| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 312 words from this article are provided below; about 700 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Erskine Clarke. Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 601. $35.00.
Even though Erskine Clarke's book focuses on life in the atypical Georgian Sea Islands, it is one of the best and most important studies of American slavery I have ever read.	1
Clarke, now winner of a much-deserved Bancroft Prize, conveys the distinctive features of Liberty County, ranging from its task system of work to its islands, marshlands, rivers, and hidden trails known only to slaves. But he also reveals the effects of market forces on slave sales and shows how a seemingly stable society, in which continuing generations of black "servants" worked for continuing generations of Puritan (Calvinist) whites, resembled the larger slaveholding South. If Liberty County long seemed like a permanent home to both whites and blacks, it eventually became a lost dwelling place that a former plantation mistress saw, as she left for New Orleans in 1868, as "the grave of my buried hopes and affections" (pp. 461–462).	2
Beginning his narrative in 1804, Clarke vividly traces the ways that black and white children acquired identities as they watched favored slaves serving tea to whites on the verandas of great mansions and guessed whom they would serve or be served by in adulthood. The reader soon meets little Phoebe, who would become the sometimes rebellious personal servant of little Mary Jones, the first cousin and future wife of Charles Colcock Jones, the central figure of the book. And along with young Charles we learn to watch the maturing of the slave who would be closest to him in the future: the extraordinary Cato, who seems to internalize the paternalistic ideology and who will eventually run the Montevideo plantation on his own, deciding what and when to plant and how much.	. . .

There are about 700 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.