Title: Crafting the Overseer's Image (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication)
First published: December 30, 2006
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.
Subjects: Plantation overseers, History, Historiography, Public opinion, Plantation life, Slave narratives, History and criticism, Slavery, Social life and customs, Race relations, Slavery, united states, history, Public opinion, united states, Southern states, social life and customs, Southern states, race relations