Introduction

The historical identity of the United States is predicated upon its national experience with slavery and race. This historiography of slavery includes a substantial body of work on the colonial period, with particular emphasis upon the Atlantic slave trade, the development of the slave plantation system, the evolving relationships between ideologies of gender, race, cultural identity, and servile status, and the broader colonial economy and society created by the dominant class of slave-owners. By the 1970s, the emphasis on the lives of the enslaved had come to dominate the historiography. It has profoundly shaped our understanding of the importance they attached to the family and bonds of kinship, despite the constant threat of separation. The influence of feminist scholarship and women’s history has had a further transformative impact by recovering the hitherto hidden history of the plantation mistress and the double burden of racial and sexual oppression suffered by enslaved women.