Yet even historians have not always been successful at coping with slavery. Ulrich Phillips, writing in 1918 for a white audience, was afraid to criticize the remnant Southern gentry in his book, American Negro Slavery . More recently, Eugene Genoveses's Roll, Jordan, Roll , written in the 1970s, offers a celebration of black cultural resistance. Each offers a very different view of slavery. Beginning in the late 1970s archaeologists began to realize that there was much to learn about African-American slavery and that archaeology might offer the best hope of achieving a new and different view.
History is written by the literate and the wealthy.
Rarely do we see anything in the plantation diaries or records that helps us understand how slaves lived . Further, conventional historical accounts can be easily distorted, either intentionally or even unknowingly. So slave owners might not always be telling us the truth in their plantation accounts. Archaeology, on the other hand, provides us with a better means of understanding the lives of African-American slaves. Not only does archaeology specialize in understanding the lives of the people being studied, but it is harder to distort these lifeways.