Master-slave Relationship Research Articles

A way out of no way: claiming family and freedom in the new South

An African American folk saying declares, Our God can make a way out of no way...He can do anything but fail. When Dianne Swann-Wright set out to capture and relate the history of her ancestors-African Americans in central Virginia after the Civil War-she had to find that way, just as her people had done in creating a new life after emancipation. In order to tell their story, she could not rely solely on documents from the plantation where her forebears had lived. Unlike the register of babies born, marriages made, or lives lost that white families' Bibles contained, ledgers recorded Swann-Wright's ancestors, as commodities. Thus Swann-Wright took another route, setting out to gather spoken words-stories, anecdotes, and sayings. What results is a strikingly rich and textured history of a slave community. Looking at relations between plantation owners and their slaves and the succeeding generations of both, A Way out of No Way explores what it meant for the master-slave relation to change to one of employer and employee and how patronage, work relationships, and land acquisition evolved as the people of Piedmont Virginia entered the twentieth century. Swann-Wright illustrates how two white landowners, one of whom had headed a plantation before the Civil War, learned to compensate freed persons for their labor. All the more fascinating is her study of how the emancipated learned to be free-of how they found their way out of no way.

The Impact of Household Slaves on the Jewish Family in Roman Palestine

AbstractIn late antiquity most of the slaves owned by Jewish slave owners in Roman Palestine seem to have been domestic slaves. These slaves formed an integral part of the Jewish household and played an important role within the family economy. In a number of respects the master-slave relationship resembled the wife-husband, child-father, and student-teacher relationships, and affectionate bonds between the slave and his master (or nursling) would have an impact on relationships between other members of the family. Master and slave were linked to each other through mutual ties of dependency which counteracted the basic powerlessness of slaves. On the other hand, slaves had to suffer sexual exploitation and were considered honorless. Rabbinic sources reveal both similarities and differences between Jewish and Graeco-Roman attitudes toward slaves. The Jewish view of the master-slave relationship also served as the basis for its metaphorical use.

The Creative and Revolutionary Nature of Desire

Beginning with our ordinary consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel intends to move his reader to the more authentic perspective of Geist, a viewpoint that will not manifest us as finite subjects in opposition to the world, but will allow us to perceive ourselves as vehicles of a spirit in which the world is no longer distinct from us. By following the dialectical movement of consciousness and the things themselves that are replete with contradiction, Hegel arrives at a discussion of self-consciousness and its dialectic of desire and fulfillment. The certainty of the self is the ground of fulfillment, which reflects our notion of ourselves and the goal of total integrity for which we work. This drive for total integrity is even evident in lower forms of life that take and incorporate needed elements for their survival from the external world and thereby cancel their otherness. More than just a basic drive for integrity, desire indicates the facticity of the need for external objects. And the dialectic of desire and fulfillment implies that self-consciousness possesses two objects: its embodiment and the object of desire. By overcoming its two objects or returning to itself, self-consciousness maintains its existence by feeding on life. But desire is not merely intentional in the sense of being for an object or other, it is also reflective because it enables the subject to discover and enhance itself.1 This philosophical scenario depicted by Hegel makes it clear that a human being is a creature of desire and not a simple self-identical being. With the continual arising of new desires, a human being alternates between being before another and being before nothing at all, an encounter with the wholly other and an incorporation of it in an attempt to satisfy one's desire and recover integrity. In order to arrive at integrity, one must find a reality whose otherness can be negated without its being annihilated. This appears to suggest that the fundamental desire of self-consciousness, a process of destroying and incorporating foreign objects, can only be satisfied by another self-consciousness, a steadfast reality that can cancel its own foreignness and yet allow one to discover oneself. This is possible in the encounter with another human being in so far as one is recognized as human by that being. Since this recognition must be mutual for both parties to achieve integrity, it is, of course, impossible within the context of the master-slave relationship for Hegel. Nonetheless, it is evident that for Hegel desire is connected with self-knowledge and the search for identity. In reaction to Hegel's position on desire, some postmodern thinkers claim that his conception of desire is too negative, and there is rather a need to emphasize the affirmative nature of desire. Moreover, from the perspective of some postmodern thinkers Hegel's notion of desire is metaphysical because it raises the problem of human identity. By introducing an affirmative nature of desire and correcting Hegel, it will be possible to see that desire is not something negative, but it is rather something productive, creative, and even revolutionary. In the following discussion, I shall focus on the contributions of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Lacan, Felix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze on the topic of desire. Since Guattari and Deleuze form a team, I shall compare their position on desire to those of Lacan and Levinas with respect to the relation of desire to need or lack, the connection of desire and the self, the necessity of the liberation of desire, and the relation between revolution and desire. I will then conclude with some critical observations. Need and Lack Since there is an absence of an analysis of desire in Heidegger's phenomenology of Dasein, Levinas attempts to correct this oversight in his own work. By drawing a fundamental distinction between desire and need, Levinas stresses that the former is excessive, exterior, strange, other, and possesses an ability to disrupt and reorient us. …

