The Sweetness of Life

Eugene D. Genovese, one of the most significant and distinguished historians of his time, spent a lifetime studying the society of the Old South. His books include The Political Economy of Slavery 1967), The World the Slaveholders Made (1988), In Red and Black (1973), From Rebellion to Revolution (1992), The Slaveholders' Dilemma (1992), A Consuming Fire (2009), and Roll, Jordan, Roll (1976), which was awarded the Bancroft Prize. With his wife, the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, he wrote Fruits of Merchant Capital (1983), The Mind of the Master Class (Cambridge, 2005), Slavery in White and Black (Cambridge, 2008), and Fatal Self-Deception (Cambridge, 2012). A past president of the Organization of American Historians, Genovese died in 2012. Douglas Ambrose is the Carolyn C. and David M. Ellis Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. The author of Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South (1996) and co-editor of The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton (2007), Ambrose was a student of both Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

• Introduction; 1. A gracious people; 2. Dining room, parlor, and lawn; 3. Horses and hounds; 4. Vignettes: sundry pleasures; 5. Vignettes: charms of high life; 6. Home away from home; 7. Matters not so sweet; Editor's epilogue.

'In crafting The Sweetness of Life, the late Eugene D. Genovese drew upon a long, illustrious career of research into the lives of white and black southerners. Agree with his conclusions or not, no historian played a larger role in recovering the complicated, turbulent world of antebellum cotton slavery. Gracefully edited by Douglas Ambrose, this brilliant and insightful study serves as a capstone to Genovese's fifty years of distinguished scholarship. A masterful achievement.' Douglas R. Egerton, Le Moyne College