Susan Eva O'Donovan

Bio: Susan Eva O'Donovan is an academic researcher from University of Memphis. The author has contributed to research in topics: Emancipation & Politics. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 11 publications receiving 251 citations.

Becoming Free in the Cotton South

Abstract: "Becoming Free in the Cotton South" challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, Susan O'Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War. This boldly argued work focuses on a small place - the southwest corner of Georgia - in order to explicate a big question: how did black men and black women's experiences in slavery shape their lives in freedom? The reality of slavery's demise is harsh: in this land where cotton was king, the promise of Reconstruction passed quickly, even as radicalism crested and swept the rest of the South. Ultimately, the lives former slaves made for themselves were conditioned and often constrained by what they had endured in bondage. O'Donovan's significant scholarship does not diminish the heroic efforts of black Americans to make their world anew; rather, it offers troubling but necessary insight into the astounding challenges they faced. "Becoming Free in the Cotton South" is a moving and intimate narrative, drawing upon a multiplicity of sources and individual stories to provide new understanding of the forces that shaped both slavery and freedom, and of the generation of African Americans who tackled the passage that lay between.

Slavery: annual bibliographical supplement (2007)

Abstract: For 2007 the bibliography continues its customary coverage of secondary writings published since 1900 in western European languages on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world: monographs, ...

Slavery: annual bibliographical supplement (2013)

Abstract: For 2013, the bibliography continues its customary coverage of secondary writings published since 1900 in western European languages on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world: monographs,...

The Civil War as a crisis in gender : Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890

Abstract: Argues that gender concepts and constructions deeply influenced the beliefs underpinning both the Confederacy and its vestiges to which white southerners clung for decades after its defeat. The book focuses on the effects of the conflict on the South's gender hierarchy.

Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760-1900

Abstract: Introduction 1. The Rise of Lagos as an Atlantic Port, c. 1760-1851 2. Trade, Oligarchy, and the Transformation of the Precolonial State 3. The Original Sin: Anti-slavery, Imperial Expansion, and Early Colonial Rule 4. Innocent Commerce: Boom and Bust in the Palm Produce Trade 5. Britain and Domestic Slavery 6. Redefining the Owner-Slave Relationship: Work, Ideology, and the Demand for People 7. The Changing Meaning of Land in the Urban Economy and Culture 8. Strategies of Struggle and Mechanisms of Control: Quotidian Conflicts and Court Cases Conclusion