Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery
by John Michael Vlach
Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies (1993)
140 Members (4.33)
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Description
Behind the "Big Houses" of the antebellum South existed a different world, socially and architecturally, where slaves lived and worked. John Michael Vlach explores the structures and spaces that formed the slaves' environment. Through photographs and the words of former slaves, he portrays the plantation landscape from the slaves' own point of view. The plantation landscape was chiefly the creation of slaveholders, but Vlach argues convincingly that slaves imbued this landscape with their show more own meanings. Their subtle acts of appropriation constituted one of the more effective strategies of slave resistance and one that provided a locus for the formation of a distinctive African American culture in the South. Vlach has chosen more than 200 photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey--an archive that has been mined many times for its images of the planters' residences but rarely for those of slave dwellings. In a dramatic photographic tour, Vlach leads readers through kitchens, smokehouses, dairies, barns and stables, and overseers' houses, finally reaching the slave quarters. To evoke a firsthand sense of what it was like to live and work in these spaces, he includes excerpts from the moving testimonies of former slaves drawn from the Federal Writers' Project collections. show lessTags
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8+ Works 440 Members
John Michael Vlach is professor of American studies and anthropology and director of the Folklife Program at George Washington University.
Series
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Art & Design, History
- DDC/MDS
- 975.00496 — History & geography History of North America Southeastern United States (South Atlantic states)
- LCC
- E443 .V58 — History of the United States United States Revolution to the Civil War, 1775/1783-1861 Slavery in the United States. Antislavery
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 140
- Popularity
- 233,816
- Rating
- (4.33)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 2
- ASINs
- 1
