Author of 'The Peculiar Institution' dies

From the Los Angeles Times
OBITUARIES
Kenneth M. Stampp dies at 96; UC Berkeley historian repudiated paternalistic interpretations of slavery
His 1956 book 'The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South' rejected the mythology that inspired such stereotypes as the benevolent plantation owner and the smiling black mammy.
By Elaine Woo
July 19, 2009

he concluded that slavery was in fact a "most profound and vexatious social problem," a radical view in an America that had just begun to experience the tremors of the modern civil rights movement

Didn't most of the world figure this out by the mid 1860s?

However, what statesmen take care to think and write about for history, a rare few citizens feel is their's to ignore.

Of course, it continues today.

but 'Gone With the Wind' was a popular best-seller in the twenties and thirties and I doubt the segregationists ever stopped to ask black folk their opinions on their plight.

There seem to be many out there now who would have no problems with a slavery society...as long as they can be the ones looking down on the slave class.

ideas about the antebellum South. IMO, it contributed a lot to the myth of the "happy slaves."

It was published in 1936.

There are people to this day---supposed Democrats among them---who continue to minimize the effects of slavery. That's why "Peculiar Institution" was such an extraordinarily important book. I remember reading it in college, and how it freed me from a lifetime of Daughters of the Confederacy propaganda. I wish others would have the same experience.....

I thought there might be a few DUers who would remember him and his book.

I was even thinking someone else might have posted it already.

Historians are sometimes just ideologues serving the purpose of creating a national narrative.

Of course, in the 1860s and afterwards, the consensus view was that slavery was bad. But after the Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877, historians began trying to build a national narrative that united the north and south. By the early 1900s, most professional historians were writing that slavery was a kind and civilizing institution for Africans, that tha abolitionists were evil troublemakers, that the civil war was misguided and that slave owners protected the value of their investments by treating their slaves well (the latter view being pervasive on DU, so it's not hard to see how a country can trick itself into believing foolish things).

I remember taking AP history in the 1970s and my teacher assigned Stamp and the historians he had been up against just 2 decades earlier, and it was quite remarkable what crap was the dominant view. He pretty much single handedly turned the consensus around, and by the 1960s, the slavery-was-good school had been completely discredited.

Kinda like what Jared Diamond did with the Eurocentric view of evolution ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

I read it decades after its publication in college.

When I was in grade school in Virginia in the 60's I swear that my Virginia history textbook had an illustration of the happy slaves picnicing and dancing during one of their many days off. My parents could not believe it.

... how long the GOP's anti-intellectualism will last.

Few academic books have that kind of longevity.

This was back in the 60's when I was in high school (we lived in North Carolina for a while while re-locating). They had black families living on their land who were loaned a few acres so they could feed their families. The black families and white families had lived together for generations and had a co-dependent relationship. The whites 'took care' of the blacks but never really gave them the kind of help that would pull them out of poverty and ignorance. Not out of any deliberate meanness, but I think it was out of custom because it was a way of life that had been the same since after the Civil War. My grandmother truly believed that blacks were mentally inferior to whites, and that they were like children. She was quite puzzled about the civil rights movement and didn't understand it because she believed that good Christian people were meant to care for their lesser fellow humans. She was a racist but she didn't hate blacks nor did she fear them. They had always been part of their lives and everyone just accepted the status quo. I know all this because she approached me and wanted to talk about her growing confusion during those turbulent times when they watched on tv as the foundation of their world was convulsing violently. We had quite a few very good conversations because for her it was an enlightenment and she was sincerely curious about her changing world. She was one of those people who at first couldn't believe that a black person (Martin Luther King, Jr.) could be such an eloquent speaker.

In time they changed their views but there was never any hatred in them. They just grew accustomed to the idea that blacks are equal in all respects, including in intelligence. To her he was talking just like the white people on tv, and it was a real revelation to her that such a thing could happen.

It was an interesting time and place to live through.

I was born in 1956. I'm certainly aware of the virulent racism that existed during my childhood (and still exists to a lesser extent), but I've never realized that such a paternalistic view was widespread amongst historians at the time. Somehow I've just assumed that educated people, while having racist views, understood the undeniable wrongness of slavery. I suppose that, by the time we studied it in school, Stampp's understanding had become more mainstream, at least here in the north.

I also wonder how the view of the "good old days of the 1950's" might be changed for young people who are just now learning about Stampp an Peculiar Institution?

:kick: