In a Land of Strangers

“An important and persuasive contribution, In a Land of Strangers breaks new ground with an impressive examination of more than two thousand northern teachers in the Old South, offering fresh insights into race, class, gender, and sectional identity. Elegantly written and methodologically strong, this book promises wide scholarly impact.”—Jonathan Daniel Wells, author of Blind No More: African American Resistance, Free Soil Politics, and the Coming of the Civil War

“This book offers an unparalleled window into antebellum American identity through the eyes of Northern teachers, whose letters and diaries captured intimate encounters with white and Black Southerners. By tracing their ambitions, disillusionments, and cultural reckonings, this book significantly deepens our understanding of sectional difference and shared national life before the Civil War. ”—Heather Andrea Williams, author of Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom

“Michael Bernath’s In a Land of Strangers offers an innovative study of the Northern schoolteachers who tutored the children of Southern planters and, through them, helped create the identity of the South. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, Bernath’s work reorients how we think of and about Southern plantations in the decades before the start of the US Civil War and provides a fresh perspective on the antebellum era.”—Sarah Gardner, coeditor of Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought

“By recovering the sharp, haunting voices of Yankee tutors, Michael Bernath takes readers into the opulent, dark heart of the Old South. Generations of historians have studied the myth and reality of the plantation South without consulting the letters of thousands of Northern teachers who lived with and worked for the region’s wealthiest families. In a Land of Strangers corrects this omission with impressive archival research, perceptive analysis, and engaging prose.”—Jason Phillips, author of Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future