Customer Reviews

Designs against Charleston : The Trial Record of the Denmark Slave Conspiracy of 1822

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I guess I can be generous to the other reviews. They seem to be written soon after this book was released.

The errors are not just with the maps. This is a poster child for sloppy historical workmanship. A review of this book by Michael P. Johnson, in "William and Mary Quarterly" Oct '01 completly shredded the book and stated that the actual record indicated exactly the reverse of Pearson's conslusion. The Johnson review earned the prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best journal article of that year in all of American History, in spite of the fact that the President of that organization had written a blurb for the back cover praising the book.

The Pearson could not even get it right in the book title--there was no trial.

The current price for this book is so high because the publisher withdrew the book and tried to recover all copies.

Like the previous reviewer stated, this book was thoroughly discredited by Michael P. Johnson. How Pearson could keep his job or his pride after writing this travesty of a book boggles the imagination.

I wonder how he would have graded himself, if he were his own student?

The real tragedy here is that he takes a pivotal historical event in the history of slavery in the US and completely misrepresents it. Bad scholarship doesn't even begin to cover it.

This book is a carefully edited work that will be appreciated by scholars and laypersons alike interested in Vesey as well as slavery, racism and resistance in general.

Minor distractions from the otherwise impressive scholarship in this book are the woefully inaccurate maps accompanying the text. In one wildly wrong map, the port city of Charleston is located not on the Atlantic but thirty or more miles inland on a river's bank. I realize such errors should not be chalked up against the author, but for such an expensively-priced volume, a reader should also receive accurate illustrations. A university press should have taken greater care in the production of this otherwise excellent book.