James F. Brooks, a one time high school dropout, wrote the first history book to win the three big prizes of academic history, the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the Bancrof Prize, and the Francis Parkman Prize, then immediately turned down tenure. The book, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands, looks as interesting as he is, says this review from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Accounts of slavery in America tend to begin in 1619, with the first shipload of Africans sold in Virginia. "People think of it as something that mostly existed in the Black Belt," says Mr. Brooks, referring to the region of the Deep South where African slaves worked the land. "And people assume that it ended in 1865." But a different form of bondage emerged in the 1500s, when Spanish invaders encountered the indigenous people of North America. A "distinct slave system," as Mr. Brooks calls it -- similar to chattel slavery in some ways, but distinct in others -- grew out of ethnic conflicts and commercial exchanges in the region that came under Spanish influence. And it existed until well after the Civil War.

Aside from addressing an historical period I have absolutely no knowledge about, the relationships Mr. Brooks explores may complicate some traditional attitudes about violence and power in relationships among cultures.

"What's innovative about his work," says Clifford Geertz, a professor emeritus of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, "is that he focuses on a field of relationships -- the intermixture of people, involved in each other's lives in various ways, so that the usual concepts applying to the various groups don't work very well. I think that's really quite extraordinary."

The book sounds very worth reading.
- posted by Tom Sawyer @ 11:47 AM