The Southern Plantation

Catalog description

This course explores the plantations of the American South, both physical and imagined spaces. It challenges students to consider the spatial boundaries of the plantation, offering an examination of African trading posts, American slave markets and small courthouse towns along with the dwellings, outbuildings, fields and gardens of antebellum commercial slave agriculture. This broader spatial history framework uses a number of historical subfields, particularly architectural, environmental and public history, exposing students to a variety of scholarly perspectives. The class incorporates a wealth of primary material from diverse authors and points of view, including slave narratives, government records, travel accounts, letters, novels, paintings and architectural drawings, in order to demonstrate that the same physical landscape can be perceived differently depending on the viewer's perspective and experience. The course also includes on-site visits to two historic plantations.