Description
Book SynopsisThe Mind of the Master Class tells of America's greatest historical tragedy. A great many of the slaveholding men and women were intelligent, honorable, and pious; yet, these very people, presided over a social system that proved itself an enormity and inflicted horrors on their slaves.
Trade Review'Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese have given us a masterpiece of the historian's art. Every serious student of the American South and of American intellectual life must read it - now and for many years to come' The Times Literary Supplement
'The Genoveses give us a learned, lucid, even luminous portrait of a worldview bought to ruin by the freeing of those on whose forced labour it rested.' The Times Literary Supplement
'[Eugene D. Genovese] enlivened a stagnant field by bringing a Marxist analysis to the sectional conflict.' London Review of Books
Table of ContentsPart I. Cradled in the Storms of Revolution: 1. 'That Terrible Tragedy'; 2. The age of revolution through slaveholding eyes; 3. 'The Purest Sons of Freedom'; Entr'Acte: the bonds of slavery; Part II. The Inescapable Past: 4. History as moral and political instruction; 5. The slaveholders' quest for a history of the common people; 6. World history and the politics of slavery; 7. History as the story of freedom; Part III. Ancient Legacies, Medieval Sensibility, Modern Men: 8. In the shadow of antiquity; 9. Coming to terms with the Middle Ages; 10. The chivalry; 11. Chivalric slave masters; 12. Chivalric politics: Southern ladies take their stand; Part IV. A Christian People Defend the Faith: 13. A Christian people; 14. Unity and diversity among the faithful; 15. War over the Good Book; 16. Slavery: proceeding from the Lord; 17. The Holy Spirit in the word of God; 18. Jerusalem and Athens - against Paris; 19. Serpent in the garden: liberal theology in the South; 20. Theopolitics: golden rule, higher law, and slavery; Coda: St. John of Pottawatamie; Part V. At the Rubicon: 21. Between individualism and corporatism: from the reformation to the war for Southern Independence; 22. Past and future Caesars; Epilogue: King Solomon's dilemma.
