{"product_id":"9781570030475","title":"A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818-1881","description":"\u003cb\u003eA remarkable chronicle of one family's thirty-year plummet from prominence to poverty\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eA World Turned Upside Down\u003c\/i\u003e follows the trials of the nineteenth-century planter family that once dominated the southern banks of South Carolina's Santee River. Voluminous, literate, and rich in detail, the Palmer letters and journal entries serve as a sustained narrative of the economic pressures and wartime tragedies that shattered the South's planter aristocracy.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe volume offers insight into every aspect of plantation life: education, religion, household management, planting, slave-master relations, and social life. While the antebellum writings reveal rigid attitudes about social, economic, political, and religious concerns, the wartime correspondence depicts the devastation of those attitudes and of the Palmers' lifestyle. In addition to overwhelming material concerns, the Palmers describe the emotional impact of wartime casualties and of God's seeming indifference to their plight.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy the close of the war, the Palmers were heavily in debt. Their letters from that period tell of unprofitable contract labor and sharecropping, the desertion and loss of slaves, the search for nonagricultural employment, and their changing social status.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of South Carolina Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47055517286640,"sku":"9781570030475","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781570030475_p0.jpg?v=1763769056","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781570030475","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}