Robotic surgery, telerobotic surgery, telepresence, and telementoring. Review of early clinical results.

Although laparoscopic cholecystectomy rapidly became the standard of care for the surgical treatment of cholelithiasis, very few other abdominal or cardiac operations are currently performed using minimally invasive surgical techniques. The inherent limitations of traditional laparoscopic surgery make it difficult to perform these operations. We, and others, have attempted to use robotic technology to (a) provide a stable camera platform, (b) replace two-dimensional with three-dimensional (3-D) imaging, (c) simulate the fluid motions of a surgeon's wrist to overcome the motion limitations of straight laparoscopic instruments, and (d) offer the surgeon a comfortable, ergonomically optimal operating position. In this article, we review the early published clinical experience with surgical robotic and telerobotic systems and assess their current limitations. The voice-controlled AESOP robot replaces the cameraperson and facilitates the performance of solo-surgeon laparoscopic operations. AESOP provides a stable camera platform and avoids motion sickness in the operative team. The telerobotic Zeus and da Vinci surgical systems permit solo surgery by a surgeon from a remote sight. These telerobots hold the camera, replace the surgeon's two hands with robotic instruments, and serve in a master-slave relationship for the surgeon. Their robotic instruments simulate the motions of the surgeon's wrist, facilitating dissection. Both telerobots use 3-D imaging to immerse the surgeon in a three-dimensional video operating field. These robots also provide operating positions for the surgeon console that are ergonomically superior to those required by traditional laparoscopy. The technological advances of these telerobots now permit telepresence surgery from remote locations, even locations thousands of miles away. In addition, telepresence permits the telementoring of novice surgeons who are performing new procedures by expert surgeons in remote locations. The studies reviewed here indicate that robotics and telerobotics offer potential solutions to the inherent problems of traditional laparoscopic surgery, as well as new possibilities for telesurgery and telementoring. Nonetheless, these technologies are still in an early stage of development, and each device entails its own set of challenges and limitations for actual use in clinical settings.

Everyday life of slaves in Northern Dahomey: The process of remembering

This article analyses the social act of remembering among the Gannunkeebe in northern Benin, predominantly descendants of slaves of the Fulbe. It raises methodological issues concerning the possibility of gaining access to memories of the daily life experiences of a community whose members possess their own factual history but one which - unlike the 'things-worth-remembering' history of their masters - offers little scope for the creation of traditions of collective identity. Hence the slaves' descendants often remain silent, negating their own stories. In consequence the everyday experience of slaves is transmitted not so much in verbal as in corporeal remembering. This process of embodying memories is the main subject of the article. Although the circumstances transmitted by slaves' descendants cannot always be traced directly to colonial influences, the colonial authorities do often feature in the fragments of remembered history. The Gannunkeebe paint an ambivalent picture of the colonial period: on the one hand, the authorities are depicted as welcomed strangers, associated with the end of slavery; on the other, they represent military service and forced labour, under which slaves were the worst hit, frequently being sent as substitutes for their masters to colonial recruitment. Even if French colonialism at the beginning of the twentieth century punished slave raiding and the slave trade, it did not challenge the master-slave relationship at the core of the Fulbe community. Orally transmitted knowledge shows that slaves were not passive victims but actively constructed their daily life as social agents, albeit subject to their masters' power to determine whose labour was placed at the disposal of the colonial administration.

