On Teaching Southern History at the "Most Southern University on Earth"

Ever since the advent of humanismor, more correctly, ever since the Roman humanist Lorenzo Valla brought humanist historiography to Naples-the two kingdoms of Sicily and Naples have attracted the attention of foreign as well as native southern historians. Indeed, many of these historians produced works that have been recognized as classics not just of local but of world historiography: Pandolfo Collenuccio, who first adapted the Livian model in a history of Naples ab urbe condita; Giovanni Pontano, who composed the first major statement of humanist historiographical principles; Federico Maurolico, who walked all over Sicily in search of archaeological monuments; Giannantonio Summonte, who brought the whole of Neapolitan history to bear upon the constitutional problems of the late sixteenth century; Pietro Giannone, who wrote the first of the civil histories of the Italian Enlightenment; Benedetto Croce, whose History of the Kingdom of Naples has recently been translated into English.' Thanks, however, to the huge flood of money that since 1967 has been poured into academic research projects by the ever-bountiful Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerca (CNR) (the Italian equivalent of the American National Endowment for the Humanities), the historiography of the south has recently experienced an unprecedented quantitative expansion. Thanks also to the decision of several prominent historians to settle permanently in southern universities -rather than to use them as springboards in the direction of more

As its title proudly promises, The History of Southern Literature is an ambitious feat of American collective scholarship. In several senses of the term, it is indeed a monument. Imposing in size (626 pages) and scope, it sets out to record Southern writing and writers from 1588 to 1982, from Thomas Hariot's A Brief and True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia to Sylvia Wilkinson's Bone of My Bone. In addition to the seven expert editors, some forty other scholars and historians have contributed seventy-five chapters on literary periods, figures, and genres, as well as historical events and cultural movements. This four-pound monument to a tradition still significantly anchored in place and past was subsidized a private foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sponsored the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, it is issued by the leading scholarly publisher in the field of Southern history and (p. xiii). The project enjoyed the support services of librarians, computer experts, and typists from half a dozen Southern universities. On these and more intrinsic grounds, The History of Southern Literature claims an authority and cultural status no previous history or textbook of Southern writing earned for Louise Manly, W.P. Trent, Leonidas Warren Payne, or Jay B. Hubbell, whose 1954 study, The in American Literature: 1607-1900, is the immediate ancestor of this volume. Given these circumstances, one is encouraged not only to consult but to read this history both for what it says about Southern writing, past and present, and for what it represents as historical-cultural document, the expression of values and beliefs of an influential group of contemporary intellectuals. Consulting The History provides ample, generally reliable information, much pleasure, and some frustrations. The varied riches of this regional (and universal) literature are chronicled, often celebrated, and less often critically evaluated in a roughly chronological series of brief chapters. Even for the expert, new names and titles and unexpected connections pop up. Consulters and readers generally will know, and know how to judge discussions of, George Washington Harris and Joel Chandler Harris, but how many will as readily recognize Bernice Kelly Harris or Corra Harris? On broader topics and more major writers, too, there are nicely compressed chapters like Richard J. Calhoun's Literary Magazines in the Old South and Mary Ann Wimsatt's William Gilmore Simms. However, The History is not always as discriminating as it is en-

