“A book of tremendous value to historical demographers, historians of the family, and scholars concerned with regional, race, and ethnic comparisons, differences, and developments. . . . One of the finest books on the family life of enslaved African Americans in the United States written to date.” — Journal of Marriage and the Family
“A successful blend of quantitative research and illustrative case studies. In this sense it stands as a superb model of the integration of the two methodologies. By focusing on household composition, Malone adds a new dimension to our understanding of the impact of slavery on enslaved people.” — Journal of American History
“This epoch-making study of the slave family in one Deep South state should lead to comaparable studies in other states. Few scholars have the patience to amass so much information about that domestic institution in a single state even with the technology available.” — Louisiana History
“This insightful and finely crafted study is an eloquent plea for historians to avoid oversimplification about a social structure as complex as the slave family.” — American Historical Review
“Ann Patton Malone expands discussion of the slave family in two significant ways. First, she broadens traditional analysis of the subject by utilizing the demographic model of the Cambridge Group of social historians to explain how slaves organized into domestic units. Second, rather than considering the family as a fixed institution, she examines the influences that changed slave family structures in Louisiana during the nineteenth century.” — Journal of Southern History
“Using qualitative and quantitative analyses, Ann Malone has come up with significant findings on the development of slave families and slave societies. No one has done an analysis as detailed as Malone has done for Louisiana. Her book is an important contribution to the study of family, southern society, black culture, and slavery.” — Orville Vernon Burton, author of In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina
“This is the best book ever written on slave family life in the American South. The research is impressive, the analysis sophisticated, the concern with diversity and change over time salutary, and the writing clear. All historians of slavery and the Old South will long be in the author’s debt.” — John B. Boles, editor of the Journal of Southern History
