Current Feature: June 2008

Reconfiguring the Old South: “Solving the Problem of Slavery,” 1787–1838

An engraving of a slave auction in Charleston, South Carolina, shows a scene familiar to Charlestonians throughout the antebellum era.Examining the choices that confronted the American South in the era of the cotton revolution, Lacy Ford outlines the tensions that appeared as both the upper and the lower South attempted reconfigurations of slavery after the foreign slave trade ended in 1808. Upper South politicians sought a demographic reconfiguration, or a “whitening” of the region, to reduce the number of slaves living there through both colonization and the sale of slaves to the lower South. Lower South leaders, meanwhile, sought an ideological reconfiguration to make slaveholding consistent with existing republican and emerging humanitarian ideals by transforming slavery into a “domestic” institution legitimated by paternalism. As Ford shows, the divergent efforts at reconfiguration pitted spokesmen of the upper and lower South against each other even as the antagonists displayed a shared and fundamental unwillingness to undermine slaveholding and slaveholders. Visit this installment >

“Teaching the JAH” uses online tools to bridge the gap between the latest scholarly research in U.S. history and the practice of classroom teaching. JAH authors demonstrate how featured articles might be taught in a U.S. history survey course.

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Other Recent Installments

September 2007
Houses Divided: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Political Landscape of 1858
—Allen C. Guelzo

June 2007
The Army in the Marketplace: Recruiting an All-Volunteer Force
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Migrant Mother December 2006
Dorothea Lange: The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist
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200603 S March 2006
Demobilizing Chicago, 1943–1953
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March 2005March 2005
The Classic Image in Early America
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Sept. 2004 Sept. 2004
The Great Hair Debate
by Gael Graham

March 2004 March 2004
Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of Music
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