| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. Ed. by Kenneth S. Greenberg. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xx, 289 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-513404-4.)

"The world of Nat Turner scholarship is messy and confusing" (p. xix), Kenneth S. Greenberg writes in the introduction to this anthology he has edited. As a result, he decided not to deal with the inconsistencies, errors, and contradictions found in the thirteen chapters that follow. The writing includes several essays and articles, a section from a 1937 M.A. thesis, revised material from a recent Ph.D. dissertation, sections from two books, a 1996 lecture, and two interviews conducted as part of the 2002 documentary film entitled Nat Turner—A Troublesome Property. Besides the disparate nature of the writing, the volume has no index, sometimes strays off the main topic, and tends to tell us more about what we do not know than what we do know concerning the most significant slave revolt in American history. In the first chapter, the editor questions whether we really even know the facts about Nat Turner's name, what he looked like, or what happened to his body after his death. Legally, the editor asserts, slaves could not have surnames. Although this was not the case, it is true, as the editor suggests, that our knowledge of individual slaves remains very sketchy and that even "one of the most important African Americans of the nineteenth century may be lost to us in a deep way" (p. 23).

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