Why read Roll, Jordan, Roll?

Book cover of Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made

Book description

A testament to the power of the human spirit under conditions of extreme oppression, this landmark history of slavery in the South challenged conventional views by illuminating the many forms of resistance to dehumanization that developed in slave society.

Displaying keen insight into the minds of both enslaved persons and…

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Black history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Roll, Jordan, Roll as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Michael Zakim

Author

Eugene Genovese was the most brilliant of a talented generation of scholars whose studies of New World slavery have since been largely deposed by a far more simplistic, black-and-white (pun intended) version of the same.

Genovese’s magnum opus, Roll, Jordan, Roll, offers an unsparing view of a reality in which neither master nor slave “could express the simplest human feelings without reference to the other,” an especially intimate form of class rule which struck a compelling contrast to the anonymity of the wage nexus increasingly prevalent in the Northern states.

These dialectics played out in a continual, if asymmetric,…

From Michael's list on The best books about the modern capitalist economy from a scholar.