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Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies) by John Michael Vlach
Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies) by John Michael Vlach
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Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies)
Contributor(s): Vlach, John Michael (Author)
US SRP: $50.00 US
Binding: Paperback
Copyright Date: 1993
Pub Date: May 28, 1993
Physical Info: 0.82" H x 11.12" L x 8.54" W (1.75 lbs) 278 pages
Behind the "Big Houses" of the antebellum South existed a different world, socially and architecturally, where slaves lived and worked. John Michael Vlach explores the structures and spaces that formed the slaves' environment. Through photographs and the words of former slaves, he portrays the plantation landscape from the slaves' own point of view.
The plantation landscape was chiefly the creation of slaveholders, but Vlach argues convincingly that slaves imbued this landscape with their own meanings. Their subtle acts of appropriation constituted one of the more effective strategies of slave resistance and one that provided a locus for the formation of a distinctive African American culture in the South.
Vlach has chosen more than 200 photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey--an archive that has been mined many times for its images of the planters' residences but rarely for those of slave dwellings. In a dramatic photographic tour, Vlach leads readers through kitchens, smokehouses, dairies, barns and stables, and overseers' houses, finally reaching the slave quarters. To evoke a firsthand sense of what it was like to live and work in these spaces, he includes excerpts from the moving testimonies of former slaves drawn from the Federal Writers' Project collections.
The plantation landscape was chiefly the creation of slaveholders, but Vlach argues convincingly that slaves imbued this landscape with their own meanings. Their subtle acts of appropriation constituted one of the more effective strategies of slave resistance and one that provided a locus for the formation of a distinctive African American culture in the South.
Vlach has chosen more than 200 photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey--an archive that has been mined many times for its images of the planters' residences but rarely for those of slave dwellings. In a dramatic photographic tour, Vlach leads readers through kitchens, smokehouses, dairies, barns and stables, and overseers' houses, finally reaching the slave quarters. To evoke a firsthand sense of what it was like to live and work in these spaces, he includes excerpts from the moving testimonies of former slaves drawn from the Federal Writers' Project collections.
John Michael Vlach is professor of American studies and anthropology and director of the folklife program at The George Washington University. His books include The Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings and The Afro-American Tradition in the Decorative Arts.
Commendation Quotes:
John Vlach's "Back of the Big House" uses material culture to make important statements about slave culture and society in particular and Southern culture and society in general. His images from the Historic American Buildings Survey evoke the antebellum South better, perhaps, than ever before.--Daniel C. Littlefield, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
""A visually stimulating, engagingly written introduction to this important aspect of southern culture.--""Southern Cultures"
-A visually stimulating, engagingly written introduction to this important aspect of southern culture.--Southern Cultures
A visually stimulating, engagingly written introduction to this important aspect of southern culture.--Southern Cultures
This is a solid piece of documentation which forcefully illuminates a neglected yet pivotal aspect of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reality.-- Maryland Historical Magazine
One of the most user-friendly studies of African-American material culture ever written.-- American Historical Review
Contribute[s] significantly to the architectural no less than the social history of the United States from colonization to the Civil War.-- Journal of the Early Republic
"A visually stimulating, engagingly written introduction to this important aspect of southern culture.--Southern Cultures
Splendid. Using photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) dating back to the 1930s, oral histories of former slaves taken by the Federal Writers Program, antebellum travel accounts and agricultural journals, modern agricultural histories, and the vast literature on the history of slavery, Vlach deftly weaves an account of plantation life in the slave's territory, back of the 'Big House.'-- Design Book Review
Vlach expands our understanding of slave life while illuminating the little-known world of antebellum southern agriculture. Back of the Big House confirms Vlach as the preeminent scholar of African-American material culture.--Dell Upton, University of California, Berkeley
Vlach interweaves contemporary reports, oral histories of former slaves and archaeological evidence of surviving outbuildings in an unemotional but powerful manner."-- New York Times Book Review
[Vlach] presents us with a book that is at once album, introduction, and overview of the complexity and diversity of southern plantation architecture."-- South Carolina Historical Magazine
John Michael Vlach proves himself America's foremost scholar of African American material culture in this gracefully written and profusely illustrated examination of the vernacular architecture of plantation slavery. Drawing upon the best of folklife studies, architectural history, cultural geography, and historical archaeology as well as the records of the Historical American Buildings Survey and his own extensive fieldwork, Vlach has produced an indispensable study."--Charles Joyner, author of Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community
