Avery O. Craven – författare

"In recent years a highly industrious school of historians has begun asking whether the war should have been fought at all and whether it was perhaps not more the fault of the North than of the South. Seeking to revise earlier judgments they have become known as the revisionists, and one of the most gifted and studious of them all is Avery Craven, whose The Coming of the Civil War . . . is one of the landmarks of revisionist literature."—Bruce Catton, American Heritage". . . those who would examine the democratic process during a period of progressive breakdown, in order to understand the dangers it embodies within itself, will find The Coming of the Civil War a classic analysis."—Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Sewanee Review"The book has always been recognized, even by its most severe critics, as a work of consummate scholarship."—T. Harry Williams, Baton Rouge Morning Advocate

American scholarship is richer for this unique exercise. More important, the great community, . . . one again sorely beset by unsettled problems of sectional rivalry and world tension, can read this book with great profit. Too few historians put their talents at the disposal of society so effectively. - American Historical Review""A brilliant, straightforward summary of the background of America's favourite armchair war. So deceptively simple is [Craven's] exposition that the solid worth of the book sneaks up on the reader when, having finished it, he realises that the brief volume may be short on detail but is complete as a well-considered, authoritative statement of history."" - Chicago Tribune""Never has he, or anyone else, analysed the growing sectional conflict in more graphic or understandable terms than in the present volume."" - Civil War History

Rachel O'Connor was an extraordinary woman. For nearly fifty years (from 1797 to 1846), she lived on a plantation near Bayou Sara in Louisiana's West Feliciana Parish. And for twenty-five of those years, after the death of her husband, she managed the plantation alone. Although they had, as she said, ""begun poor,"" at the time of her death she owned about a thousand acres and seventy-five slaves.Not a biography in the conventional sense, Avery O. Craven's charming little book is rather the story of Rachel and the Louisiana in which she lived. Based largely on several hundred of her letters, it tells of her day-to-day activities, her relationships with slaves and overseers, her successes and failures with crops, as well as her health and legal problems.By focusing on the life of one woman, Craven brings to light the thoughts, emotions, and attitudes of Louisianians (and other southerners) during this period. Rachel of Old Louisiana is a significant addition to the literature on the Old South.