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Term Two: Week 3: Slave family life and death

Gobbets
  • Douglass (1845) ch 1
  • Douglass (1892) Chs 1 & 3
Questions

How did the slave family survive slavery? What techniques were employed by slaves to maintain family links? What was the reaction when those links were severed? What were the common causes of death among American slaves?

Core Reading
E-resources
Further reading
  • Jones, Jacqueline, Labor of love, labor of sorrow: black women, work and the family from slavery to the present.
  • Moody, V A, Slavery on Louisiana Sugar Plantations (ch 6)
  • Malone, Ann, Sweet chariot: slave family & household structure in 19thC Louisiana (pt 1)
  • Dusinberre, William, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (ch3, 4 & 8)
  • Hudson, Larry, To have and to hold: slave work and family life in antebellum South Carolina
  • Stevenson, Brenda, Life in Black and White: Family and Community In the Slave South
  • King, Wilma, Stolen childhood: slave youth in 19thC America
  • West, Emily, Chains of Love: Slave couples on antebellum South Carolina
  • Morgan, Jennifer L, Laboring women : Reproduction & gender in New World Slavery
  • Schwartz, Marie, Born in bondage : growing up enslaved in the antebellum South
  • Blassingame, John W., The slave community: plantation life in the antebellum South. 
  • Land, Aubrey Christian, Bases of the plantation society.
  • Savitt, Todd, Medicine and slavery
  • Postell, W D, Health of slaves on southern plantations
  • Morgan, Philip, 'Black society in the lowcountry' in Berlin & Hoffman (eds) Slavery and Freedom in the American Revolution