| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Myths of the Plantation Society: Slavery in the American South and the West Indies. By Nathalie Dessens. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. x, 213 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-2682-2.)

The core "myth" in the analysis offered by Nathalie Dessens is the notion of an Old South. She makes a strong case for southern distinctiveness, setting the region against the plantation societies of the Caribbean rather than the North. The origin of the comparison is Dessens's observation that whereas the South possessed a persistent and pervading myth, expressed in culture and politics, there seemed no equivalent in the Caribbean in spite of a shared history of slavery and the plantation. It is her principal objective to set out the contents of the legend of a southern golden age and to explain its origins. She sees difference arising from contrasts in the structure of slave society, from the nature of the struggle over abolition, and from the character of postemancipation life, pursuing her subject well into the twentieth century.

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