This Is Our Home

Whitney Nell Stewart is assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas.
For more information about Whitney Nell Stewart, visit the Author Page.

"This is Our Home is wonderfully written and richly illustrated with numerous images showing the places it explores and the material culture items it discusses. Stewart’s interdisciplinary approach to studying the liberating sense of home among the enslaved makes for compelling reading."—Emerging Civil War

"A must-read . . . . "Home" is an abstract yet powerful concept. This book creatively wrestles with what home meant for enslaved people in the American South. It is a critique of public history and the public interpretation of slavery which seeks to center enslaved people's living spaces beyond the daily routine of labor exploitation."—CHOICE

“This Is Our Home expands the meaning of home, applying it to stories of the enslaved and their efforts in creating a place of their own against the tides of oppression throughout the nineteenth-century South. . . . She paints a picture of an expansive and intentional homemaking process, where the enslaved found power and agency as they created their homes.”—North Carolina Historical Review

“This Is Our Home is crucial to understanding the substantial percentage of freedpeople who chose to remain close to the sites of their bondage after emancipation. . . . It is persuasively argued, empathetic, and clear-eyed about the intensely human attractions of homemaking despite terrible obstacles. . . . Stewart’s study will be useful to a range of students and historians, especially those interested in public history, the South’s built landscapes, and emancipation.”—Journal of Southern History

“This Is Our Home expands the meaning of home, applying it to stories of the enslaved and their efforts in creating a place of their own against the tides of oppression throughout the nineteenth-century South. . . . [Stewart] paints a picture of an expansive and intentional homemaking process, where the enslaved found power and agency as they created their homes.”—North Carolina Historical Review

"Mining a rich array of interdisciplinary sources with sensitivity and brilliance, Stewart reshapes our understanding of 'home' by recovering the material worlds and emotional experiences of Black southerners who lived on plantations. Stewart's book is a game changer for the field of American material culture studies and a must read for Black and southern history."—Zara Anishanslin, author of Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World