Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781469696362 Academic Inspection Copy

In a Land of Strangers

Northern Teachers in the Slave South
Description
Author
Biography
Reviews
Google
Preview
What makes the American South distinctive? Is it the location, the culture, the mindset-or a story Americans learned to tell about themselves? In a Land of Strangers contends that the idea of a "distinctive" South did not crystallize out of the Civil War or politics alone; instead, it took shape decades earlier through the everyday observations of thousands of Northern teachers who lived and worked there from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War. Young, white, educated, and marked as outsiders, these men and women occupied an unusual position of trust within Southern households, classrooms, and plantations, granting them rare, intimate access to the inner workings of slaveholding society. Michael T. Bernath offers the first full-length study of this vast group of teachers-the most sustained point of contact between North and South in the antebellum era. Bewildered, curious, and constantly translating the South for themselves and audiences back home, these educators described a strange and profoundly different place in their diaries and letters. Collectively, they fixed a shared image of the South in the national imagination. In this book, Bernath reshapes our understanding of sectional identity, American culture, and why the idea of a distinctive South endures.
Michael T. Bernath is Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor of American history at the University of Miami.
"An important and persuasive contribution, In a Land of Strangers breaks new ground with an impressive examination of more than two thousand northern teachers in the Old South, offering fresh insights into race, class, gender, and sectional identity. Elegantly written and methodologically strong, it promises wide scholarly impact."-Jonathan Daniel Wells, author of Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War
Google Preview content