Contesting "The Way the Almighty Wants It": Crafting Memories of Ex-Slaves in the Slave Narrative Collection

BETWEEN 1937 AND 1939, SEVENTEEN STATE BRANCHES OF THE FEDERAL Writers' Project (FWP) interviewed more than two thousand ex-slaves, approximately 2 percent of the total ex-slave population. 1 Federal employees gathered a number of interviews collected by this Ex-Slave Studies program into a rare book housed in the Library of Congress. The Slave Narrative Collection, which emerged out of this effort, has played an important role in shaping the narratives written by folklorists, sociologists, and historians about slave culture and the master-slave relationship. 2 Most academics acknowledge the problematic nature of these sources, since they generally resulted from encounters in the Jim Crow South between white southerners and elderly blacks, many of whom were children at the time of Emancipation and octogenarians when they were interviewed. Few academics, however, have explored how the narratives came into being, a process which reveals not only the biases of the ex-slave interviews as sources but also the operations of racism in the early twentieth century. Two versions of an interview that Federal Writer Esther de Sola conducted with Charlie Moses, an ex-slave from Brookhaven, Mississippi, illustrate how the interviews gathered in the Slave Narrative Collection resulted from contestations over the memory of slavery. The original transcript of Moses' interview depicts him as one of the most articulate, angry, and, as de Sola put it, "exceptionally intelligent" ex-slaves. 3 In his concluding comments, Moses, true to his prophetic name, argued poignantly against the "harsh treatment" that slaves [End Page 1] received and called upon God to maintain free blacks in a state of redemption and freedom. "I want to tell you now," Moses avowed, I pray the Lord to let us be free always. God almighty nevah ment human beings to be lak animals. Us niggahs has a soul, an' a heart, an' a mine an we isn't lak a dawg or a horse. I didn't spec' nothin' outten freedom septin' peace an' happiness an' the right to go my way as I please. An' that is the way the Almighty wants it." 4 Before submitting this potent statement to the national office of the Writers' Project, Mississippi state editors Pauline Loveless and Clara E. Stokes removed de Sola's complimentary editorialization and tamed Moses' criticism of slavery by adding the following words to his assertion: "If all marsters had been good like some, the slaves would all a-been happy. But marsters like mine ought never been allowed to own Niggers." 5 By inserting into the text a dichotomy between good and bad masters, the state editors replaced Moses' criticism of slavery as an institution with a reproach of his own "bad" ex-master, who deviated from the "good" master norm; thus, they implied that Moses' experience departed from the more typical paternalistic and consensual relationships between slaves and masters. Loveless and Stokes's revision of Moses' testimony was atypical. In his investigation of interviews with ex-slaves that state editors failed to submit to Washington, George Rawick found that editors in only six states revised interviews before sending them to the national office, and the state editors in five of those states changed an average of only eight interviews before submission. 6 According to Rawick, most of the editorial revisions were benign, such as shortening interviews and minor alterations in the recorded dialect, which had no clear explanation other than, perhaps, employing additional federal writers. Texas and Mississippi, however, deviated from this norm. Before submitting their interviews to Washington, Texas state editors revised the majority of their collection (275 out of 591 interviews). 7 One editor selected the interviews to be altered, and then a small team of interviewers rewrote them. 8 According to Rawick, the Texas revisions "help[ed to] make the narratives conform more closely with the accepted version of proper race relations of...

The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White

The Hairstons is the story of how the legacy of slavery has passed into our own time. Opening at the faded North Carolina plantation of Coolemee, this Faulkner-like true saga examines the ambiguities of the master-slave relationship.

Being Human in the Wor(l)d: Chinese Men and Maxine Hong Kingston's Reworking of Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe is nothing less than a nationalist narrative that extols the burgeoning capitalism of eighteenth-century England. In this moving tale, a ship-wrecked slave trader, stranded on an island for twenty-four-years, single-handedly consolidates the arduous and multi-tasked feat of making bread – from planting the wheat to producing the finished product – into a one-person job. On a smaller but no less devastating scale, he also succeeds in replicating the process of colonization through his master–slave relationship with Friday. The novel thus popularizes the notion of self-sufficiency through the mechanisms of capitalism, conquest, and the transmission of hegemony.

