"Ms. Sobel's book is a work of great importance, and not only to the scholars who will be its primary audience... Ms. Sobel's assertion that
as C. Vann Woodward once put it
black and white southerners 'shared and molded a common culture' represents a bold departure from recent trends... A stunning reinterpretation of colonial Virginia's culture."
Jan Lewis, New York Times Book Review ... Read more"The trend in modern studies of slavery has been ... to emphasize the survival of the African heritage and the autonomy of black culture even under slavery. Sobel takes the trend a step further in contending that attitudes and casts of mind carried from Africa penetrated and altered the dominant English culture... Most significantly Sobel finds black and white patters of religious experience meshing and merging in the evangelical denominations that swept up lower- and middle-class Virginians in the last half of the eighteenth century."
Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books "Mechal Sobel offers a revisionist look at the culture of the American South before 1800. Her approach presents a perspective on the South not found in comprehensive general histories... In chapters woven with anecdotes, Sobel describes striking similarities and peculiar difference in the ways black and working class white Virginians spent their days, how they worshiped, where they lived, and how they saw themselves in relation to the rest of the world."
Mary Tabor, Christian Science Monitor Show Less