The Slave’s Power

For nearly two decades now, historians have been debating whether it is even possible to write the history of American slavery. Can an accurate story of a system of oppression be derived from sources created and preserved by the oppressors? In many ways it is a surprising controversy. For the generation of American historians working after the emergence of the mainstream civil rights movement in the mid-1950s, slavery studies represented perhaps the most exciting field of American historical scholarship, attracting an audience of general readers as well as the attention of prominent academics. Books about slavery were discussed in popular magazines and featured on the nightly news. Innovative methodologies, including demography and quantitative analysis, folklore, material culture, oral history, and family reconstitution opened new windows into the past. At the same time, changed assumptions about racial equality made the “moonlight and magnolias” South of Gone with the Wind and most earlier studies of slavery obsolete. Historians began to construct a rich and sobering narrative of the lives of both enslavers and enslaved, as well as a portrait of the system that bound them togethe...