Rhys Isaac and history's Uneasy Kingdom: a review essay.

Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation. By Rhys Isaac. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xxiv, 423. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-19-518908-6; cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-19-515926-8.)

RHYS ISAAC CLOSED HIS PULITZER PRIZE--WINNING THE TRANSFORMATION of Virginia, 1740-1790 with a meditation entitled "Change and Continuity" that discussed how "[m]uch remained the same" (p. 320) in a Virginia that had been transformed by cultural upheaval and political revolution. His long-anticipated Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom builds on that insight, exploring the tensions between tradition and change during the American Revolution in Virginia. Isaac's topic has remained similar; however, his approach in Uneasy Kingdom reflects and contributes to historiographical transformations that have shaped the ways that cultural historians approach the past. In retrospect, Isaac's first book appeared at a moment of methodological shift in the historiography of early America and on the cusp of an equally important if less obvious transformation in historians' implicit claims about the relationship between the history of slavery and racism in early Virginia and the history of race in the United States. In Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom, Isaac addresses time-honored questions about race, slavery, and the American Revolution using poststructuralist methods and writing from a perspective informed by recent trends in Atlantic history. In Isaac's hands the story of the Revolution in a small corner of Virginia breaks into multiple competing narratives that reveal the rich interplay between the local and the Atlantic, between the personal and the political, and, above all, between lost stories told by subalterns and the recorded stories of a patriarch-master. (1)

The Transformation of Virginia appeared at the height of an extraordinary boom in colonial Chesapeake historiography that began in 1968 with Winthrop Jordan's magisterial White over Black. (2) Jordan's analysis of the origins of white American racism ranged far beyond the Chesapeake, but by asserting that colonial Virginia's "unthinking decision" to adopt race-based slavery was the most important early turning point in North American racism and by presenting the Virginian Thomas Jefferson's tortured erotic imagination as emblematic of the psychosexual roots of American race relations, Jordan effectively portrayed Virginia as the hearth culture for U.S. race relations.

Seven years after White over Black appeared, Edmund S. Morgan provided an implicit rejoinder to Jordan's psychoanalytic interpretation in another of the most celebrated books in recent American historiography. In American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia Morgan explored the connections among slavery, freedom, persistent inequality, and American egalitarianism. (3) Morgan saw the twinned rise of race-based slavery, on the one hand, and egalitarian republicanism, on the other, as rooted in the ways that slavery allowed white Virginians to remove from formal politics the tensions arising out of the antagonistic labor relations of large-scale tobacco production. American Slavery, American Freedom saw American racism developing primarily in response to rational socioeconomic forces rather than irrational psychosexual ones, and in doing so the book reinforced historians' tendency to portray the history of race and slavery in the United States in national terms and to privilege colonial and Revolutionary Virginia as the crucible in which the dynamics of North American racism were forged.

American Slavery, American Freedom stimulated a torrent of fine-grained and often quantitative social history that focused on the Chesapeake. Scholars scoured seventeenth-century court records to test Morgan's bleak portrayal of indentured servants' prospects after gaining freedom and to disentangle the cultural and economic causes of large tobacco producers' turn from indentured servitude to slavery around the end of the seventeenth century. (4) Others turned to the eighteenth century to complete the portion of the Chesapeake's social history that Morgan had left relatively untouched. (5) This rich vein of local and regional social history has produced a depth of knowledge about the material conditions of life in the colonial Chesapeake that surpasses that of any North American region other than New England.

Isaac published The Transformation of Virginia while this "new social history" reigned in Chesapeake studies, but his book shared less with that work than with contemporary early modern European scholarship that coalesced as the "new cultural history." (6) Rather than being understood as one of several Chesapeake historians who used the methods of social history to test Morgan's claims, Isaac is better understood to have begun by accepting the premise that Morgan's eighteenth-century stable white society existed. Isaac sought first to lay bare the cultural dynamics of monarchy, Anglicanism, and patriarchy that undergirded Virginia society. Viewing Virginia's ancient regime through this lens of cultural practice casts a different light on the rise of evangelicalism than had been apparent in American Slavery, American Freedom. When Morgan turned from the social history of seventeenth-century tobacco production to expressions of political ideology in eighteenth-century Virginia, Baptists seemed only a minor part of the broader Revolutionary coalition of egalitarian, but racist, populism that led the new state and nation to independence. (7) They just did not merit separate treatment. When Isaac turned to the level of cultural practice, he used different historical methods to uncover what he perceived to have been a fundamental challenge to gentry values. His findings rested on ethnographic techniques borrowed from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz that allowed him to read cultural meanings out of the Baptists' actions and the ways that the gentry responded. This approach posited a holistic, almost organic vision of culture that would allow a historian who uncovered evidence of a single, loaded cultural moment--whether a dance in a Virginia planter's mansion or a French former apprentice's joke about killing cats--to set about cracking the code of the culture being studied. With the code broken, the true meaning of the event for its participants would become clear, and in the process a richer picture of the culture being studied would become discernible. (8)

