(5 of 5)
Sense of Life. But such reservations aside, most were considerably impressed. Stanley Elkins admitted that he would have to revise his thinking in the light of the authors' persuasive arguments but added that the book does not convey the sense of what life was like for a slave. We still need, he said, "an imaginative re-creation of slavery on the level of Faulkner." Some, like the University of Chicago's Louis Gottschalk, were hostile and skeptical at first. "My reaction was: even if it's true, I don't want to believe it." Eventually he concluded that the importance of the book could be compared with Frederick Jack son Turner's thesis, "The Signifance of the Frontier in American History," put forward in 1893.
That may be going a bit far. The book is likely to change the way history is written in the future, both for good and ill. It surely should be the most controversial volume on American history since 1913, when Charles A. Beard was called a hyena (and worse) merely for pointing out that the U.S. Constitution had been drawn up by property-owning lawyers who had much to gain by its adoption.