""Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe""

'''Swing the Sickle' demonstrates how far gender has come as a category of historical analysis in slave studies. It displays refinement, nuance, and balance ... [and] brings together gender, work, family, and economy in an easily accessible, readable account useful to slave scholars and students of Georgia slavery in particular.'' Georgia Historical Quarterly ''Reconstructing the practices of slavery from plantation records, memoirs, and newspapers and the encounter with those practices through folk songs and ex-slave testimonies, Berry succeeds in capturing commonalities and differences in slavery in white-majority communities and African American-majority communities... [An] important contribution to historiography. Recommended.'' Choice ''Berry's fresh approach to studying slavery in Georgia includes new discussions of gender exploitation, family, and worker's skills. 'Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe' makes a tremendous contribution to the field, as it makes important connections between labor, skill and gender, forced breeding, and the informal economy.'' Deborah Gray White, author of Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Antebellum South and Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994