Freedom in a Slave Society

Johanna Nicol Shields holds a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Alabama. She taught at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) between 1967 and 2007 and is the founding director of the UAH Humanities Center. She has won numerous awards for teaching and research, including UAH's Alumni Association Distinguished Faculty Award. Shields has held research awards from the American Association of University Women and National Endowment for the Humanities. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Early Republic, the Journal of Southern History, Southern Cultures, Alabama Review and Mississippi Quarterly. She is the author of The Line of Duty: Maverick Congressmen and the Development of American Political Culture, 1836–1860 (1985), which won the Ralph Gabriel Prize awarded by the American Studies Association and Greenwood Press.

• 1. Regarding a 'weird utopia'; Part I. The Origins of Individual Freedom: 2. Self-making in southwestern towns; 3. The domestic foundations of self-determination; 4. The voluntary bonds of friendship; Part II. Writing Freedom, with Slaves: 5. Southwestern histories for a divided market; 6. Slave characters and the problem of human nature; Part III. The Crisis of the Rising South: 7. Slavery and political trust; 8. Self-determination and slavery in conflict.

'… a significant entry into the burgeoning literature of the once-neglected Southern middle class.' Christopher A. Graham, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society