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The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History by Anne C. Bailey (review)

and societal boundaries. Yet slaves clearly remain in the background of Genovese’s narrative. Unlike his earlier works, The Sweetness of Life lacks any new strong or provocative interpretations. The book is almost exclusively descriptive rather than analytical. It is peculiarly reminiscent of the kind of anecdotal social history pioneered by Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and Dixon Ryan Fox in their thirteen-volume History of American Life series published in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Genovese eschews any kind of cultural analysis that characterizes other works in southern history, such as Rhys Issac’s The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (1982). While he does note the importance of summer resorts in maintaining political friendships, Genovese has virtually nothing new to say about antebellum southern politics, class relations, or the course of the South to secession. At times, the reader is left wondering if or why it is important to know that low-country Carolinians enjoyed a blancmange “that combined milk with substantial amounts of wine and brandy and an alternative with isinglass, cream, sugar, blanched almonds, vanilla, and wine” (37). Nonetheless, the book does provide a portrait of life in the Old South that lends support to the notion that a middle-class culture with its Victorian values of sentimentality was a national rather than sectional phenomenon in the first half of the nineteenth century. Eugene D. Genovese, whose interpretations have shaped historical debate for at least two generations, had a brilliant career. The Sweetness of Life may not mark the apogee of that career, but it is still a reminder of a fine historian who dedicated his scholarly life to understanding the life of the master class in the slaveholding South. Mitchell Snay