| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 266 words from this article are provided below; about 466 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, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation. By Wilma A. Dunaway. (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii, 368 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 0-521-81276-3. Paper, $28.00, ISBN 0-521-01216-3.)
Wilma A. Dunaway's new book is a deeply researched study of enslaved families in the mountain South and the forces that shaped them and their region. Like other recent critics, Dunaway believes that U.S. historians put too much emphasis on slave agency. "Notions like 'windows of autonomy within slavery' or an 'independent slave economy' seriously overstate" slaves' control over their lives, she argues; worse, they "trivialize" the system's "brutalities and ... inequities" (p. 4).	1
The stakes are high. The hundred-year-old idea of reparations has become a formal lawsuit, while in some op-ed pages an even older idea is reviving: that, whatever the ills of slavery, blacks are better off in the United States than if they had stayed in Africa. Dunaway plunges into this debate by focusing on black family life in the mountain South, a region of small plantations and a non-slaveholding majority. This region, she argues, was actually more typical in the United States than the large cotton and rice plantations that underpinned landmark studies by Eugene Genovese (Roll, Jordan, Roll, 1974) and Herbert Gut-man (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1976), whose work serves as both inspiration and foil here. Combining moving, vivid slave testimony with the quantitative methods of cliometrics, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation challenges "the dominant paradigm that a majority of U.S. slaves lived in stable, nuclear families" (p. 271).	. . .

There are about 466 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.