References Cited

Reviewed by: History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie: Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt Charles W. Eagles (bio) History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt. Edited by Gordon Harvey, Richard Starnes, and Glenn Feldman University of Alabama Press 240 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $24.95 In 2006 Wayne Flynt retired from Auburn University after teaching history for more than forty years. Born in Pontotoc, Mississippi, Flynt grew up in rural and [End Page 98] small-town Alabama. By the time he graduated from Howard College (now Samford University) in Birmingham in 1961, he was an ordained Baptist minister, had served as student body president, and had coordinated southern college students for Richard Nixon in 1960. Already a critic of segregation, Flynt rejected a career as a southern minister for graduate study in history at Florida State University. After a decade teaching at Howard College, he moved in 1977 to Auburn. In addition to teaching thousands of undergraduates, he directed more than forty doctoral dissertations. His historical scholarship in more than a dozen books deals with southern politics, religion, and poverty, often focused on Alabama, and has earned many prizes, including the 1990 Lillian Smith Award for non-fiction. He also won teaching awards, served as department chairman, and was a Distinguished University Professor. Flynt was no ordinary university professor. As a scholar and as a Christian, he advocated reform of Alabama's regressive tax system, helped found Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform, supported better and equal funding for public schools, served on the board of directors of the Alabama Poverty Project, and spoke out against powerful special interests. To recognize his many contributions both as a historian and as an activist, three of his former graduate students collected eleven essays from Flynt's students and colleagues. History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie follows a line of Festschriften that have saluted eminent southern historians. Edited in 1965 by Arthur S. Link and Rembert Patrick, the essays in Writing Southern History: Essays in Historiography in Honor of Fletcher M. Green have had perhaps the greatest influence in the field. Twenty-five years later John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen edited Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham, the long-time editor of the Journal of Southern History. Other prominent Festschriften with more traditional monographic or narrative contributions have honored C. Vann Woodward, David Herbert Donald, and George Brown Tindall. Four essays emphasizing Flynt's activities outside the classroom distinguish History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie from similar volumes. Though one coherent and comprehensive assessment would have served the reader better than the four repetitive ones, the contributions by John Shelton Reed, Dewayne Key, Bailey Thomson, and Dan T. Carter each describe Flynt's Christian civic activism and provide examples of his importance for modern Alabama. Sociologist Reed praises him as a public intellectual whose "social thought comes not from Karl Marx or The Nation but straight from the Sermon on the Mount." Thomson, a longtime journalist and professor at the University of Alabama, both observed Flynt and worked with him in reform efforts. Seeing in Flynt an "evangelist's zeal for attacking injustice," Thomson describes him as combining "a writer's sensibility with a scholar's curiosity and an activist's passion." Key, an Alabama public school leader, describes his colleague in educational reform as "a spiritual man who is [End Page 99] guided by timeless principles of compassion and fairness and justice and who has become a sort of modern prophet to his region and state. He is a patient man who perseveres as he pursues the acceptance and incorporation of these principles in the formation of public policy in this state." Comparing his fellow historian to Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Carter calls him "the conscience" of Alabama and finds in Flynt "a remarkable blend of academic excellence and public service." Between these remarkable tributes to Wayne Flynt, seven of his former students present scholarly essays in his honor. All but one deal with the twentieth-century South, and most stress the impact of race in southern history. Bruce Blevins's...

David Goldfield. Southern Histories: Public, Personal, and Sacred. (Georgia Southern University Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Lecture Series, number 11.) Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2003. Pp. xvii, 123. $24.95 Get access Goldfield David. Southern Histories: Public, Personal, and Sacred. (Georgia Southern University Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Lecture Series, number 11.) Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2003. Pp. xvii, 123. $24.95. Paul K. Conkin Paul K. Conkin Vanderbilt University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 109, Issue 5, December 2004, Pages 1595–1596, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.5.1595-a Published: 01 December 2004

