Makes a genuine contribution to our understanding of antebellum Georgia.
~Timothy J. Lockley, author of Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary Record
Colonial Georgia has long been known as 'the debatable land' contested by the British and Spanish crowns. That imperial conflict, as Watson Jennison shows, was the tip of the iceberg. In a sweeping account, Jennison describes the struggle between Low Country planters, Revolutionary republicans, black maroons, free people of color, and Native Americans to control the region. Georgia's violent and tumultuous first century culminated in the creation of a white man's republic. Readers of this excellent book will know that the outcome was neither uncontested nor inevitable.
~Claudio Saunt, author of Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family
Jennison's thoughtful synthesis of social, intellectual, and political history will stand for some time to come as the best one-volume account we have of slavery and racism in Georgia. This is a book that students and scholars of slavery, the South, and race in American history need to read and contend with.
~Anthony E. Kaye, author of Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South
Finesses Georgia's racial history to show that divides were not inevitable and that the call for the democratazation of white society helped create a bifurcated society by the antebellum era.... Jennison improves our understanding of how these divides came to be.
~Choice
This book provides interesting insight into the history of Georgia and demands a place on any early Americna reading list.
~Southern Historian
This book is a welcomed addition to the literature on race and slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
~Journal of American History
This readable and engaging history provides a fresh perspective on familiar chronologies. That the work at times seems to be counterintuitive or counterfactual is a testament to the ways in which Jennison challenges assumptions about the meanings of race and the histories we tell ourselves.
~American Historian Review
"Cultivating Race" is highly readable and recommended for graduate courses on colonial and antebellum U.S. history.
~Kellie Carter Jackson, The Journal of African American History
[...] Jennison draws readers into the complex world of early Georgia.
~Thomas Chase Hagood, Southern Spaces
[...] Jennison draws upon a wide variety of source material to present a fluent, thorough account of the spread of black slavery and the attendent white supremacy in Georgia from 1750 to 1860. [...] he challenges those who would read the hardened racial attitudes of the late antebellum era as inevitable, unchanging, and uncontested. [...] Jennison [...] weave[s] a more complicated tapestry based on relationships and negotiaons. Jennison successfully challenges this narrative, making clear that racial unity was not always a given Ultimately, Jennison's monograph helps to flesh out the diversity and complexity of early Georgia's social, political, and cultural life Cultivating Race will appeal to scholars of early American race relations, but its readable and engaging style suggests that undergraduate students also would find the book a useful addition to their reading lists
~Rose Stremlau, South Carolina Historical magazine
