Read Death of an Overseer : Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South by Michael Wayne Online
* Read ^ Death of an Overseer : Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South by Michael Wayne ✓ eBook or Kindle ePUB. Death of an Overseer : Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South In May of 1857, the body of Duncan Skinner was found in a strip of woods along the edge of the plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, where he worked as an overseer. Part essay on the art of historical detection, part seminar on the history of slavery and the Old South, Death of an Overseer is, above all, a murder mystery--a murder mystery that allows readers to sift through the surviving evidence themselves and come to their own conclusions about who killed Duncan Skinner and why.. Alth
| Title | : | Death of an Overseer : Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.30 (502 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0195140044 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-05-11 |
| Language | : | English |
NEWS said The killer is obvious.. I read this book because I'm currently researching the life and times in the Natchez district up and the decades after the Civil War. I recently finished Dr. Wayne's other book, "The Re-Shaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District", which was immensely helpful to my research.I found useful information about Natchez plantation life in this book as well. I wasn't much looking for a murder mystery as I approached this book but I went along for the ride anyway, I'll admit bringing along the suspicions I had going into the book on who the responsible killer likely was, before. Fascinating lesson in history; terrible stab at fiction Death of an Overseer starts off a murder mystery and on the way teaches a good bit on historical research and writing. In respect to the latter the book is far more illuminating in potential pitfalls and mistakes as well as demonstrating sources to draw upon. As the former Michael Wayne impresses early on he will not tip his hand as to who he thinks was the responsible for the murder. It's an interesting if unoriginal idea and at times Wayne's writing makes for sometimes disjointed reading as he tends to repeat earlier passages to the point you feel like saying "you've mentione. A reader from New Orleans said A riveting look at how historians do history. A riveting murder mystery involving race and sex in the Old South, "Death of an Overseer" is equally fascinating for what it reveals about the historian's craft. Besides this, it is beautifully written. Historians and the general reader alike will find this book hard to put down.
Following that, Wayne slips into the role of historiographer, presenting the evidence in original documents and reviewing the protocols of slavery, inheritance law and politics at the time. After an account of McCallin's later years married to a black field hand, the book ends curiously with a fictional document written by Wayne: a letter to his son in which McCallin confesses to having consorted with slaveholders and dreamed of owning slaves, though he sees himself as a victim of the treachery of others. From Publishers Weekly Elements of class privilege, social ambition, interracial sex and violent death lend the flavor of a mystery to this crime story-cum-history about the brutal murder of an overseer, set on a Mississippi plantation in 1857. The crime story is the matter of the first chapter. (Feb.)Forecast: Although blurbs from James McPherson and Catherine Clinton (author of Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars) give this book a
In May of 1857, the body of Duncan Skinner was found in a strip of woods along the edge of the plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, where he worked as an overseer. Part essay on the art of historical detection, part seminar on the history of slavery and the Old South, Death of an Overseer is, above all, a murder mystery--a murder mystery that allows readers to sift through the surviving evidence themselves and come to their own conclusions about who killed Duncan Skinner and why.. Although a coroner's jury initially ruled his death to be accidental, an investigation organized by planters from the community concluded that he had been murdered by three
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