Suzanne E. Smith . To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death . Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2010. Pp. 257. $29.95.
Explores American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the subsequent Civil War in the Mississippi Valley. Discusses Jeffersonian visions and nightmares in Louisiana; the panic of 1835; the steamboat sublime; limits to capital; the runaway's river; dominion; “The Empire of the White Man's Will”; the carceral landscape; the Mississippi Valley in the time of cotton; capital, cotton, and free trade; tales of Mississippian empire; the material limits of “Manifest Destiny”; “The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny”; and the ignominious effort to reopen the slave trade. Johnson is Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South. Andrew W. Kahrl. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 376 pp., maps, photos, notes, bibliog., index. $39.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0674050471)