May also demonstrates how the fear of slave rebellions was especially pervasive during the Christmas holiday.

How could it be, May asks, that antebellum southern writers could depict joyous Christmas celebrations, where black slaves thankfully enjoyed barbecues and dances organized by charitable slave owners, while contemporary newspaper articles and personal correspondence reveal that whites across Dixie feared Christmas as the time of year when their slaves were most likely to rise up and violently overthrow the plantation system? Furthermore, May questions how and why the agreeable vision of Christmas, one where affectionate masters provided childlike slaves with gifts and work reprieves, became such a firmly entrenched trope in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, at the expense of and often erasing the callous realities of Christmas on southern plantations? May also wants to know why many former slaves, especially those interviewed by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, provided surprisingly fond accounts of the Christmases they spent in servitude?Ĭollectively, Yuletide in Dixie draws back the curtain of the Lost Cause mythos to reveal how most slaves saw little, if any, change in their day-to-day routines during Christmastime. May’s examination of Christmastime in the American South. Kettler (University of California, Los Angeles)Īn important paradox concerning slavery and popular historical memory lies at the heart of Robert E. Patrick O'Brien (Ave Maria University)Ĭommissioned by Andrew J. Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory.Ĭharlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019.

Yuletide in Dixie by Robert E May