• Honorable Mention, 2009 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award sponsored by the Caribbean Studies Association

In an ambitious and compelling book, Matthew Pratt Guterl asks us to rethink accounts of race, slavery, and national identity within a framework of the Americas. In revealing the hemispheric underpinnings of the South's master class of slaveholders, he sheds important new light on American history. This is also a wonderful book to read. Guterl is a remarkably elegant, at times virtuosic, writer.
   --Caroline Levander, author of Cradle of Liberty

A model of transnational history that reconceives the era of emancipation from a truly exciting hemispheric perspective. Guterl decisively demonstrates that the post-emancipation South cannot be properly understood unless it is viewed in connection with those parts of the Caribbean and Central and South America that also confronted labor problems in the aftermath of abolition.
   --Steven Mintz, author of Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood

With this elegantly written study, Guterl powerfully resituates the U.S. South within the 'American Mediterranean,' and in the process he uncovers the story of a Southern, slave-holding master class that understood itself both as 'American' and as a part of the wider arena of slave-holding power in the New World. With its focus on the complex relation between labor and transnationalism, this is a timely and much needed book.
   --Anna Brickhouse, University of Virginia

This startlingly original, interdisciplinary study compels one to think afresh about the geographical status of the American South. Guterl marshals an impressive range of materials to demonstrate how Southern slaveholders participated in a pan-American class whose shared consciousness relocated them within a circum-Atlantic topography that included the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. In uncovering this heretofore ignored cartography, he has revealed a deeper history of New World slavery and freedom.
   --Donald Pease, Dartmouth College

Matthew Pratt Guterl is Associate Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and Director of the American Studies Program, at Indiana University.

Read More by Matthew Pratt Guterl:

• The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940