Background
Jordan, Winthrop Donaldson was born on November 11, 1931 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. Son of Henry Donaldson and Lucretia Mott (Churchill) Jordan.
( In the war-fevered spring and summer of 1861, a group o...)
In the war-fevered spring and summer of 1861, a group of slaves in Adams County, Mississippi, conspired to gain their freedom by overthrowing and murdering their white masters. The conspiracy was discovered, the plotters were arrested and tried, and at least forty slaves in and around Natchez were hanged. By November the affair was over, and the planters of the district united to conceal the event behind a veil of silence. In 1971, Winthrop D. Jordan came upon the central document, previously unanalyzed by modern scholars, upon which this extraordinary book is based - a record of the testimony of some of the accused slaves as they were interrogated by a committee of planters determined to ferret out what was going on. This discovery led him on a twenty-year search for additional information about the aborted rebellion. Because no official report or even newspaper account of the plot existed, the search for evidence became a feat of historical detection. Jordan gathered information from every possible source - the private letters and diaries of members of the families involved in suppressing the conspiracy and of people who recorded the rumors that swept the Natchez area in the unsettled months following the beginning of the war; letters from Confederate soldiers concerned about the events back home; the journal of a Union officer who heard of the plot; records of the postwar Southern Claims Commission; census documents; plantation papers; even gravestones. What has emerged from this odyssey of research is a brilliantly written re-creation of one of the last slave conspiracies in the United States. It is also a revealing portrait of the Natchez region at the very beginning of the CivilWar, when Adams County was one of the wealthiest communities in the nation and a few powerful families interconnected by marriage and business controlled not only a large black population but the poorer whites as well. In piecing together the fragments of extant information about the conspiracy, Jordan has produced a vivid picture of the plantation slave community in southwestern Mississippi in 1861 - its composition and distribution; the degree of mobility permitted slaves; the ways information was passed around slave quarters and from plantation to plantation; the possibilities for communication with town slaves, free blacks, and white abolitionists. Jordan also explores the treatment of blacks by their owners, the kinds of resentments the slaves harbored, the sacrifices they were willing to make to protect or avenge abused family members, and the various ways in which they viewed freedom. Tumult and Silence at Second Creek is a major work by one of the most distinguished scholars of slavery and race relations. Winthrop D. Jordan's study of the slave society of the Natchez area at the onset of the Civil War is a landmark contribution to the field. More than that, his exhaustive and resourceful search for documentation and his careful analysis of sources make the study an extended and innovative essay on the nature of historical evidence and inference.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807120391/?tag=2022091-20
(In 1968, Winthrop D. Jordan set out in encyclopedic detai...)
In 1968, Winthrop D. Jordan set out in encyclopedic detail the evolution of white Englishmen's and Anglo-Americans' perceptions of blacks, perceptions of difference used to justify race-based slavery, and liberty and justice for whites only. This second edition, with new forewords by historians Christopher Leslie Brown and Peter H. Wood, reminds us that Jordan's text is still the definitive work on the history of race in America in the colonial era. Every book published to this day on slavery and racism builds upon his work; all are judged in comparison to it; none has surpassed it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807871419/?tag=2022091-20
(In the war-fevered spring and summer of 1861, a group of ...)
In the war-fevered spring and summer of 1861, a group of slaves in Adams County, Mississippi, conspired to gain their freedom by overthrowing and murdering their white masters. The conspiracy was discovered, the plotters were arrested and tried, and at least forty slaves in and around Natchez were hanged. By November the affair was over, and the planters of the district united to conceal the event...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EEQ7AUE/?tag=2022091-20
(A timeless classic and award-winning work on the history ...)
A timeless classic and award-winning work on the history of race relations in early America. "A rare thing: an original contribution to an important subject. In helping us understand today's racial crisis, Jordan has ideally fulfilled the historian's function of investigating the past in order to enlighten the present."--The judges for the 1969 National Book Award for History and Biography "A massive and learned work that stands as the most informed and impressive pronouncement on the subject yet made."--C. Vann Woodward, "New York Times Book Review"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080781055X/?tag=2022091-20
Jordan, Winthrop Donaldson was born on November 11, 1931 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. Son of Henry Donaldson and Lucretia Mott (Churchill) Jordan.
AB, Harvard University, 1953. Master of Arts, Clark University, 1957. Doctor of Philosophy, Brown University, 1960.
Instructor history, Phillips Exeter (N.H.) Academy, 1955-1956;
lecturer in history, Brown U., Providence, 1959-1961;
fellow, Institute Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1961-1963;
from assistant professor to professor of history, University of California, Berkeley, 1963-1982;
associate dean for minority group affairs Graduate division, University of California, Berkeley, 1968-1970;
visiting professor of history and black studies, U. Mississippi, Oxford, 1981;
professor of history and Afro-American studies, U. Mississippi, Oxford, since 1982. Visiting assistant professor of history University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1966. Visiting professor of history University of California, Berkeley, 1989.
William F. Winter professor of history and professor Afro-American studies, U. Mississippi, since 1993, F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished professor, since 1998. Visiting professor of history U. Zimbabwe, 1994.
( In the war-fevered spring and summer of 1861, a group o...)
(In the war-fevered spring and summer of 1861, a group of ...)
(The paperback edition of Jordan's classic and award-winni...)
(A timeless classic and award-winning work on the history ...)
(In 1968, Winthrop D. Jordan set out in encyclopedic detai...)
Council member Institute Early American History and Culture, 1977-1979. Member American Antiquarian Society (elected), American History Association, Organisation American Historians, Southern History Association, Massachusetts History Society (elected), Mississippi History Society, Krokodiloes Club.
Married Phyllis Henry, August 30, 1952 (divorced 1979). Children: Joshua H., J. Mott, W. Eliot. Married Cora Miner Reilly, February 27, 1982.