Description
Book SynopsisUnderstanding the nature of "free" servitude in a time of slavery
Trade Review"
Love, Wages, Slavery is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the literature of service in the United States. Demonstrating the interconnection among thoughts on race, ethnicity, various kinds of work, and our concept of home, Ryan's wide-ranging survey of materials reminds us of the complexity of the 'servant problem' and the various attempts to address it."--
The New England Quarterly"Barbara Ryan's impressive study charts shifting conceptions of 'free,' co-residential, non-kin labor in the antebellum and postbellum United States."--
Legacy"At the heart of Barbara Ryan's book is a series of crucial observations about the assumptions of the nineteenth-century world. . . . Ryan identifies meaningful links between slavery and 'free' service from the antebellum period to the Gilded Age. . . . A pleasure to read. . . . An enormously useful [text] for a scholar in the field of servitude and slavery in the nineteenth century."--
American Historical Review
