| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Rhys Isaac. Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xxii, 423. $35.00.

The seeds of this book were planted in Rhys Isaac's celebrated 1982 work, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790. After making brief cameos throughout that text, Landon Carter, a Virginia planter and slave master, took center stage in the appendix. Isaac's insightful interrogation of a passage of Carter's diary was a last act that almost stole the show. Here Carter gets top billing. Those familiar with Transformation, or with Carter's published diary, will find a familiar cast of supporting characters (ungrateful slaves and wastrel offspring) and setting (late eighteenth-century Virginia). But differences in the books reflect historiographical transformations that have occurred over the intervening decades. The cultural symbols and rituals that so clearly embodied Virginia society in Transformation, are here far more ambiguous and contested. Even Carter's identity is now depicted as unstable and contingent. The diary is examined as a work of imagination as much as of fact. Isaac describes it as an "unedited masterpiece" that "deserves a prominent place in American literature" (pp. 341, xxi).

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