Thursday, October 22, 2009, 4:30 PM
Perkins Library Rare Book Room

a FACULTY BOOKWATCH panel discussion on

OUT OF THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE:
The Transformation of the Plantation Household

- by -

THAVOLIA GLYMPH
Associate Professor of History and African & African American Studies, Duke University

Panelists

Ira Berlin
Distinguished University Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland

William A. Darity
Arts & Sciences Professor of Public Policy / Professor of African and African American Studies & Economics, Duke University

Barbara Fields
Professor of History, Columbia University

Peter Wood
Professor Emeritus of History, Duke University

- and -

Thavolia Glymph

Presented with the Duke University Libraries

ABOUT THE FEATURED BOOK & AUTHOR
Out of the House of Bondage (Cambridge University Press, 2008) views the plantation household as a site of production where competing visions of gender were wielded as weapons in class struggles between black and white women. Mistresses were powerful beings in the hierarchy of slavery rather than powerless victims of the same patriarchal system responsible for the oppression of the enslaved. Glymph challenges popular depictions of plantation mistresses as “friends” and “allies” of slaves and sheds light on the political importance of ostensible private struggles, and on the political agendas at work in framing the domestic as private and household relations as personal. Out of the House of Bondage is co-winner of the 2009 Taft Labor History Prize and a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

Thavolia Glymph is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and History at Duke University. In addition to Out of the House of Bondage, Professor Glymph is the author of several essays on slavery, emancipation and the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, economic history, and southern women. She is co-editor of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1861, ser. 1, vol. 1; The Documentary of History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, ser. 1, vol. 3; The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South and Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy. Her current writing and research focuses on women in the Civil War, the geography of the plantation household and Civil War veterans in Egypt.

ABOUT FACULTY BOOKWATCH
Faculty Bookwatch is a series intended to celebrate and to encourage scholarly conversations on important recent books by Duke humanities faculty. Each program consists of a panel discussion on the book with speakers representing different fields and disciplines, with addition remarks by the featured author.