Introduction

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. In the mid-1960s, perhaps 4 or 5% of recent school leavers in the UK went to university, and Warwick was part of a new program of broadening access while maintaining British traditions of small-group teaching. The broadening process turned out to be gradual and it was not until the 1980s that the proportion of the school-leaver cohort attending university passed 15%, and not till much more recently that it reached 40%. 2. Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, xii. 3. Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, xii. 4. Adams, History of the United States. 5. See especially, Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll. Other important discussions of paternalism by Eugene Genovese and by his late wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese include Genovese, “‘Our Family, White and Black’”; Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital; Genovese, The Slaveholders' Dilemma; Genovese, The Southern Tradition; and Genovese, A Consuming Fire. 6. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 71. 7. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 89. 8. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 114; Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 178–200. 9. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 71; Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 200–2. 10. Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 370. 11. Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 436. 12. Revisionist historians like Gutman and Blassingame reacted against U.B. Phillips's white supremacist portrayal of slaves and slavery, and against Stanley Elkins's ‘Sambo thesis,’ a thesis which portrayed enslaved people as crushed and childlike. See Gutman, Black Family in Slavery and Freedom; Blassingame, Slave Community. For other notable revisionist works, see for example Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup; Levine Levine , Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom . New York : Oxford University Press , 1977 . [Google Scholar], Black Culture and Black Consciousness; Raboteau, Slave Religion; and Stuckey, Slave Culture. For some important post-revisionist studies, see Kolchin Kolchin , Peter . “ Re-evaluating the Antebellum Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective .” Journal of American History 70 1983 : 579 – 601 . [Google Scholar], “Re-evaluating the Antebellum Slave Community”; King, Stolen Childhood; Stevenson, Life in Black and White; Painter Painter , Nell Irvin . Southern History Across the Color Line . Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 2002 . [Google Scholar], Southern History Across the Color Line; Johnson Johnson, Walter. 2003. On Agency. Journal of Social History, 37: 113–24. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], “On Agency”; Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk; and Kaye, Joining Places. Kolchin's essay reviewed revisionist scholarship, suggesting that these studies tended to be too optimistic about the measure of autonomy that enslaved people could achieve through community, family, religion, independent work, resistance, and culture. Johnson's essay questioned the usefulness of the notion of slave “agency,” a concept that underpinned many revisionist studies. King emphasized the suffering and great vulnerability of enslaved children under the power of whites, and Stevenson argued that enslaved women suffered, not only at the hands of whites, but also through black misogyny. Painter, using the concept of “soul murder,” and pointing to the likely sexual abuse of enslaved people of all ages, argued that psychological pressures on enslaved people were almost impossibly intense. Both Penningroth Penningroth , Dylan C. The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South . Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 2003 . [Google Scholar] and Kaye challenged the notion of a united slave community, with Penningroth emphasizing disagreements within the slave quarters over small items of property. Kaye argued that slaves’ loyalties were not to a broad-based community of enslaved people. Instead, slaves might be loyal to their local neighborhood, but at the same time, they were deeply distrustful of enslaved people from outside of their locality. 13. Genovese, “Review of Them Dark Days,” 159, 161.