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December 11, 2019 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

In her recent book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton – and thus, slaves – in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete – for jobs or living wages – with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these ‘masterless’ men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.

Author Keri Leigh Merrit will be joined in discussion with professor and historian Rhae Lynn Barnes.

Instructors

  • Keri Leigh Merritt
    Keri Leigh Merritt works as a historian and writer in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her B.A. from Emory University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017). It won both the … Read More ›
  • Rhae Lynn Barnes
    Rhae Lynn Barnes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University and the leading expert on the history of amateur blackface minstrelsy. She is a historian, editor, and onscreen commenter specializing in the globalization of American popular culture. Her research and teaching focus on the histories … Read More ›

Details

Date:
December 11, 2019
Time:
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Event Categories:
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Venue

The People’s Forum
320 West 37th Street
New York, NY 10018 United States
Phone
347-695-1095
View Venue Website

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