Moonlight, Magnolias, and Brigadoon; or, “Almost Like Being in Love”: Mastery and Sexual Exploitation in Eugene D. Genovese's Plantation South

Abstract

Like most eager graduate students on the job market, I vastly overprepared for my AHA interviews, which, thankfully, now seem like a lifetime ago. One of the questions I imagined my interviewers would ask was, what do you believe to be the most important book published in southern history (as I considered myself then as now, first and foremost, a southern historian)? Needless to say, the question was never posed; interviewers showed much greater interest in the more pedestrian tasks of determining what teaching gaps I could fill in their departments and in sizing me up as a collegial colleague. At long last, it seems, I now have an audience and a forum for that long-ignored question, as well as my response. Professors Livingston and Sinha have offered wonderful, thorough analyses and synopses of the published work of Eugene Genovese and its impact on the field of southern history. Some of what I have to say, therefore, is a mere reiteration of their points. Foremost, what I believe to be Genovese’s greatest contribution to the field is his attentiveness to analysis. As we all know, Genovese relied on many of the sources used by U. B. Phillips, whose work, American Negro Slavery, is considered the first scholarly attempt to grapple with slavery as a historical subject. Whereas the apologist and racist Phillips marshaled the sources, largely the texts written by slaveholders