John T. Schlotterbeck – författare

How James Madison and the milieu of the Virginia countryside he called home shaped one anotherJames Madison's World is a time-lapse of life in two central Virginia counties that captures two centuries of continuity and change. From the time that the first white settlers arrived in the early 1700s to the early 1900s some things—like agricultural cycles and the rhythm of life on the farm—remained essentially unaltered. Others, like the sources of political authority and the abolition of chattel slavery, changed life for residents fundamentally.Taking Orange and Greene Counties—home to the illustrious Madison family—as his setting, John Schlotterbeck focuses not on the father of the Constitution but rather on the ordinary people who lived before, during, and after he made his mark on US history. In so doing, Schlotterbeck unveils a rich tapestry of women and men, enslavers and the enslaved, laborers and employers, yeomen and gentry, saints and sinners. He describes in vivid detail how they, together, experienced and contested economic, social, political, religious, and cultural change as the country crept toward realizing the democratic promises woven into its founding. Bridging historical periods that most scholars treat in isolation, Schlotterbeck has produced a holistic picture of how a particular place, and its people, navigated the vicissitudes of American history.

It is difficult for twenty-first-century Americans to imagine life in the South over two hundred years ago. What were the daily routines and popular beliefs of ordinary people? What did they do for fun? How did contacts between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans alter patterns of work, family life, material culture, and food; change religious beliefs; and fashion new social identities? When did people in the colonial South identify as “southerners”?Daily Life in the Colonial South is the first major synthesis of the social history of the southern colonies that examines these questions. John T. Schlotterbeck describes how social interactions between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans from initial contacts with Europeans in the early 1500s to the eve of the American Revolution in the 1760s created new societies. Indigenous people and newcomers adapted inherited cultures, institutions, and social patterns to novel settings from the Chesapeake Bay to the Lower Mississippi River and the Native interior. Over time, new ways of living, behaving, and believing developed across diverse and changing physical, demographic, economic, and social environments. Schlotterbeck’s examination of everyday life encompasses both private lives and public actions of all members of society: women and men, blacks and whites, Native Americans and Europeans, and common folk and gentry.