Isaac used Geertzian methods to portray a mid-century, white Virginian culture that was almost wholly under the sway of competitive, hierarchical masculine values. He uncovered traces of that culture in the way white Virginians shaped and moved through the landscape and in the design of their houses and churches, and he devoted a pivotal chapter of the book to the special occasions--militia musters, parties, horse races, elections--when they produced communal action-texts expressing that culture. These "traditional ways of life," to use the title of part 1 of Transformation, were challenged by members of communal, egalitarian, evangelical churches during the second half of the eighteenth century. Evangelicals, especially Baptists, saw their wealthy neighbors' obsessions with hierarchy, competition, and display as hopelessly compromised by the sin of pride; and Isaac portrayed the Baptists' struggle for religious freedom as having had a socioeconomic valence that extended beyond the realms of constitutional and religious history. Because the Baptists eschewed the competitive arena of Virginia politics, Edmund Morgan and other historians (unlike eighteenth-century Virginia gentlemen) had underestimated the importance of their challenge and thus had missed the centrality of the Baptist insurgency to the emergence of the modern, individualized, privatized culture of "Jeffersonian Virginia."

The methodology that Isaac used to uncover the Baptist challenge also entailed a stylistic shift. In American Slavery, American Freedom Morgan presented evidence uncovered through deep archival research but did not lead readers through his judgments about the meanings of the sources or their limitations. He told a straightforward analytical story and assumed that readers would accept his interpretive authority. The book does, of course, provide ample documentation so that anyone with doubts can return to the sources to judge for themselves, but it does not make the author's approach to the sources a part of the narrative. Isaac's turn to Geertzian thick description required a different approach, one that came to dominate new cultural history. To unlock the secrets of colonial Virginia's partially lost culture, Isaac had first to walk his readers through the occluded meanings of the sources that he used. Like other contemporary works, Transformation makes source criticism a central part of the story rather than, as in American Slavery, American Freedom, a concealed stage of the writing process.

Notwithstanding the methodological and substantive divergences between Isaac and Morgan, both American Slavery, American Freedom and much of The Transformation of Virginia have the same, very odd lacuna--neither book's central narrative affords enslaved black people a significant voice or role, though both authors put slavery near the center of Virginia's culture. Neither historian commented on the relative absence of black people in his book, but Isaac provided what can be read as both an auto-critique of Transformation and a prologue to Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom in the brilliant "A Discourse on the Method" that he appended to the text. (9) The discourse begins as one would expect, with an explanation of the application of Geertzian ethnographic method to historical evidence. The centerpiece of the essay becomes, however, something much more than a methodological example when Isaac demonstrates his technique on an incident in which a slave ran away from Landon Carter. The result is one of the richest available analyses of the interlocking cultural worlds of enslaved and free people living on a plantation. Isaac's complex portrayal of the alliances and antagonisms that animated the different participants in that drama and of the radically different meanings that participants invested in this single event suggests that much of Virginia's history occurred at a level of meaning outside of the public events and formal architectural elements that Isaac analyzed when discussing "traditional" Virginia and its transformation. The black and white Virginians whose worlds Isaac untangled through his analysis of this incident did of course find themselves through their relationships to landscapes, buildings, and public events but equally through their roles in a set of interlocking narratives about work, family, friendship, and betrayal. These narratives suggest that a constant struggle over meaning was waged within the seemingly placid world of patriarchal order.

"A Discourse on the Method" appears in retrospect to have been a preliminary step from The Transformation of Virginia toward what has become Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom. This is true on the most basic level in that it begins Isaac's transition from writing about Virginia as a whole to his micro-historical focus on Landon Carter's plantation communities, and it is also true in more fundamental methodological and theoretical terms. Isaac's new book uses Landon Carter's rich diaries to explore in microcosm a moment at the cusp of the Revolution when patriarchal structures of authority came under attack in Virginia. Both his approach and his analysis challenge some conventional historical practices.

