Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe

Abstract

Reviewed by: Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe Jason Phillips (bio) Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought. Edited by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 242. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $29.95.) Insiders, Outsiders showcases exciting new work in southern history, and most of it focuses on the Civil War era. Dedicated to Michael O'Brien, the volume reflects the vibrancy and curiosity that marked his work and inspired his field to explore the South's diversity of thought. In the introduction, editors Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe also acknowledge how the 1977 Wingspread conference shifted American intellectual history toward a broader engagement with cultural values and practices. Whereas conventional intellectual histories studied the persistence of ideas across space and time, this newer approach explained how thoughts developed within distinct historical contexts. Despite this more holistic approach, the volume that resulted from Wingspread, New Directions in American Intellectual History (1979), and more recent anthologies, including The Worlds of American Intellectual History (2017) and American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (2018), lack literary studies.1 With its long tradition of collaboration between historians and literary critics, southern studies—including works like Insiders, Outsiders—encourage interdisciplinary conversations by sharing important questions, theories, and methods. Gardner and Stowe organize their book into two parts that explore common themes in southern history. In part 1, historians study intellectual life in the South to consider how the region affected thinking within its borders and was, in turn, changed by that thinking. These essays range beyond the usual subjects of intellectual history. Stephen Berry argues that the "southernness" of Edgar Allan Poe questioned mainstream American and British faith in progress, capitalism, and destiny. Poe yearned to belong to a pantheon with Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other contemporary luminaries, but his realism and rage offended their clique, making him the insider's outsider. Michael T. Bernath uncovers how efforts to purge a South Carolina community of northern teachers after John Brown's raid exposed internal divisions along class lines. Only the wealthiest families could afford to hire northern tutors for their children, but this luxury became a social and political liability when sectional fervor and hysteria increased. Beth Barton Schweiger calls for new book histories of the South that focus on the uses and circulations of texts instead of their production. She encourages us to consider a book's linguistic, musical, and anthropological customs as it traveled through the region, touching everyone from [End Page 134] intellectuals to illiterates. Timothy J. Williams studies an obscure book, Edwin Wiley Fuller's autobiographical novel Sea-Gift (1873), to interpret southern men's fantasies during Reconstruction. In search of personal greatness and a utopian South, Fuller's Lost Cause romance focuses on the future, not the past. Mitchell Snay concludes part 1 by analyzing different Reconstruction writers, the journalists and politicians who saw immigration as a panacea for the southern economy after emancipation. His essay suggests the global dimensions of Reconstruction and how immigration debates exposed assumptions about race, citizenship, and capitalism, and how they still do today. In part 2, literary critics take the lead to interpret thinking about the South. Melanie Benson Taylor opens this section with an insightful essay on southern literature and the Anthropocene. The apocalyptic perspective of southern writers and the region's history of environmental destruction and dispossession frame southern stories as profound commentaries on humanity's endangerment to itself and others. Next, John Grammer identifies a "southern turn" in New Journalism by focusing on the careers of Willie Morris, Marshall Frady, and Larry L. King. As southern white men, this "Wrecking Crew" reported the civil rights movement from a privileged position—that of insiders who enjoyed better access than northern journalists, while staying outside the perils that threatened Black writers. Scott Romine explores the inchoate and contradictory identities of Lost Cause southerners by focusing on different versions of Edward Pollard's iconic text. His delightful essay introduces "subintellectual history," or "the history of ideas that are not quite complicated, as articulated by southerners...