The Realms of Oblivion

While contemporary studies of slavery have illuminated many aspects of the United States' long history of racism and its role in the wider Atlantic world, they have devoted less attention to the institutional and local dimensions of enslavement. The Realms of Oblivion is a micro history that uses a Tennessee slave-owning family's plantation, Davies Manor, as a window into slavery's local dimensions and the damning legacy of bondage long after emancipation. Through tracing the Zachariah Davis family's migration to Tennessee from Virginia in the late eighteenth century, the book weaves together an engrossing, multi-generational family narrative that showcases how the family's wealth and "success" as farmers were predicated upon the brutal exploitation of enslaved Black people. Written in an engaging and critical style, The Realms of Oblivion is grounded in a rich source-base, ranging from legal records, to personal files of the Davies family, to oral histories. The book uses this archive to create a "bottom-up" history that not only reveals a critical chapter of Tennessee and Southern history, but also offers a valuable approach to United States history more generally.