Family Venture

Joan E. Cashin is associate professor of history at Ohio State University. She is the author of A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier, also available from Johns Hopkins.

Cashin's A Family Venture is a deceptively slim volume that packs quite a wallop. In a relatively few pages she comments intelligently, provocatively, and originally on many of the most disputed subjects in southern history-the structure and function of planter families, the status and power of white women, the temperament and achievements of western migrants, and the nature of master-slave relations. Writing with clarity and grace, Cashin brings fresh interpretations to complex problems. -- Jane Turner Censer William and Mary Quarterly This lively, human exploration of race, class, and gender in westering before the great leap of the 1850s provides a new look at the impact of individualism in unsuspected places. -- Sarah Deutsch American Historical Review