Böcker av Avery O. Craven

"American scholarship is richer for this unique exercise. More important, the great community,... one again sorely beset by unsettled problems of sectional rivalry and world tension, can read this book with great profit. Too few historians put their talents at the disposal of society so effectively." - American Historical Review

Rachel O'Connor was an extraordinary woman. For nearly fifty years (from 1797 to 1846), she lived on a plantation near Bayou Sara. And for twenty-five of those years, she managed the plantation alone. Not a biography in the conventional sense, Avery Craven's charming little book is rather the story of Rachel and the Louisiana in which she lived.

Recognized since its publication in 1926 as a watershed in American historiography, Craven's study of soil depletion in Virginia and Maryland links elements of the author's frontier thesis, causal aspects of the expansion of slavery, and the economics of staple-crop production.