Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind

Appendix: Major Historical Studies, Fiction, Drama, Films, and TV Presentations since 1918 concerning Slavery in the United States

215 appendix Major Historical Studies, Fiction, Drama, Films, and TV Presentations since 1918 concerning Slavery in the United States The following is not intended to be an exhaustively comprehensive survey. So many works have addressed American slavery in one form or another that to catalog them all is neither feasible nor desirable. The purpose of this appendix is to give the reader a clear timeline of the general historical development of the cultural conversation about slavery in a variety of genres. I have elected to date the chronology back beyond Gone with the Wind to 1918—the end of World War I and the year that Ulrich Phillips’s American Negro Slavery was published. This appendix is least comprehensive in its treatment of historiography. Of the thousands of existing historical studies of slavery, I have limited myself to fewer than one hundred particularly significant and representative works here. The list barely mentions, for example, studies of the slave trade, the Civil War, and abolitionism, and it largely neglects edited collections and volumes of primary source material. For fuller information, I refer the reader to the many useful bibliographies that have been compiled by professional historians: a good starting point is the excellent bibliographical essay in Peter Kolchin’s American Slavery, 1619–1877. The primary aim of this chronology is to clarify the extent to which modern American fiction has been concerned with slavery. I hope it will introduce the reader to several neglected works—including some not addressed in this study, such as Frances Gaither’s Follow the Drinking Gourd and Edmund Fuller’s novelistic treatment of the life of Frederick Douglass, A Star Pointed North. I have tended to exclude texts that emphasize only the recto 216 experiences of the white ruling class—most obviously the legions of tedious plantation potboilers—as well as some interesting novels on tangentially relevant subjects, such as abolitionism (including several significant books about John Brown). This appendix also cites a significant number of twentieth-century dramatic works about slavery—an area largely neglected by scholars. The frequent focus of plays upon slave rebellions and resistance—including several works about Nat Turner, Dorothy Heyward’s dramatization of the Denmark Vesey conspiracy, an adaptation of the life of Harriet Tubman, and Clifford Mason’s Gabriel—is particularly notable, intriguing, and worthy of further study. Natalie Zemon Davis explores several cinematic representations of slavery in Slaves on Screen (2000), but a wide-ranging study of the treatment of the institution on film remains to be written. It would be particularly interesting to see scholarly explorations of such neglected and unusual works as Uncle Tom without a Cabin (a 1929 comedy short), Slave Ship, Slaves, and Manderlay alongside analysis of such culturally prominent motion pictures as Gone with the Wind, Mandingo, Amistad, and Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Beloved. appendix year historical studies fiction drama, film, and tv 1918 Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery Uncle Tom’s Cabin (dir. J. Searle Dawley) 1919 Uncle Tom without a Cabin (dir. Edward F. Cline, Ray Hunt) 1924 Mary Johnston, The Slave Ship 1926 Stark Young, Heaven Trees 1927 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (dir. Harry A. Pollard) Topsy and Eva (dir. Del Lord) 1929 Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South 1930 May Miller, Harriet Tubman 1934 Randolph Edmunds, Nat Turner 1935 Georgia Douglas Johnson, Frederick Douglass So Red the Rose (dir. King Vidor) 1936 Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind Arna Bontemps, Black Thunder William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 1937 Slave Ship (dir. Tay Garnet) 1938 Joseph C. Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800–1865 Allen Tate, The Fathers Jezebel (dir. William Wyler) 1939 Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming) Continued recto 217 year historical studies fiction drama, film, and tv 1940 Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl Frances Gaither, Follow the Drinking Gourd 1941 Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past 1942 John Weld, Sabbath Has No End Philip Van Doren Stern, The Drums of Morning 1943 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts 1944 Frances Gaither, The Red Cock Crows Paul Peters, Nat Turner 1946 Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas Frank Yerby, The Foxes of Harrow Edmund Fuller, A Star Pointed North 1947 John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom The Foxes of Harrow (dir. John Stahl) Dorothy Heyward, Set My People Free 1949 E. Franklin Frazier, The...