A bride most begrudging
Deeanne Gist
"Set in 1640's Colonial Virginia, a marriage of convenience becomes most inconvenient when the bride proves more than the planter had bargained for"--Provided by publisher.

by Donald P. McNeilly (2000)
"In this study, Donald P. McNeilly examines how moderately wealthy planters and sons of planters immigrated into the virtually empty lands of Arkansas seeking their fortune and to establish themselves as the leaders of a new planter aristocracy west of the Mississippi River. These men, sometimes alone, sometimes with family, and usually with slaves, sought the best land possible, cleared it, planted their crops, and erected crude houses and other buildings. Life was difficult for these would-be leaders of society and their families, and especially for the slaves who toiled to create fields in which they labored to produce a crop.". "McNeilly argues that by the time of Arkansas's statehood in 1836, planters and large farmers had secured a hold over their frontier home and that between 1840 and the Civil War, planters solidified their hold on politics, the economy, and society in Arkansas. The author takes a topical approach to the subject, with chapters on migration, slavery, non-planter whites, politics, and the secession crisis of 1860-61. McNeilly offers a first-rate analysis of the creation of a white, cotton-based society in Arkansas, shedding light not only on the southern frontier, but also on the established Old South before the Civil War."--BOOK JACKET.
Deeanne Gist
"Set in 1640's Colonial Virginia, a marriage of convenience becomes most inconvenient when the bride proves more than the planter had bargained for"--Provided by publisher.
Anthony S. Parent, Jr
Publisher description: Challenging the generally accepted belief that the introduction of racial slavery to America was an unplanned consequence of a scarce labor market, Anthony Parent, Jr., contends that during a brief period spanning the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a small but powerful planter class, acting to further its emerging economic interests, intentionally brought racial slavery to Virginia. Parent bases his argument on three historical developments: the expropriation of Powhatan lands, the switch from indentured to slave labor, and the burgeoning tobacco trade. He argues that these were the result of calculated moves on the part of an emerging great planter class seeking to consolidate power through large landholdings and the labor to make them productive. To preserve their economic and social gains, this planter class inscribed racial slavery into law. The ensuing racial and class tensions led elite planters to mythologize their position as gentlemen of pastoral virtue immune to competition and corruption. To further this benevolent image, they implemented a plan to Christianize slaves and thereby render them submissive. According to Parent, by the 1720s the Virginia gentry projected a distinctive cultural ethos that buffered them from their uncertain hold on authority, threatened both by rising imperial control and by black resistance, which exploded in the Chesapeake Rebellion of 1730.
Stephen Bly
The Joyton family, who run the Sonora Pass stagecoach station, deal with the mysterious shooting death of a passenger and welcome new neighbors who open a mercantile next door.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
This unforgettable novel tells the story of Tom, a devoutly Christian slave who chooses not to escape bondage for fear of embarrassing his master. However, he is soon sold to a slave trader and sent down the Mississippi, where he must endure brutal treatment. This is a powerful tale of the extreme cruelties of slavery, as well as the price of loyalty and morality. When first published, it helped to solidify the anti-slavery sentiments of the North, and it remains today as the book that helped move a nation to civil war. "So this is the little lady who made this big war." Abraham Lincoln's legendary comment upon meeting Mrs. Stowe has been seriously questioned, but few will deny that this work fed the passions and prejudices of countless numbers. If it did not "make" the Civil War, it flamed the embers. That Uncle Tom's Cabin is far more than an outdated work of propaganda confounds literary criticism. The novel's overwhelming power and persuasion have outlived even the most severe of critics. As Professor John William Ward of Amherst College points out in his incisive Afterword, the dilemma posed by Mrs. Stowe is no less relevant today than it was in 1852: What is it to be "a moral human being"? Can such a person live in society -- any society? Commenting on the timeless significance of the book, Professor Ward writes: "Uncle Tom's Cabin is about slavery, but it is about slavery because the fatal weakness of the slave's condition is the extreme manifestation of the sickness of the general society, a society breaking up into discrete, atomistic individuals where human beings, white or black, can find no secure relation one with another. Mrs. Stowe was more radical than even those in the South who hated her could see. Uncle Tom's Cabin suggests no less than the simple and terrible possibility that society has no place in it for love." - Back cover.