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Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders

This pathbreaking social history of the slaveholding South marks a turn in our understanding of antebellum America and the coming of the Civil War. Oakes's bracing analysis breaks the myth that slaveholders were a paternalistic aristocracy dedicated to the values of honor, race, and section. Instead they emerge as having much in common with their entrepreneurial counterparts in the North: they were committed to free-market commercialism and political democracy for white males. The Civil War was not an inevitable conflict between civilizations on different paths but the crack-up of a single system, the result of people and events.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 307
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780393317053
  • Genres
  • history, race
  • Release date
  • 1998