A New Plantation World
Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940

Examines the creation of 'sporting plantations' in the South Carolina lowcountry during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

Daniel J. Vivian (Author)

9781108403429, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 July 2019

365 pages, 20 b/w illus.
23 x 15.3 x 2.4 cm, 0.5 kg

'… no one has presented the 'New Plantation World' of the South Carolina lowcountry as comprehensively as Vivian. His book is rich in details and exhaustively footnoted. He draws on a wealth of primary and secondary sources to support his argument, including public and private manuscript collections. Vivian does for the South Carolina lowcountry what Stephanie Yuhl did for the city of Charleston, South Carolina, with A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (2005). Indeed, Yuhl's and Vivian's books could serve as companion pieces that present a picture of how the both the urban and rural built environment and landscape of the South Carolina coast were rehabilitated and transformed in the early twentieth century to create an imagined past.' Jennifer W. Dickey, The American Historical Review

In the era between the world wars, wealthy sportsmen and sportswomen created more than seventy large estates in the coastal region of South Carolina. By retaining select features from earlier periods and adding new buildings and landscapes, wealthy sporting enthusiasts created a new type of plantation. In the process, they changed the meaning of the word 'plantation', with profound implications for historical memory of slavery and contemporary views of the South. A New Plantation World is the first critical investigation of these 'sporting plantations'. By examining the process that remade former sites of slave labor into places of leisure, Daniel J. Vivian explores the changing symbolism of plantations in Jim Crow-era America.

Introduction
1. Discovering the lowcountry: Northern sportsmen in paradise, 1880–1915
2. Creating plantations for sport and leisure: estate-making in the Carolina lowcountry, 1915–1940
3. New lowcountry, new plantations
4. Creating Mulberry Plantation, 1915–1935: the Colonial Revival as an estate-making idiom
5. Medway plantation: the patina of age
6. Representing a new plantation world
7. Plantation life: varieties of experience on the remade plantations of the lowcountry
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Lifestyle, sport & leisure [W], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], Social & cultural history [HBTB], History of the Americas [HBJK], History of architecture [AMX]