In keeping with recent trends in ethnographic writing, Isaac forgoes an omniscient narrative voice in Uneasy Kingdom, insisting instead that readers recognize his subjective, highly personal role as interpreter of the diary and creator of the text. The book is divided into two preliminary sections, five parts that consist of two or three chapters each, and an afterword. During the second preliminary section of the book (ironically titled "First Words"), Isaac sketches a quick biography of Landon Carter, describes the forms and content of the various texts that have come to be known as The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter, and argues that these personal writings should be seen as something more than a rich source to be raided by historians looking for illustrative quotations. (10) Carter's diary "deserves a prominent place in American literature" (p. xxi), both for the power of Carter's writing and because it may be the world's "biggest repository" (p. xx) of what Isaac labels "gentrylore" (p. xx)--stories that have been told by agricultural elites throughout history about the so-called dependents upon whom they have relied to work their land. Somewhat less conventionally, Isaac also provides a mini-autobiography, introducing himself as, alternatively, "the historian who will present Landon Carter as a storyteller" (p. xix), the "scriptwriter and theater director of a major historical stage show" (p. xix), and, finally, as Carter's "literary editor" (p. xxii). In short, Isaac aspires to be the scholar who makes sense of the cultural worlds of Landon Carter's plantations--to be C. Vann Woodward for Carter's Tom Watson--while simultaneously playing Maxwell Perkins to Carter's Thomas Wolfe.

The result is a book that builds unobtrusively on fragmented narrative techniques drawn from the postmodern novel--Isaac invokes John Barth and Thomas Pynchon in describing the literary masterpiece concealed in Carter's diaries. He divides his discussion of the diaries into five thematic and roughly chronological parts in order to portray the narrative structures that Carter drew upon when describing the various residents of and visitors to Sabine Hall, Carter's estate. He shows how Carter wrote himself, his slaves, his family, and his neighbors into these narrative structures, and he asks what stories those mentioned in Carter's diaries would have told of themselves. The resulting clash of narratives takes place within the context of the American Revolution's undermining of the age-old structures of patriarchal kingship that Isaac explored so masterfully in The Transformation of Virginia; but as African American slaves, unhappy heirs, scheming in-laws, and untrustworthy neighbors take turns as the targets of Carter's pen, the reciprocal influences of constitutional disputes and of "personal" events normally consigned to a different realm of history--oedipal struggles, disputes among neighbors, resistance among the enslaved--become the key to understanding what the American Revolution really meant for Landon Carter and for all those with whom he interacted.

In his role as editor, Isaac chooses and arranges long excerpts from the diaries, sometimes bringing unity to narratives that were fragmented by the diarist's elisions or simply by virtue of having been recorded across several entries and sometimes cutting from scene to scene in almost cinematic style. In one chapter, he displays Carter's writing about nature, in another about books, and in the bulk about one group of people or another. Isaac presents the wellspring of Carter's authorial creativity in his "split personality," a split rooted in Carter's devotion to the very same patriarchal order that, as a leader of Virginia's independence movement, he was in the process of helping to replace with a sentimental and self-consciously rational order. Isaac pushes readers beyond the pathos of Landon Carter's endless laments that his generosity and virtue went unappreciated by his slaves (by his children, by his neighbors, by virtually anyone with whom he interacted), asking them to appreciate the power of Carter's stories and the different literary conventions that give them shape.

As historian, Isaac tries simultaneously to accomplish a different set of tasks. He places Carter's stories within their many contexts to see what they reveal about the worlds of early Virginia. Some of these contexts are familiar, and Isaac develops them in ways that are entirely satisfying by the standards of conventional historiography. Perhaps the best example involves Isaac's explanation of Carter's vision of himself as a patriotic legislator during the Seven Years' War. He uses the diary and other extant records to explain the issues before the House of Burgesses and to address several interpretive questions rooted in previous scholarship, but he then changes his angle of vision, insisting that one can understand the true meaning of these arguments for Carter and for American history only if one understands the role of William Pitt, and one can understand Pitt's role only by turning away from the debunking attitude that is almost second nature to many scholars. Isaac's William Pitt was "the first and last great popular leader of the pan-Atlantic British nation" (p. 161), a statesman who stirred American patriotism for a British nation that colonists would soon discover did not exist in the same form in the minds of metropolitan Britons. In this way Pitt helped create "split personalities" like Carter's, earning unrecognized standing as "a mighty herald of the American Revolution ..." (p. 160). By juxtaposing the stories in which Carter fashions himself as a patriot leader against a narrative of Pitt as ideal patriot leader, Isaac provides a nuanced psychological portrait of an American Revolutionary who found himself opposing Great Britain in defense of British values while undermining the very patriarchal ethos on which his own small kingdom depended.

Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom includes countless similar examples in which Isaac develops the historical context of incidents recounted in Carter's diaries. He does not, however, stop there, and it is in his exploration of missing contexts that Isaac challenges conventional historical practice. He points out that stories told by others--especially by the subjects of Carter's stories--form a crucial, perhaps the crucial, context for the diaries, and he repeatedly probes for partial openings into stories that surely were told at some time but never recorded for posterity. The most important of these missing counter-narratives, and the ones whose absence largely structures Isaac's analysis of the meanings of rebellion in Landon Carter's little kingdom, are the stories told by enslaved African Americans, and they are worth tracing through the book.

Isaac opens his discussion "of the challenges to authority that revolutionary times ... call[ed] forth" (p. 1) and "the trauma experienced by [Carter as] an old-fashioned patriarch" (p. 1) by telling the story of eight men who, in 1776, escaped from slavery at Sabine Hall by fleeing to Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, to fight for their freedom. Isaac dubs these men "the Eight" (p. 4) to reinforce their iconic status for Carter, and he mines the diaries for all surviving stories (and traces of stories that have not survived) that the master told of these eight bondmen during their time under his authority. The stories are presented less as evidence of the lives of these men, however, than as evidence of what Isaac sees as one of the deepest meanings of slavery: "being compelled to act out not one's own story but the story imposed on one by another ..." (p. 17). Carter raged about the ingratitude that the Eight showed when, by running away, they declined their parts in his script, but the surviving record permits Isaac to offer "only approximate ideas about" what alternative versions of "these stories would have been told among the enslaved" (p. 34). Given the rise of evangelical Christianity among enslaved Virginians at the time and the documented role of Christianity in black resistance in other contemporary settings, Isaac speculates that more than chance explains the names of the two leaders of the Eight--Moses and Manuel (written in full as "Imanuell" at least once)--but the Exodus of the Eight, as opposed to the flight of eight slaves, did not get recorded in any contemporary context. The silence of the surviving record challenges Isaac's desire to say more, a challenge he takes on through much of the rest of the book.

Part 1, "Revolution in House and Home," sets up the themes of the book, and Isaac devotes two of its chapters to Carter and the Eight--the third chapter examines the rebellion of Carter's daughter Judith against his patriarchal authority. In the succeeding four parts, Uneasy Kingdom goes back to the first of the surviving diaries and follows them chronologically. Prior to the Revolutionary upheaval, Carter told stories in which he presented himself as an enlightened patriarch presiding over his small realm; with the coming of the Seven Years' War he reported on his efforts to defend his country, his king, and his empire as a patriotic legislator, and then he struggled as he came to perceive that his duty to country required that he resist his king. Uneasy Kingdom reaches its climax in part 4, "A Troubled Old Regime," when Isaac returns to Carter's struggles to narrate the "proper order of the master's rule of the slave plantation" (p. 185). Here more than anywhere else Isaac turns away from his role as Carter's literary editor. This discussion highlights the limitations of Carter's diaries as a historical source by presenting an odd and fascinating dialectic. Isaac juxtaposes stories that Carter told of the slaves living around Sabine Hall--stories previously labeled "gentrylore"--with oral histories, folktales, songs, and published narratives produced by enslaved African Americans.

The effect is jarring. Carter's accounts of concrete events are placed within the context of archetypal narratives through which the master understood them, but the mirrored subaltern accounts must take a different form. Isaac must reverse the process he uses with Carter; he begins with folklore and moves speculatively backward from timeless accounts of slaves' struggles with masters to the absent core--lost stories that enslaved people living around Sabine Hall must have told. Readers who expect the chapter that Isaac would have liked to write--a chapter that would have explored the differences between the ways a master and a slave narrated the same event--will be disappointed, but the disappointment is central to Isaac's purposes. The ways that slaves made sense of and narrated their lives and the lives of those around them did much to shape life around Sabine Hall, and their lost stories must also have been crucial to the meaning of the stories that Carter told in his diary. By going beyond a standard expression of disappointment about records that have not survived, by asking readers to travel with him to the point at which the records go silent, Isaac shows how much of what shaped Carter's kingdom remains far out on the horizon where we can only perceive it in shadowy outline.

