Larry Hudson
Professor
Department of History
E-mail: lehn@mail.rochester.edu
Office:
585.275.4557
Fax:
585.256.2594
Fields of Interest:
African-American history; Comparative Slavery; Civil War and Reconstruction; New South; Theory and Methods of Oral history
By the early nineteenth century, slaves had begun to change their strategies for resistance. Overt violent resistance such as rebellions and mass escapes declined, instead they increased their efforts to establish and maintain institutions that would ensure their individual and collective survival. In contrast to earlier generations of slaves, their tactics were multi-pronged: to create viable families, to foster a sustaining faith, and to nurture the strength and wherewithal to withstand the physical and excruciating psychological demands of a cruel institution. However one measures the contest between enslaver and enslaved, during the most hopeless days of slavery and even in some of its most brutalizing locations, enslaved African Americans, always more patient and resilient than their owners, scored some notable victories. My current project presents the enslaved as patient, hardworking subversives who were able to shape their world as they prepared themselves for freedom. It looks at the work environment, family life, and religious and health practices of the slaves as each of these areas was important to them because they provided the enslaved with the cultural tools with which to ensure more than mere survival of an awful system of human exploitation.
Representative Publications:
* 'All that Cash': Work and Status in the Slave Quarters" in Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1994), edited by Larry E. Hudson, Jr.
* "To Have and to Hold": Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (University of Georgia Press, 1997)
Courses:
AAS 110/HIS 110 Intro to African and African-American studies
AAS 141/HIS 165 Afro-American History
AAS 249/HIS 249 The Civil War: A Search for National Unity
AAS 256/HIS 258 History of Race in America
AAS 287/HIS 253 History of the American South, 1792-1896
AAS 288/HIS 254 History of the American South, 1896-1945
AAS 356/HIS 340 Black Family in Slavery and Freedom
AAS 357/HIS 479 Oral History: Theory and Method
AAS 372/HIS 339 America at War: The Civil War and Reconstruction
AAS 297 Contemporary Issues on African-American Life & Culture
Frederick Douglass
Institute for African and
African-American Studies
Morey 302
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627
585.275.7235
fdi@mail.rochester.edu