Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730-1810

James Sidbury’s Ploughshares into Swords places the enslaved population of Virginia squarely within the emerging Atlantic world culture–of the market economy, of urban culture, of Virginia’s rapidly changing religious culture. Sidbury stresses the way black Virginians appropriated white cultural forms, transformed their meaning, and in the process created symbols of black liberation and a culture that had autonomous features even though it drew from the larger culture. His skillfull interweaving of these two separate strands of argument provides rare insights into the entire process of identity formation and creolization.