The absence of countervailing stories is most striking when one looks at the enslaved subjects of Carter's tales, but a similar if less complete silence characterizes the subjects of the following two chapters--the first of which discusses Carter's growing disappointment regarding his neighbors' lack of either virtue or gratitude and the second on the similar and even more disturbing failures of the troubled patriarch's children. The book's fifth and final part--one might say its Fifth Act--opens with Carter annotating his copy of King Lear with an expression of empathy with the dying king and then traces the old diarist's waning efforts to make sense of revolution against his own king, of the rebellions he faced in his own small kingdom, and of his frustrated desires to reconcile himself to the emerging order. Isaac finds that Carter's most resonant struggles with these issues take place as he deals with the members of his plantation household, especially the black members.

The book's penultimate chapter underscores the centrality of slavery and the slave experience to this Virginia kingdom by turning to Carter's "tales of Nassaw"--the enslaved man who assisted Carter in his gruesome medical practice--to "give intimate insights into the unequal enslavement of both master and man within the plantation system" (p. 313). Nassaw's struggles with alcoholism, with his master, and with the duties that he must have valued--his skill as a surgeon would not have come without dedication--give "an otherwise unmatched insight into Nassaw's own misery and into the very nature of plantation-household enslavement" (p. 318), and they show that much of that misery grew out of Carter's efforts at what he himself perceived to be "humanitarian" reform. In this chapter, as in the book more generally, Landon Carter's small kingdom provides a rich arena in which to explore the microcosmic implications of broader forces. Lest any dim reader think the stakes of such understanding are purely antiquarian, Isaac's "Last Words" draw explicit lessons from the analysis. Comparing these lessons to Edmund Morgan's conclusion to American Slavery, American Freedom opens a window on some important recent historiographical trends.

Isaac constructs his "Last Words" around a memorable story that Landon Carter told about a hummingbird, a story emblematic of much of the writing in the diaries. He told of a hummingbird that he caught and kept for more than two weeks in a cage, where it was fed honey and water daily from a spoon. When it escaped, Landon Carter calmly informed Robert Wormeley Carter, his skeptical, headstrong son, that the bird would voluntarily return to the cage, for "hunger" would "inevitably enslave" (p. 334), but the son ridiculed his father's prediction. The bird did indeed return the following day, affording Carter one of the things he valued most--a story illustrating his superior, but unappreciated, insight. However, the story of his insight regarding what would "inevitably enslave" probably did not provide psychological balm for the failure of "the Eight" to fulfill an earlier dream of Carter's in which, having been ragged and starving in the woods, they were enslaved by hunger and returned to Sabine Hall to beg their patriarch's forgiveness. (11) Isaac uses this story to explain the meaning of Carter's diaries and their stories of his uneasy kingdom in a more pessimistic, ambiguous voice than Morgan used to conclude American Slavery, American Freedom.

Morgan brought American Slavery, American Freedom to a close by asking whether the United States remained "colonial Virginia writ large"; whether the "vision of a nation of equals" was "flawed at the source by contempt for both the poor and the black" (p. 387). If, as Morgan clearly believed, the answer to those questions was yes, his analysis gave grounds for hope. American Slavery, American Freedom presented a clear genealogy of U.S. racism that stretched back to specific socioeconomic formations in colonial Virginia and to the cultural responses that they produced. While no one reading the book could walk away under the delusion that a new era of racial justice was within easy reach, readers would, if convinced by the analysis, know what forces to fight. If the sources of slavery and freedom and of the relationship between them lay in colonial Virginia, then, presumably, racism and the commitment to equality could be disentangled. In short, while Morgan's book was anything but a feel-good patriotic history of America, it was, like most American history at the time, written in a progressive mode, and its conclusion implicitly called on its readers to set about righting the wrongs whose root causes it had laid bare. We can know the truth about the past, and it promises to help set us free in the present.

