Books like The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South

It was hard making it through this book. I gave it three stars instead of two for a couple of reasons. One is that I did learn from it, and found information that I had not previously known. The other is that the book contains a "Critical Essay on Sources" which is great, not just for the wide selection of sources but also for the explanation of the criteria used in determining how much trust to place in any given account.Blassingame also published a compilation of slave interviews, letters, and speeches, and that is no surprise because his true talent may be the ability to patiently pore over data and sift through sources and find lots of information. The downside is that, at least on this topic, there were many contradictions. Some masters were kind, and some were cruel, and some wavered between both, and some slaves adapted, and some didn't, and some abolitionists were accurate, and some twisted the truth, and it's not that he is not right, but the frequent see-sawing leaves a feeling that you aren't really getting anywhere. Blassingame himself acknowledges in the preface that there are contradictions that he still does not understand. One wonders what he would have produced if he had lived longer.That there is always room for more study leads to another point. I felt the weakest area was the chapter on slave personalities. There are many references to the work of Bruno Bettelheim, some of whose work has now been discredited, and I think modern psychology would disagree with a lot of the conclusions.