Discharge Prediction of Rechargeable Batteries with Neural Networks1

This article presents an original method to accurately predict the end of discharge of rechargeable batteries inserted in portable electronic equipments. The proposed method is based on two neural networks organized in a master-slave relation. A pred

The Slave Family in Arkansas

THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY is central to the history of the United States and especially the South. As Ira Berlin recognizes in his recent study, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, slavery shaped Americans'definition of race. Since race remains a major force in our society today, understanding the basis of our racial thought continues to be critical. The earliest scholars of slavery tended to look at it as an institution the slaveholders made, but in the last thirty years researchers have turned toward understanding slavery from the perspective of the slaves themselves. What might be called revisionist historians have examined in detail the development of the various social dimensions of the slave community.1 This new scholarship, however, has had little impact on our understanding of slavery in Arkansas. Orville Taylor's Negro Slavery in Arkansas remains the standard work and was exemplary for its time. Published in 1958 before recent research developments, it contributes little to the current discussion of the nature of slave life.2 This study seeks to rectify that deficiency with a look at one aspect of the slave community, the family. The slave family has been of particular interest to scholars, since understanding it has been considered critical to explaining the basic dynamics of the master-slave relationship and thus the character of the institution. Serious scholarly study of the slave family began with the work of one individual, E. Franklin Frazier, who published The Negro Family in Chicago in 1932 and The Negro Family in the United States in 1939. Frazier, concerned with what he considered to be the instability of the African American family in the 1930s, located the roots of that instability in slavery. He concluded that the slave family was little more than an accommodation to the institution. It never had the capacity to tie together households into units of common interest and purpose. The reason for this failure, Frazier hypothesized, was that the slave family could not be protected by its adult members and, often dispersed by owners, seldom existed over any length of time.3 Later historians, such as Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins, followed in Frazier's wake, agreeing with him that even where the slave household existed it lacked cohesiveness. The frequent breakup of families by masters prevented the development of strong bonds among family members. In the end, Stampp and Elkins concluded, as Frazier had, that the slave family reflected little more than the slave owner's desire to create stability within the plantation community. These conclusions became the textbook history for a generation and even the basis for public policy. Daniel P. Moynihan's book, The Negro Family in America: The Case for National Action, published in 1965, integrated this analysis into his explanation of modern problems of the African American family and his proposal for their solutions.4 Scholarship in the 1970s, by looking at the slave family from the viewpoint of the slaves, developed a different and revisionist interpretation. Examining new sources that ranged from the reminiscences of ex-slaves to plantation records, historians found an institution not simply shaped by the interests of the master but also by the interests of the African American slave community. They discovered stability rather than instability. The idea that slaves sought to create two-parent nuclear families that then became the vehicle for the formation of a larger and uniquely African American culture first appeared in 1972 in John Blassingame's Slave Community. It received subsequent support in Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's controversial Time on the Cross and Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll. Herbert Gutman carried the idea further in his Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, concluding that the two-parent family was the norm among slaves.5 By the 1990s the revisionist model had displaced that of Frazier, Stampp and Elkins. …

