Crafting the Overseer's Image (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication)
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: December 30, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 234
ISBN-13: 9781570036460
Subjects: American history: c 1500 to c 1800; American history: c 1800 to c 1900; Social History; 20th century; c 1600 to c 1700; c 1700 to c 1800; Language Arts & Disciplines; History; Business / Economics / Finance; Rhetoric; Language; Southeastern & South Atlantic states; Plantation life; Labor; Historiography; Southern States; 19th century; Plantation overseers; Public opinion
First sentence: From the mid-1600s to 1865, plantation overseers who extracted the maximum amount of labor from slaves and routinely used violence to ensure their obedience were widely and accurately perceived as taskmasters.
Description: "Though overseers played crucial roles in managing and perpetuating the plantation culture of the American South, they remain shadowy figures on an otherwise widely studied landscape. In Crafting the Overseer's Image, William E. Wiethoff illumines the rhetoric surrounding a class of workers whom historians often have relegated to the periphery. Comparing conventional notions about these supervisory figures with slave narratives, planters' correspondence, enacted statutes, and case law, Wiethoff maps the distance between historical reality and perception in public memory." "The first book-length examination of the overseer in four decades, Wiethoff's study bridges historical, legal, and rhetorical scholarship to present a provocative investigation into the multifaceted roles of this oft-forgotten figure in plantation society."--Jacket.