Back of the Big House - by John Michael Vlach (Paperback)

About the Book

Behind the "big houses" of the antebellum South existed an entirely different world, socially and architecturally, where slaves lived and worked. Vlach has chosen over 200 photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey of the 1930s--an archive that has been mined many times for its images of the planters' residences but almost never for those of slave dwellings.

Book Synopsis

Behind the "Big Houses" of the antebellum South existed a different world, socially and architecturally, where slaves lived and worked. John Michael Vlach explores the structures and spaces that formed the slaves' environment. Through photographs and the words of former slaves, he portrays the plantation landscape from the slaves' own point of view.

The plantation landscape was chiefly the creation of slaveholders, but Vlach argues convincingly that slaves imbued this landscape with their own meanings. Their subtle acts of appropriation constituted one of the more effective strategies of slave resistance and one that provided a locus for the formation of a distinctive African American culture in the South.

Vlach has chosen more than 200 photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey--an archive that has been mined many times for its images of the planters' residences but rarely for those of slave dwellings. In a dramatic photographic tour, Vlach leads readers through kitchens, smokehouses, dairies, barns and stables, and overseers' houses, finally reaching the slave quarters. To evoke a firsthand sense of what it was like to live and work in these spaces, he includes excerpts from the moving testimonies of former slaves drawn from the Federal Writers' Project collections.

Review Quotes

"A visually stimulating, engagingly written introduction to this important aspect of southern culture."--Southern Cultures

"Contribute[s] significantly to the architectural no less than the social history of the United States from colonization to the Civil War."--Journal of the Early Republic

"One of the most user-friendly studies of African-American material culture ever written."--American Historical Review

"Splendid. Using photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) dating back to the 1930s, oral histories of former slaves taken by the Federal Writers Program, antebellum travel accounts and agricultural journals, modern agricultural histories, and the vast literature on the history of slavery, Vlach deftly weaves an account of plantation life in the slave's territory, back of the 'Big House.'"--Design Book Review

"This is a solid piece of documentation which forcefully illuminates a neglected yet pivotal aspect of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reality."--Maryland Historical Magazine

About the Author

John Michael Vlach is professor of American studies and anthropology and director of the folklife program at The George Washington University. His books include The Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings and The Afro-American Tradition in the Decorative Arts.