| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 237 words from this article are provided below; about 334 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, 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.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• 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 Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
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 Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South. By Anthony E. Kaye. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. x, 365 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3103-8.)

For over three decades, historians have posited the existence of a slave "community," loosely defined as a cultural space in which slaves could sufficiently escape from masters' power and maintain a distinct and autonomous culture. Of course, such an escape could only be temporary, as the title of George P. Rawick's pioneering book From Sundown to Sunup (1972) suggests. But its existence allowed slaves or, perhaps more accurately, their historians, to construct a world of black agency within the crucible of slavery. Anthony E. Kaye begins Joining Places by asking how slaves conceived of the world beyond themselves and their families. Kaye argues that slaves (or ex-slaves in post-emancipation testimony) most commonly spoke of themselves as living, not in a community, but within a neighborhood. Nor were these neighborhoods the homogenous slave communities that scholars have imagined. For one thing, neighborhoods defined actual geographic spaces, bounded by adjacent plantations, and nearby towns, roads, and rivers. Moreover, they contained whites as well as blacks, either of which might be friends or foes in a given situation. By reconceptualizing slaves as living within complex, shifting, historically and spatially specific "neighborhoods," Joining Places suggests a promising way out of the increasingly unproductive historiographical impasse between slaves' agency and masters' power.

. . .

There are about 334 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.