Rhys Isaac is just as committed to righting racial wrongs as Edmund Morgan is, but his "Last Words" strike a different chord. Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom appears in the wake of more than a decade of scholarship that has pushed us to see the history of race and slavery in the United States more as a peculiar variation on an Atlantic theme and less as an exceptional formation. (12) Current scholars are increasingly inclined to think that the early modern Iberian roots of U.S. racism run deeper and have greater influence than those that started on Virginia's Eastern Shore and that while there is much to explain in why some Atlantic societies turned away from racial slavery around the turn of the nineteenth century, there is less need to explain why colonial Virginians turned to slave labor when they did. While Isaac does not explicitly comment on this literature, he concludes by situating the historically specific qualities of Carter's tales of Virginia rebellion in a timeless history of all living beings' enslavement to hunger and want. The resulting patterns of dependence and oppression create what Isaac presents as a world of competing stories.

One must be careful not to say that it is "just" a world of competing stories--because which stories are told, which stories are recorded, and which stories are accorded authority profoundly influence who oppresses whom, who goes hungry, and what the hungry can do about it. Nonetheless, there is something sobering and pessimistic about the lessons that Isaac asks readers to take from Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: he encourages them to look within. On the one hand, a careful look within will prevent us from allowing a feeling of superiority to the injustices of the past to blind us to our responsibilities in today's world: "What do we, who so readily disapprove of Landon, actually do to advance freedom and equality?" (p. 336). On the other, by learning to tend our own gardens, we will recognize that "revolution must begin with self and home," a maxim that Isaac offers as the "best guide for the reading of Landon Carter's diaries" (p. 336). The relation between the truth about the past and freedom in the present has become far less certain.

Isaac, like many historians writing today, offers no confident sense that history is moving in a predictable direction. But with this wonderful story about storytelling, he reminds us of both the costs and benefits of some recent trends in history writing. Nostalgia arises when reading American Slavery, American Freedom and The Transformation of Virginia, not only because both are wonderful books, but also because both were written with a seemingly irrecoverable sense of confidence in what we can know about the past and about why that knowledge matters. Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom is written out of the broadly shared conviction that such confidence was a bit too innocent, that the silenced voices in sources must become a central part of our understanding of the past, and that the subjective nature of interpretation should be acknowledged. Isaac's analysis of Revolutionary Virginia suggests that, as much as things have changed and will continue to change, we are all caught in an inescapable web of stories. Ironically, Isaac's success in making that case makes one long for the confidence of earlier years at the same time that it underscores how much our knowledge of the past is conditioned upon facing what we can never recover.

(1) Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982).

(2) Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1556-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968).

(3) Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).

(4) A partial list of this rich literature includes Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society (Chapel Hill, 1979); Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh, Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill 1991): James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill, 1994); Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 (New York, 1984); Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-1720 (Princeton, 1982); and T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, "Myne Owne Ground": Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York, 1980).

(5) Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York, 1972) preceded Morgan's book. A partial listing of those that followed includes Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986) and Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998). Rutman and Rutman, Place in Time and Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996) both bridge the two centuries.

(6) Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif., 1975); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, translated by John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294-1324, translated by Barbara Bray (London, 1978); Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984); David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, Eng., 1984). For a discussion of the emergence of "new cultural history," see Lynn Hunt, "Introduction," in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989).

(7) "Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians all sought souls, not political converts," and, besides, "most of the men who ran Virginia were not dissenters." Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 374.

(8) Darnton, Great Cat Massacre. chap. 2; Ronald G. Waiters, "Signs of the Times: Clifford Geertz and Historians," Social Research, 47 (Autumn 1980), 537-56; Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 412-53, and the other essays in that collection; Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983).

(9) I am grateful to Robert Olwell for this point about "A Discourse on the Method." Morgan may make oblique reference to the absence in his preface to the second edition. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (2nd ed.; New York, 2003), ix-x.

(10) Following the publication of Jack P. Greene, ed., The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall, 1752-1778 (2 vols.; Charlottesville, 1965), Carter's diary became one of the most frequently quoted sources for eighteenth-century Virginia history.

(11) I am grateful to Catherine Molineux for this point.

(12) David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, Eng., 2000); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge, Eng., 1998); Joyce E. Chaplin, "Race," in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (New York, 2002), 154-72; James H. Sweet, "The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (January 1997), 143-66; April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2004), chap. 6; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London, 1997).

MR. SIDBURY is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.