Slavery and the Defining of Arkansas

SLAVERY WAS RARELY, IF EVER, what struck visitors about antebellum Arkansas. In 1818 and 1819 Henry Schoolcraft romanticized a near savage population of hunters in the Ozarks while Thomas Nuttall found only incipient agricultural activity along the more settled banks of the Arkansas River. Traveling down the Southwest Trail in the mid-1820s, Joseph Meech worried about robbers and murderers. George Featherstonhaugh, in an oft quoted comment of 1834, described Arkansas Territory as a crude and violent place whose population consisted of debtors, gamblers, forgers, horse thieves, and murderers; all of them immigrants from the East attracted by Arkansas's flexible attitude toward such fundamental points as religion, morals, and property. A few years after statehood, Friedrich Gerstacker experienced the place as a vast wilderness, made up largely of swamps and forest, filled with game, and sparsely populated, mostly with subsistence farmers. As late as 1860 Henry Merrill marveled at the poverty-stricken and uncivilized mountain folk of Polk County in the Ouachita Mountains, making them sound like a fallen version of Schoolcraft's noble woodsmen of three decades earlier.1 While Orville W. Taylor published a comprehensive survey of in Arkansas in 1958, most recent scholars have de-emphasized that institution. Among modern interpreters, Malcolm J. Rohrbough saw Arkansas as a product of frontier and western influences; Lonnie White, Margaret Ross, and James M. Woods stressed the importance of politics; Michael B. Dougan was impressed with the lack of economic development, while this author argued for the importance of ambition and opportunity. Carl H. Moneyhon is an exception to this trend, but his work begins with the 1850s, when the significance of is more obvious. The general lack of attention, however, is neither surprising nor entirely unwarranted; was less dominant in Arkansas than in other states where planters and plantations were better established.2 In his recent and magisterial work, Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin distinguishes between societies with slaves and slave societies. In the former, slaves were simply one source of labor, and had a relatively small impact on society; in the latter, slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations. With slaves representing only 26 percent of its population in 186-the second smallest proportion in the Confederate states and only I percent above Tennessee, which was the bottom dweller-Arkansas did not fit Berlin's definition of a slave society, except perhaps in the plantation-dominated region of the south and east. Yet the influence of was pervasive. It established prerequisites for wealth and power, structured the law to meet its own imperatives, and shaped the relationship between Arkansas and the Union. Slavery was not the only definer of Arkansas, but it was a crucial one.3 The growth of in Arkansas was linked closely to the region's broader economic development. In 1820, a year after Arkansas had become a territory, agriculture was in its infancy. Slaves were only 11 percent of the population, and they were not concentrated geographically. Hempstead County on the Red River in the southwest had a population that was 21 percent slave, the highest in the territory. Delta counties like Arkansas and Phillips on the Mississippi River had only 14 percent and 12 percent respectively. Highland counties, Lawrence County in the north and Clark County in the southwest, had 9 percent and 7 percent respectively. By 1840 things had begun to change. In that year the census recorded that slaves were 20 percent of the population. Instead of being slightly more than one in ten persons, they were now one in five. Moreover, a geographic pattern had emerged as the slave population began to concentrate in the Delta and the Gulf Coastal Plain. …

The Articulation of Two Worlds: The Master-Slave Relationship Reconsidered

In 1830 or thereabouts Edmund Covington concluded that his hilly Mississippi land was not well suited to cultivating cotton. He therefore turned his plantation into what he described as a breeding business, not primarily with the intention of selling slaves, but to increase the capital holdings and assets of the plantation. By increasing allotments of food and clothing, providing comfortable dwellings, and reducing the work loads of women between the ages of fifteen and forty, he succeeded in helping his plantation's slave population achieve a crude birthrate of 12 percent, double the national average for slaves.' As Covington shifted his energies from raising cotton to raising people, the Manigault family in coastal Georgia sacrificed people for profits from rice. By minimizing expenditures on food and health care and increasing the work loads of female and child laborers to the point of exhaustion, the family lost 90 percent of all children born on the plantation, a horrendously high rate of child mortality even for a coastal rice plantation. Over a twenty-five-year period the Manigaults averaged a healthy 9 to 15 percent rate of return on total investment.2 These contrasting stories add fuel to the ongoing debate over the nature of slavery. Both cases seem to support the view, associated most frequently with the work of Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, especially Time on the Cross, that slave owners were profit-maximizing capitalists. The apparent brutality of the Manigaults, however, is inconsistent with Fogel and Engerman's representation of slave owners as plantation managers who generally preferred positive incentives to encourage good worker morale and efficiency. The Manigault plantation better reflects the

