Overview

In Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle, Sylvia Hoffert calls on a particularly rich collection of primary sources, including diaries, letters, oral histories, census data, court documents, church records, and psychiatric hospital logs, all relating to Hillsborough, North Carolina, to argue that gossip and rumor were central to the formation of interpersonal relationships and an integral part of small-town life in the antebellum South. They exposed the insecurities and anxieties of the town’s inhabitants. Indeed, they served as important weapons in the power struggle between the white slaveholding elite—who tried to exert, maintain, and consolidate their control over community life—and the Black, white, and mixed-race men and women, free and enslaved, who did their best to challenge the socioeconomic status quo. And they exposed fissures in the social fabric that discretion, good manners, and historical amnesia could not obscure. The result was that, on a day-to-day basis, the shady streets of Hillsborough may have seemed peaceful to the casual observer. But underneath all that tranquility, the town was ripe with competition and conflict as the inhabitants used gossip to negotiate relationships with their neighbors and make places for themselves in the social, economic, and political hierarchy of the community.

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9780820374970

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Reviews

Sylvia D. Hoffert successfully reveals the ways that gossip and idle conversations were anything but idle in a small southern town. Indeed, Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle skillfully uncovers the function between reputation, gossip, and action, not just for elite men, but for women, free people of color, and the enslaved.--David W. Dangerfield ""professor of history, University of South Carolina - Salkehatchie""

Sylvia D. Hoffert successfully reveals the ways that gossip and idle conversations were anything but idle in a small southern town. Indeed, Wagging Tongues and Tittle Tattle skillfully uncovers the function between reputation, gossip, and action, not just for elite men, but for women, free people of color, and the enslaved. -- David W. Dangerfield * professor of history, University of South Carolina - Salkehatchie * In antebellum Hillsborough, North Carolina, gossip was serious business! Sylvia Hoffert deftly demonstrates how chatter and rumor shaped reputations, relationships, and social order, within and across lines of race and gender. A joy to read, Wagging Tongues combines wide-ranging sources with keen historical insight, unpacking the ways small-town talk regulated credit worthiness, treatment of enslaved people, class relations and more, providing a compelling model for future studies of community dynamics. -- Carol Lasser * Executive Director, Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society and coauthor of Elusive Utopia: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Oberlin, Ohio *

Author Information

SYLVIA D. HOFFERT, a former professor of history at both UNC Chapel Hill and Texas A&M University, is the author of several books, including When Hens Crow: The Woman’s Rights Movement in Antebellum America; A History of Gender in America; Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life; and Alva Vanderbilt Belmont: Unlikely Champion of Women’s Rights. Hoffert lives and writes in the North Carolina piedmont.

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