life on a plantation and her marriage and parenthood afterward during the Civil War. Excerpt: The South as I knew it has disappeared; the New South has risen from its ashes, filled with the energetic spirit of a new age.

Richard Dunn reconstructs the lives of three generations of slaves on a sugar estate in Jamaica and a plantation in Virginia, to understand the starkly different forms slavery took. Deadly work regimens and rampant disease among Jamaican slaves contrast with population expansion in Virginia leading to the selling of slaves and breakup of families.

Provides information about what daily life was like on a southern plantation, including how slaves worked and dressed and what they ate.

This volume represented a compilation of interdisciplinary research being done throughout the American South and the Caribbean by historians, archaeologists, architects, anthropologists, and other scholars on the topic of slavery and plantations. It synthesizes materials known through the 1980s and reports on key sites of excavation and survey in the Carolinas, Barbados, Louisiana and other locations. Contributors include many of the leading figures in historical archaeology.

One day in 1852, The Princess, one of the finest steamboats afloat on the Mississippi River one hundred years ago was rounding the bend a Duncan�s Point about ten miles below Baton Rouge, when the boilers exploded with a frightful loss of life. The disaster occurred in front of the Conrad cottage where a descendant, the late G. Mather Conrad, of New Orleans, was born and lived as a youth. Lyle Saxon in his Old Louisiana tells of having known an old gentleman who remembered the awful holocaust. Then a little boy, this old gentleman was awaiting the return of his mother and father from New Orleans. He saw the Princess come around the bend and then turn in toward the bank. As he watched he heard a terrific explosion and saw the steamboat burst into flames. Mr. F. D. Conrad, plantation owner of that generation, so Saxon tells us, sent his slaves out in skiffs to rescue the men and women who crew struggling in the water. Many of them were frightfully scalded by steam from the broken boilers. Sheets were spread on the ground under the oak trees on the lawn and barrels of flour were broken open and the contents poured on the sheets. As the scalded people were pulled from the river, they were stripped and rolled in the flour, where they writhed and shrieked in agony. The little boy went from one sufferer to another seeking his father and mother. They were not there. They returned from New Orleans on a later boat, but he never forgot the anguish of his search.

Farverig og dramatisk slægtsskildring fra 1800-tallets USA. Queen er Alex Haleys farmor, datter af en velhavende sydstatsgodsejer og en sort slavepige, og kernen i romanen er hendes tunge skæbne som plantagebarn mellem to verdener

Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These landscapes—from cotton fields in the Lower Mississippi Valley to sugar plantations in western Cuba and coffee plantations in Brazil's Paraiba Valley—demonstrate how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy led to the formation of new zones of commodity production. By extension, these environments radically transformed slave labor and the role such labor played in the expansion of the global economy. Artists and mapmakers documented in surprising detail how the physical organization of the landscape itself made possible the increased exploitation of enslaved labor. Reading these images today, one sees how technologies combined with evolving conceptions of plantation management that reduced enslaved workers to black bodies. Planter control of enslaved people's lives and labor maximized the production of each crop in a calculated system of production. Nature, too, was affected: the massive increase in the scale of production and new systems of cultivation increased the land's output. Responding to world economic conditions, the replication of slave-based commodity production became integral to the creation of mass markets for cotton, sugar, and coffee, which remain at the center of contemporary life.