Race, Blood, and Gender in Southern Law

The catalyst for this ambitious canvass of southern law was Peter Bardaglio's realization that antebellum codifiers typically placed master-slave relations under the rubric of domestic relations. Their taxonomy provides the analytical framework for his study. In Bardaglio's view, the readiness of southern lawmakers to cluster provisions for the master-slave relationship together with those for husband-wife, parent-child, and guardian-ward attests to their perception that the relationships were connected. His objective is to trace those connections as they were played out in southern law over the course of the nineteenth century. In particular, he aims to assess the extent to which the legal regulation of the family and sexuality was shaped by the institution of slavery and then reshaped by the advent of emancipation. Accordingly, the Civil War divides this book quite literally into two parts, with the postwar segment depicted in evocative, Old Testament imagery as the time after the flood. Yet Bardaglio also balances the changes unleashed by the war with evidence of how the legacy of slavery cast its shadows on the legal culture of the postwar South. As this outline suggests, Bardaglio's probe of southern law at the nexus of race and gender is an entry point for investigating southern exceptionalism. His endnotes are a testament to scholarly controversy over how the white southern family compared to its northern counterpart, and if, in fact, it had a northern counterpart. To telescope the debate among historians into starkly reductive terms, the conflict pivots on whether individualism, liberalism, and romantic love penetrated the planter household of the South as it did the bourgeois household of the North to undermine the power of husbands and fathers, or whether male heads of southern households continued to rule their families in relatively autonomous fashion.' The dichotomy between bourgeois and patriarchal models of familial relations provides only one way of framing the issues Bardaglio pursues here. Reconstructing the Household owes as much to Michael Grossberg for its conceptualization of the issues as it does

The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (review)

BOOK REVIEWS263 society, as Rabinowitz argues, and reveals how difficult it is to preserve freedom and equal opportunity in a nation of "partial-identifiers." Rabinowitz, a self-proclaimed "partial identifier" himself, does show that this perspective can make for excellent history. This Northern white offers important insights into both Southern and African American history. These essays deserve what, in his introduction, Rabinowitz calls his highest compliment: they display "common sense based on a tiiorough reading ofdie sources" (15). Gaines M. Foster Louisiana State University The Economy andMaterial Culture ofSlaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana. By Roderick A. McDonald. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv, 339. $39.95.) In his intriguingstudy ofdie "slaves' economy" inJamaicaandLouisianaduring those two societies' most mature stages of economic development—Jamaica, 1780-1820, and Louisiana, 1820-1860—Roderick A. McDonald argues diat slaves on sugar plantations engaged in extensive and integrated economic networks diat tiiey themselves created and largely controlled. This "internal economy," moreover, undergirded an autonomous slave culture diat thrived beyond slaveholders' purview. Despite tiieir enslavement—which was exacerbated by die grinding routine of sugar production—slaves in Jamaica and Louisiana exercised considerable self-determination. While attending to die geographical and environmental factors mat distinguished sugar production and plantation routine in Jamaica and Louisiana, McDonald documents an array of activities mat enterprising slaves on sugar plantations conducted on their own time. Slaves raised animals, grew crops in their gardens or on provision grounds, and manufactured items, among other tasks. They bartered or sold diese commodities in nearby towns during "market days" or sold them directly to die plantation. Slaves were also paid cash or received credit for performing routine plantation chores on tiieir own time. One Louisiana sugar planter, for instance, paid his slaves on average three hundred dollars annually between 1848 and 1861 for die Spanish moss they collected. Slaves in botii societies were also consumers. They purchased necessities— household utensils, clothing, blankets, or foodstuffs—to supplement their paltry provisions; and they purchased such "luxury" items as meat, flour, shoes, tobacco, fancy clothing, watches, and jewelry. Indeed, slaves enjoyed surprisingly wide discretion in spending the sums they earned, and they exhibited "proprietary" rights to tiieir houses, gardens, and goods. Although important differences marked die internal economies of Jamaica and Louisiana, die networks ofproduction, exchange, and consumption diat obtained in botii regions provided die material basis for a distinctive and autonomous African American culture. 264CIVIL WAR HISTORY While McDonald masterfully reconstructs the slaves' economy, the implications of his argument are somewhat unsettling. Because the internal economy empowered slaves, McDonald impUes, it was subversive of the slave regime. Yet McDonald's own evidence shows that slaveholders not only tolerated but indeed encouraged and superintended slaves' economic activity. Moreover, no matter how extensive the slaves' economy, or how much independence die slaves derived from it, the fact remains that in neither Jamaica nor the American South was slavery ever seriously threatened from within. To be sure, slaves struggled heroically to create meaningful Uves while Uving under unspeakable oppression. Yet this struggle never amounted to a chaUenge to tiieir enslavement . Rather than imperiling the slave regime, the internal economy helped to sustain it, and instead of spawning an "autonomous" slave culture, the internal economy bespoke a more complex master-slave relationship than historians have previously aUowed for. Despite its interpretive bent, with which one may quibble, McDonald's study addresses so many important issues—such as the internal dynamics ofthe slave family and household, distinctions within the slave community to which the internal economy gave rise, and the dialectic of slave resistance and accommodation —that it warrants a close reading from scholars ofNew World slavery. John C. Rodrigue University ofMaryland Pulling the Temple Down: The Fire-Eaters and the Destruction of the Union. By David S. Heidler. (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1994. Pp. x, 262. $22.95.) Pulling the Temple Down provides a chronologicaUy organized synthesis of Southern secessionism that puts the Old South's "fire-eaters"—its most fanatic disunionists—at center stage. Whereas John McCardell (Idea of a Southern Nation [1979]) approached the radicals thematically and Eric H. Walther (The Fire-Eaters [1992]) served up chapter-length biographies...

