New Book
Winner of the Lincoln Prize. Stampp’s classic study of American slavery as a deliberately chosen, practical system of controlling and exploiting labor is one of the most important and influential works of American history written in our time. “A thoughtful and deeply moving book. . . . Mr. Stampp wants to show specifically what slavery was like, why it existed, and what it did to the American people.”—Bruce Catton
About the Author: Kenneth M. Stampp was an acclaimed scholar, teacher, and historian of the Civil War period. He is best known for The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South and The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877, two books that staunchly challenged previous historians’ romanticized depictions of slave-owner relationships and the state of the South during the Reconstruction. These works helped revolutionize the study of the period and remain staples of university classrooms. Stampp, who was the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley, died in 2009.
