A terrible intimacy : interracial life in the slaveholding South /
"From a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, a revelatory account of slavery, uncovering a surprising web of relationships between Black and white people that ranges far beyond the familiar template of "master-slave" dynamics. A white man hosts a wedding party for his enslaved servant an...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York, New York :
Henry Holt and Company,
2026.
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "From a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, a revelatory account of slavery, uncovering a surprising web of relationships between Black and white people that ranges far beyond the familiar template of "master-slave" dynamics. A white man hosts a wedding party for his enslaved servant and finds himself charged with a criminal offense; an overseer turns up dead after getting drunk with a slave; two men, one poor and white and the other enslaved, team up to plot a murder. Through six criminal cases in antebellum Virginia, A Terrible Intimacy describes a startling variety of encounters between white and Black Virginians. Contrary to our common assumption, fully half of the enslaved people in the South lived not on sprawling plantations but on small properties. Cruelty was baked into the system, yet in households of five, ten, or fifteen people, exploiters and exploited knew each other well, sharing religious worship, folkways, and domestic dynamics. Slaves, slave owners, overseers, and poor whites drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened often, enslaved families were split up, and in 1861 most white men in Virginia were ready to fight for the right to own other humans. Revealing a society in which white Americans recognized the humanity of their Black neighbors, even as they remained committed to a system that exploited and abused them, A Terrible Intimacy offers striking new insights into the complexity of life in the old South" -- |
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| Physical Description: | 352 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, map ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 315-325) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781250381118 1250381118 |