Slavery in Black & White
Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic
by Erskine Clarke
Yale University Press, 2007
(624 pages, $20.00, paperback)
reviewed by Robert Elder
Erskine Clarke’s Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic is a study of a small group of families, both black and white, in one Georgia county, in the decades before the Civil War. At that time and in that place, the black families were enslaved to the white families, living under the peculiar institution that represents the original sin in the national narrative of America as Eden. The book recently won the Bancroft Prize, one of history’s highest honors.
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Robert Elder is currently writing a dissertation at Emory University on honor culture and Evangelical Christianity in the nineteenth-century American South. He writes the weblog, Clio and Calvin. He lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his wife Catherine, and is a member of Christ Church Presbyterian.
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