The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum

Nor did their annual hiring out of enslaved workers, some of whom would be shipped off, away from their families, on New Year’s Day-widely referred to as “heartbreak day.” Their buying and selling of workers didn’t abate during the holidays. May, a professor of history at Purdue University and author of Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas and Southern Memory, owners’ fears of rebellion during the season sometimes led to pre-emptive shows of harsh discipline. Many received gifts from their owners and enjoyed special foods untasted the rest of the year.īut while many enslaved people partook in some of these holiday pleasures, Christmas time could be treacherous. Many enslaved workers got their longest break of the year-typically a handful of days-and some were granted the privilege to travel to see family or get married. It was in these Southern states and others during the antebellum period (1812-1861) that many Christmas traditions-giving gifts, singing carols, decorating homes-firmly took hold in American culture. In the 1830s, the large slaveholding states of Alabama, Louisiana and Arkansas became the first in the United States to declare Christmas a state holiday. Nissenbaum researched this work at the Society as an AAS-National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow.How did Americans living under slavery experience the Christmas holidays? While early accounts from white Southerners after the Civil War often painted an idealized picture of owners’ generosity met by grateful workers happily feasting, singing and dancing, the reality was far more complex.

Among his many works on early America is the The Battle for Christmas: A Social and Cultural History of Our Most Cherished Holiday, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize when it was published in 1996. Stephen Nissenbaum (elected 1982), professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will be lead scholar for this program. The AAS collections are rich with material illustrating the shifting traditions surrounding the holiday, including books, children’s literature, manuscripts, periodicals, sermons, broadsides, music, and a wide variety of ephemera, all of which participants will explore during the workshop. This workshop will explore the way Christmas in America changed during the nineteenth century from a banned day of revelry in the colonial period into the domestic and commercial celebration we know today. Did you know that Christmas as we know it has only been in existence since about the mid-nineteenth century? The season has become so all-consuming that it’s hard to imagine a time when the holiday didn’t immediately bring to mind decorated evergreens, rounds of gift-giving, and a big, jolly, red-suited elf.

The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum