"American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation": A talk with Matthew Pratt Guterl September 20, 2007

The antebellum Southern "Master Class" was connected - by ship, by overland travel, by print culture, by a sense of singular space, and by the prospect of future conquest - to the habitus and communitas of New World slaveholders, to institutions, cultures, and "structures of feeling" that could not be contained by the nation-state. Why did some of the masters of the Old South invest in a vision of the circum-Caribbean? How did their commitment to this broader slaveowning community fare during and after the Civil War? What, in the end, was its historical significance? Matthew Pratt Guterl is Associate Professor in the Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies and director of the American Studies Program at Indiana University.

Sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and the Department of History as part of the Thursdays at Four series. Free and open to the public.

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