Author Description

Product Description Drawing on four generations of family correspondence --reflecting the hopes, fears, desires, frustrations, and failures of an American family touched by personal scandal-- this book presents the saga of the Hammonds of Redcliffe from before the Civil War to after the New Deal. Set inRedcliffe, the plantation home of the Hammonds, this sweeping collection of letters, many of them by women, recaptures a way of life that is gone forever as it provides fascinating insights into the reactions of the participants to disaster on the battlefield and on the homefront and into the agonyof an eminent plantation family that had to adjust as best it could to a new social order. More than just the story of one family, the book casts in high relief the whole fabric of society: how all people worked and wept, married and mourned, lived and died. Review "[Bleser] adds much to [the letters'] intelligibility with her introductions to successive generations and by her brisk rattling of skeletons from family closets."―C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of Books"Social history that reads like a novel."―Jean Strouse, Newsweek"Surpasses any other such collection of American correspondence that I have ever read."―Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The New Republic"A remarkable collection of family letters....One can sense the broader implications of this particular family's history for anyone interested in the social history of women and of the South."―The New York Times Book Review."Bleser has skillfully edited the Hammond letters, provided excellent introductory essays for each section, and compiled an extensive bibliography and genealogical record. The Hammonds of Redcliffe is a wonderful walk through the private lifes of a very prominent Southern family. The book would be invaluable in a seminar on Southern family or social history because it is much more than a collection of letters. It is family history at its finest."―Teaching History About the Author Carol Bleser, Professor of History, Clemson University, South Carolina.