Shaping Southern Society: The Colonial Experience

by T.H. Breen

Shaping of Southern Society is a collection of thirteen essays by noted American and English scholars that explores the changing character of social relationships in the Southern colonies during the period before the American Revolution. The articles examine the ways in which people of different racial and social backgrounds interacted in the new World creating what anthropologist have termed "cultural interdependencies." In each of the plantation societies discussed here -- Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia -- large numbers of African and European migrants established complex new societies, to which each group brought the knowledge of a culture left behind. Although the colonists attempted whenever possible to preserve what was familiar, the rich, expansive environment of the Southern colonies constantly forced the newcomers to make cultural adjustments.

Genres: History

265 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1976

About the author

Timothy H. Breen is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. He is also the founding director of the Kaplan Humanities Center and the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern. Breen is a specialist on the American Revolution; he studies the history of early America with a special interest in political thought, material culture, and cultural anthropology.

Breen received his Ph.D in history from Yale University. He also holds an honorary MA from Oxford University. In addition to the appointment at Northwestern University, he has taught at Cambridge University (as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions), at Oxford University (as the Harmsworth Professor of American History), and at University of Chicago, Yale University, and California Institute of Technology. He is an honorary fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has also enjoyed research support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Humboldt Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Mellon Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. An essay he published on the end of slavery in Massachusetts became the basis for a full-length opera that was produced in Chicago. He has written for the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books.