num_pages: 736
description: On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South.Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, theeveryday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.
language: English
title: Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
titlecomplete: Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
genres: History, 18th Century, American History, African American, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 105
awards: awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Bancroft Prize, awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Albert J. Beveridge Award, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Wesley-Logan Prize, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Elliott Rudwick Prize, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award, awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History
publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press