Freedom and Oppression of Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean

Characteristics oftwo different social systems, island government and the particular master-slave relationship, jointly determined the degree offreedom of slaves in the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century. The degree to which an island was "a slave society" depended on the dominance of sugar cane in the island economy, and whether planters were internally well-organized and were powerful in the empire government. The Bahamas and Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic) had low planter power on both criteria; Barbados and Antigua had high on both. Within a slave society, the degree to which a slave was treated like a free man or woman was determined by the slave owner's need for the slave's consent and enthusiasm as a trusted agent. This varied within islands: Slave pearl divers, dock workers, fisher­ men, mistresses, hucksters, soldiers, or cowboys tended to be nearlyfree when slaves and were likely to be formally or informally set free, even if island governments strongly limited their freedom.

Liberté et oppression des esclaves aux Caraïbes au 18e siècle

Freedom and oppression of slaves in the 18th century caribbean The characteristics of two different social Systems, island government and the particular master-slave relationship, jointly determined the degree of freedom (or the degree of oppression) of slaves in the late 18th century Caribbean. The degree to which an island was a "slave society" that maximized slave oppression depended in turn on the degree to which it was a sugar island, and on how far thé planters of that island were internally well organized and had a powerful position in the empire government of the island. Thus, on both criteria, the Bahamas, Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic), had low planter power Barbados and Antigua high planter power.

Finite element analysis for consolidation in interaction between structure and saturated soil foundation

The consolidation analysis of interaction between structure and saturated soil foundation is discussed. With the use of substructure technique, the structure is condensed onto the interface of the soil, and then the consolidation governing equations to describe the interaction between soil and structure are derived. The solution with non-iterative algorithm is proposed in this paper. The pressure Master-Slave relation method is used to deal with the non-permeability conditions on soil boundaries. A numerical example is illustrated. Based on this paper, the interactive consolidation analysis between large structure and soil has been more practical.

The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South

In his Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982), Bertram Wyatt-Brown drew on anthropological theory to explore the origins and nature of the Old South’s culture. Like Genovese, he viewed that culture as premodern in many ways. Unlike Genovese, he argued that the roots of the southern culture lay in a concept of “honor” that originated in the folk cultures of early Europe, rather than in the master-slave relationship itself.

Computer networks and distributed systems

Computer Networks and Distributed Systems, along with Multiprocessor Systems, comprise the class of computer systems known as Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD). We distinguish Multi-processor Systems, which are not covered in this review, from the other members of MIMD, by the degree of autonomy of the computing elements and the means of communication between them. A system where the processors communicate by using shared memory or where there is a master-slave relationship among the processors is neither a network nor a Distributed System. This paper identifies, analyzes and classifies various aspects of distributed systems.

Images of Death and Slavery in Organizational Life

Organizational life is bounded by myths and symbols that affect the individual's behavior in mysterious ways. This paper examines the imagery of masters and slaves as a guide to the psychological dynamics of authority relationships in modern organizations. The master-slave relationship is related to the symbolic quest for immortality, and is analyzedfrom a historical and psychological perspective. Finally, its powerful imagery is connected to superior-subordinate relationships in modern organizations in order to demonstrate the continuing influence of the "irrational" in organizational life.