Excerpts
Discover the books that bring the history of the Lowcountry Southeast to life, written by key researchers and excerpted here by special permission. You may click on the book cover images or titles to read individual excerpts. We hope the works here contribute to your understanding of Lowcountry history and provide new insights for your research!
University of North Carolina Press
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 Slave Counterpoint: Womens' Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina
by Philip D. Morgan
On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South. MORE |
The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South
by Dylan C. Penningroth
In The Claims of Kinfolk, Dylan Penningroth uncovers an extensive informal economy of property ownership among slaves and sheds new light on African American family and community life from the heyday of plantation slavery to the "freedom generation" of the 1870s. MORE |
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Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom 
University of Georgia Press
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 Gullah Folktales from the Georgia CoastIn 1888, Charles Colcock Jones Jr. published the first collection of folk narratives from the Gullah-speaking people of the South Atlantic coast, tales he heard black servants exchange on his family's rice and cotton plantation. It has been out of print and largely unavailable until now. Jones saw the stories as a coastal variation of Joel Chandler Harris's inland dialect tales and sought to preserve their unique language and character. Through Jones' rendering of the sound and syntax of nineteenth-century Gullah, the lively stories describe the adventures and mishaps of such characters as "Buh Rabbit," "Buh Ban-Yad Rooster," and other animals. The tales range from the humorous to the instructional and include stories of the "sperits," Daddy Jupiter's "vision," a dying bullfrog's last wish, and others about how "buh rabbit gained sense" and "why the turkey buzzard won't eat crabs." MORE |
 Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgiaby Art Rosenbaum
Keeping African traditions alive through dance, song, and percussion, the ring shout is the oldest known African American performance tradition surviving on the North American continent. MORE |
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Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia Featured Excerpt
Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth Century Slave Narrativesby Paul D. Escott
This is the first major attempt to analyze the slave narratives in the Federal Writers' Project. Escott read nearly 2,400 narratives to establish 81 categories of information for computer analysis. Tables presenting this data are set within a well-organized text that includes many quotations. MORE
Featured Excerpt
Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal ExperimentJust seven months into the Civil War, a Union fleet sailed into South Carolina's Port Royal Sound, landed a ground force, and then made its way upriver to Beaufort. Planters and farmers fled before their attackers, allowing virtually all their major possessions, including ten thousand slaves, to fall into Union hands. MORE
