Description: This book examines the home and leisure life of planters in the antebellum American South. Based on a lifetime of research by the late Eugene Genovese (1930-2012), with an introduction and epilogue by Douglas Ambrose, The Sweetness of Life presents a penetrating study of slaveholders and their families in both intimate and domestic settings: at home; attending the theatre; going on vacations to spas and springs; throwing parties; hunting; gambling; drinking and entertaining guests, completing a comprehensive portrait of the slaveholders and the world that they built with slaves. Genovese subtly but powerfully demonstrates how much politics, economics, and religion shaped, informed, and made possible these leisure activities. A fascinating investigation of a little-studied aspect of planter life, The Sweetness of Life broadens our understanding of the world that the slaveholders and their slaves made; a tragic world of both 'sweetness' and slavery.
Brief description: Eugene D. Genovese, one of the most significant and distinguished historians of his time, spent a lifetime studying the society of the Old South. His books include The Political Economy of Slavery 1967), The World the Slaveholders Made (1988), In Red and Black (1973), From Rebellion to Revolution (1992), The Slaveholders' Dilemma (1992), A Consuming Fire (2009), and Roll, Jordan, Roll (1976), which was awarded the Bancroft Prize. With his wife, the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, he wrote Fruits of Merchant Capital (1983), The Mind of the Master Class (Cambridge, 2005), Slavery in White and Black (Cambridge, 2008), and Fatal Self-Deception (Cambridge, 2012). A past president of the Organization of American Historians, Genovese died in 2012.
Review Quotes: 'Sparkling with insight and humanity, Eugene D. Genovese again delivers, this time posthumously. This book continues his examination of the slaveholder class, describing in detail the essential ways in which it created its own definition of hospitality, of manners, of leisure, and more as it rushed toward civil war. As usual for Genovese over a career of fifty years his writing is engaging and crystal clear, and the scholarship rich. The academy owes Genovese's devoted student, Douglas Ambrose, a debt of gratitude for shepherding this sweet, final bit of Genovese's oeuvre to publication. It is well worth the read.' Orville Vernon Burton, Clemson University, and author of The Age of Lincoln