Dwelling Place, Erskine Clarke
Dwelling Place, Erskine Clarke
List: $34.99 | Sale: $24.50
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Dwelling Place
A Plantation Epic

Author: Erskine Clarke

Narrator: Langston Darby

Unabridged: 29 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/23/2023

Synopsis

Published some thirty years ago, Robert Manson Myers's Children of Pride won the National Book Award in history and went on to become a classic reference on America's slaveholding South. That book presented the letters of the prominent Presbyterian minister and plantation patriarch Charles Colcock Jones (1804–1863), whose family owned more than a hundred slaves. While extensive, these letters can provide only one part of the story of the Jones family plantations in Georgia. In this remarkable book, the religious historian Erskine Clarke completes the story, offering a narrative history of four generations of the plantations' inhabitants, white and black. Encompassing the years 1805 to 1869, Dwelling Place describes the simultaneous but vastly different experiences of slave and slave owner. This "upstairs-downstairs" history reveals in detail how the benevolent impulses of Jones and his family became ideological supports for deep oppression, and how the slave Lizzy Jones and members of her family struggled against oppression.

Through letters, plantation and church records, court documents, slave narratives, archaeological findings, and the memory of the African American community, Clarke brings to light the long-suppressed history of the slaves of the Jones plantations—a history inseparably bound to that of their white owners.

About Erskine Clarke

Erskine Clarke is professor of American religious history at the Columbia Theological Seminary.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Anson on May 16, 2019

In Dwelling Place, Erskine Clarke expands the chronological range of a notable series of letters—published in 1972 by Yale as Children of Pride—to write a history of the extended Jones family of nineteenth-century coastal Georgia, as well as the families of their “people,” their slaves. This is a goo......more

Goodreads review by Laura on January 06, 2019

In a remarkable feat of research and historical imagination, Erskine Clarke allowed me to enter into coastal Georgia plantation life in the period from about 1800 to 1865. It is set in Liberty County, Georgia, a place where I spent part of my childhood and teenage years, which made this story all th......more

Goodreads review by Dana on June 23, 2009

I had the privilege to meet the author and hear him speak about creating this wonderful book. I was literally spellbound and I am not afraid to admit that he was an inspiration. I loved this book. Yes, it is quite long, and at times, it is difficult to keep track of the diverse characters in this hi......more

Goodreads review by Kerri on July 19, 2012

An important reminder of slavery, institutions and faithfulness. I found myself wondering what blinders I wear today that keep me from seeing truth when it is not to my advantage to do so. Clarke is a professor of American Church history at Columbia Theological Seminary so it does read a bit like a "......more

Goodreads review by J. on July 25, 2012

Read this book if you want to understand why slavery in the Old South was not only brutal to the slaves but also corrupted the slaveowners.......more

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