Books by Eugene D. Genovese

In one of his most important books, the renowned historian Eugene D. Genovese examines slave revolts in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil, placing them in the context of modern world history.

Focuses on the religious dimensions of the South's response to slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation. This book shows how southern pro slavery theorists, both clergy and lay, struggled with the intellectual and theological quandaries posed by slavery.

American slaveholders used the wealth and leisure that slave labor provided to cultivate lives of gentility and refinement. This study provides a vivid portrait of slaveholders at home and at play as they built a tragic world of both 'sweetness' and slavery.

Tracing a certain strain of conservatism to sources in a rich southern tradition, this book opens a powerful perspective on contemporary politics. As much a work of political and moral philosophy as of history, it reconstitutes the historical canon, re-envisions strengths and weaknesses of the conservative tradition, and broadens political debate.

Slaveholders were preoccupied with presenting slavery as a benign, paternalistic institution in which the planter took care of his family and slaves were content with their fate. In this book, Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese discuss how slaveholders perpetuated and rationalized this romanticized version of life on the plantation. Slaveholders' paternalism had little to do with ostensible benevolence, kindness and good cheer. It grew out of the necessity to discipline and morally justify a system of exploitation. At the same time, this book also advocates the examination of masters' relations with white plantation laborers and servants - a largely unstudied subject. Southerners drew on the work of British and European socialists to conclude that all labor, white and black, suffered de facto slavery, and they championed the South's 'Christian slavery' as the most humane and compassionate of social systems, ancient and modern.