The most recommended books about the Antebellum South

When I begin researching a new historical subject I usually turn first to children’s books for a quick, broad overview. For Southern USA plantation life, Kalman’s book, part of the Historic Communities series, is a perfect introduction to the subject of southern plantations, with splendidly detailed drawings of homes and outbuildings, a glossary of terms, and many photographs from the latter decades before emancipation. Its focus is split between the planters’ lives and the lives of those they enslaved, introducing readers to every facet of this setting and the challenges faced by those who lived there. A great springboard into the subject for homeschooling.

I am, to put it lightly, obsessed with the way Octavia Butler revolutionizes the timescape and invites us to speculate about worlds that could be. In this and so many of her books, her vision of Afrofuturism is one that reminds us that our ancestral pasts and our imagined futures are always connected. 

I thought a lot about the future when I wrote my book, and I share Butler’s conviction that there is collective healing and liberation in revisiting and reimagining the past.

I also love that my neighborhood library in Pasadena is the one Octavia Butler used to frequent!

I thoroughly enjoyed this exhaustive study of American runaways that uses a wide variety of often ignored archival material.

This great book details the reasons, the places, the profiles, the strategies, and the objectives of some of the tens of thousands of people who, each year, left the plantations behind. They included Free Blacks who had been kidnapped and managed to get away.

There is quasi nothing on Maroons but, to my delight, Franklin and Schweninger show that contrary to popular belief, most runaways did not attempt to go North but remained in the South, close to their families, or in nearby cities and towns, another county, or another state. 

This book opened my eyes to the degrees of oppression/openness to slaves practiced by various states in the USA - namely Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana - along the route of the Underground Railway that led north to Canada. Penalties for capture ranged from lashes, to torture, to sterilization. The book portrays the indomitable drive of the human spirit in the character of Cora, a third-generation slave from Georgia on her odyssey north to freedom while battling slave-hunter Ridgeway all the way. The quandary of the liberated slave is also on display - wondering whether to go it on their own or to partner with the white man in an integrated, post-slavery society, while the vigilante white posse looms, ready to strike and destroy all good intentions.

Another pioneering work, this 1977 book was written during the late “Blaxploitation” film movement, but rather than focus on that era, it looks back at the first half of the 20th century, during the foundation of Hollywood as a filmmaking industry, to detail the harrowing trials and tribulations that Black performers had to endure.

With a scholarly yet accessible approach, this book drums home the fact that cinema—and American society as a whole—is not that far removed from slavery, as evidenced by Black portrayals in popular films like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Birth of a Nation. Like Bogle, Cripps is a legend in the field of Black film studies.

If you read one book about the history of slavery, this should be it. This brief volume sums up decades of Wright’s scholarship about how the institution of slavery shaped virtually every aspect of American economic development and left a lasting imprint long after Emancipation. It is concise, eye-opening, and insightful. It also offers a broader lesson in the ways in which economic institutions affect aspects of behavior in unanticipated ways.

Warning: This book will shock, intrigue, sadden, disturb, and ultimately stimulate you. This African American artist has produced an impressive and unique body of artwork that interrogates the conflicted nature of race in America.

This book provides a survey of her visually stunning work, including her controversial silhouette cut-outs that depict various charged images that draw on stereotypes to challenge and rework them. With shadowy figures that hint simultaneously at sexuality, subjugation, violence, and desire, this fascinating volume is not for the faint of heart or the easily disturbed.

This book brilliantly tells the story of the guerilla warfare that Black people waged against the purveyors of slavery in the antebellum South. It belies the White establishment’s portrayal of the compliant, intellectually challenged Negro who was content to live under the necessary guidance and protection of his or her master.

In fact, a sprawling network of underground freedom fighters developed secret codes, signs, and escape routes that enabled them to thwart the system that strove to keep them in chains. The book’s protagonist, Liz Spocott, is a “dreamer” who is able to see the future.

This book helped me understand that fiction writers are also dreamers, capable of seeing worlds that do not yet exist, and pushed me to join their ranks.

This extensive and prize-winning narrative of Southern women’s daily existence in the antebellum era covers all the bases on this subject. With the following chapter titles, how could it not? Southern Women, Southern Households; The View from the Big House; Between Big House and Slave Community; Gender Conventions; Women Who Opposed Slavery; And Women Who Did Not. A must-read for anyone wishing to delve into the subject of women’s lives in the antebellum south.

In this comprehensive study of homicide in America, Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. The book is particularly strong in addressing the South’s penchant for violence. In readable fashion, Roth argues that the United States, especially the South, is distinctive in its level of violence among unrelated adults―friends, acquaintances, and strangers.  Roth notes that the homicide rate rose substantially among unrelated adults in the slave South after the American Revolution; and it skyrocketed across the United States from the late 1840s through the mid-1870s, while rates in most other Western nations held steady or fell. That surge―and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate―correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith… show more.