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Old Age and American Slavery explores how antebellum southerners, Black and white, adapted to, resisted, or failed to overcome changes associated with old age, both real and imagined. Slavery was a system of economic exploitation and a contested site of personal domination, both of which were affected by concerns with age. In examining how individuals, families, and communities felt about the aging process and dealt with elders, David Stefan Doddington emphasizes the complex social relations that developed in a slave society. In connecting old age to the arguments of Black activists, abolitionists, enslavers, and their propagandists, the book reveals how representations of old age, and experiences of aging, spoke to wider struggles relating to mastery, paternalism, resistance, and survival in slavery. The book asks us to rethink long-standing narratives relating to networks of solidarity in the American South and it illuminates the violent and exploitative nature of American slavery.

Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South demonstrates the significance of internal divisions, comparison, and conflict in shaping gender and status in slave communities of the American South. David Stefan Doddington seeks to move beyond unilateral discussions of slave masculinity, and instead demonstrates how the repressions of slavery were both personal and political. Rather than automatically support one another against an emasculatory white society, Doddington explores how enslaved people negotiated identities in relation to one another, through comparisons between men and different forms of manhood held up for judgment. An examination of the framework in which enslaved people crafted identities demonstrates the fluidity of gender as a social and cultural phenomenon that defied monolithic models of black masculinity, solidarity, and victimization. Focusing on work, authority, honor, sex, leisure, and violence, this book is a full-length treatment of the idea of 'masculinity' among slave communities of the Old South

Cover -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of contributors -- Introduction: Writing the History of Slavery David Stefan Doddington and Enrico Dal Lago, Cardiff University and National University Ireland Galway -- Part I Global approaches -- 1 Defining slavery in global perspective David Lewis, University of Edinburgh -- 2 Writing global histories of slavery Michael Zeuske, University of Cologne (Köln), University of Bonn, Universidad de la Habana -- 3 Slavery and empire Trevor Burnard, University of Hull -- 4 The 'Great Divergence': Slavery, capitalism and world-economy Dale Tomich, Binghamton University -- 5 Approaches to global antislavery Seymour Drescher, University of Pittsburgh -- 6 Comparative and transnational histories of slavery Enrico Dal Lago, National University of Ireland Galway -- Part II Themes and methods -- 7 Political and legal histories of slavery Sue Peabody, Washington State University -- 8 Writing national histories of slavery Lewis Eliot, University of Oklahoma -- 9 Writing the religious history of the enslaved in the Atlantic World Matt D. Childs, University of South Carolina -- 10 What historians of slavery write about when we write about race Jacqueline Jones, University of Texas at Austin -- 11 Gender history and slavery David Stefan Doddington, Cardiff University -- 12 Dispossessed lives: Enslaved women, violence, and the archive Marisa J. Fuentes, Rutgers University, Introduced by Elizabeth Maeve Barnes, University of Reading -- 13 Slavery, postcolonialism and the colonial archive Andrea Major, University of Leeds -- 14 Imagining slavery in Roman antiquity K.R. Bradley, University of Notre Dame -- 15 Quantitative histories of slavery Andrea Livesey, Liverpool John Moores University -- 16 Psychohistory and slavery Patrick H. Breen, Providence College.