BETWEEN FRIENDS: EPISTOLARY CORRESPONDENCE AMONG QUAKERS IN THE EMERGENT SOUTH Howard Beeth* From their earliest days Friends strove to maintain shared beliefs and a common way of life despite separation by wide distances of land and sea. Several factors promoted their unity and uniformity. The migration of Quakers from one place to another constantly homogenized the Society and served as a barrier to isolation and provincialism. The organization of the Society into a network of meetings helped to transform it from a loose and somewhat incoherent movement into a more well ordered sect. A shared discipline provided rules which all Quakers everywhere were expected to observe and follow if they were to remain Friends. A cadre of activists called public or traveling Friends circulated among far-flung Quaker settlements and performed a variety of unifying, linking functions. Likewise, the practice of writing regularly to each other assisted Friends in maintaining unity over distance. Epistolary correspondence among Quakers began early. George Fox, with his characteristic intensity and energy, wrote letters almost continuously, even from jail. His writings not only enlarged his influence but also provided some focus to the Quaker movement in its infancy. By the time of his death in 1691 the society had institutionalized regular communication among many of its scattered meetings.1 Epistolary correspondence served Friends and their society in several ways. It reiterated and reinforced the established tenets of Quakerism and introduced new applications of traditional ideology ?Howard Beeth is a member of the history department of Texas Southern University, did his doctoral research in southern Quaker history and is an authority in that field. 1 . For information about the early development of the Society in its historic homeland, see Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England (New York: Yale University Press, 1964); William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (London; Macmillan and Company, 1919), Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Seeker and Warburg 1964); Arnold Loyd, Quaker Social History, 1669-1738 (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1950), and Richard T. Vann., The Social Development ofEnglish Quakerism, 1665-1755 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). For the evolution of the society in the emergent South, see Stephen B. Weeks Southern Quakers and Slavery: A Study in Institutional History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1896) and Howard Beeth, Outside Agitators in Southern History: The Society of Friends, 1656-1800 (Ph.D. diss., University of Houston, 1984). For local studies in the South, see Kenneth Lane Carroll , Quakerism on the Eastern Shore (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society , 1970) plus many essays he has published, mostly in Quaker History and 108 Epistolary Correspondence in the Emergent South 109 for consideration and discussion. By maintaining written contact Friends pooled their resources and provided each other with advice, guidance, and assistance. Epistles carried news and circulated information throughout the distant reaches of the society. In times of persecution letters from distant meetings conveyed inspiration, encouragement, and support to those who suffered. At the same time, knowledge that their brethren elsewhere endured hardship provided a useful reminder to Friends living in more tolerant climes that their mission to reform society could earn them the violent enmity of influential sections of that society. Sending and receiving epistles thus broadened the horizons of Quakers everywhere. Regular correspondence helped the society to maintain an international perspective that corresponded to its transcendent, international mission. Letters and epistles flowed in every direction within the society. Yearly meetings, at the highest administrative level of the society, were the principal authors and recipients of epistles. They sent general letters annually and on special occasions to their subordinate meetings. Their annual epistles summarized the answers to the queries supplied by the subordinate meetings and provided a composite overview of the state of the yearly meetings at large during the preceeding year. The annual epistles also contained news of larger, more general developments, including copies and extracts of epistles received from other yearly meetings, particularly those of London and Philadelphia. Standing committees, such as the meeting for sufferings established by yearly meetings during their annual sessions to administer the affairs of the society until the next annual session, likewise corresponded regularly with local meetings as well as with meetings in...

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 158 break new ground but summarizes an arcane ritual ably in lively prose. She traces the racial politics of Mardi Gras and illuminates the rituals of class and genealogy that underpin the debutantes’ experience. George Bernard Shaw once observed that “the great secret” did not lie in having either good or bad manners, “but having the same manner for all human souls; in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.” By this definition, no reader of these essays will ever confuse the American South with Heaven. PAMELA TYLER University of Southern Mississippi Two Alabama Historians Write Alabama History: Honoring Robert David Ward. Edited by William Warren Rogers. Tallahassee, Fl.: Sentry Press, 2008. xiv, 134 pp. $20.00. ISBN 978-1-889574-32-5. In 2006, Alabama lost one of its eminent historians, Robert David Ward, a native of Montevallo who spent his entire professional life at Georgia Southern University. Over the course of these years, Professor Ward often collaborated with his friend, historian Bill Rogers, who spent his teaching years at Florida State University. The two had met in graduate school at Auburn University (then the Alabama Polytechnic Institute ) in September 1950. Beyond American history, they had much in common—including being avid tennis players. Their close friendship lasted until David’s death. Their attempt at coauthoring articles began with a weekly column in the Auburn student newspaper, The Plainsman. Ward and Rogers both pursued their doctoral studies in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—David studying twentiethcentury American history and Bill working in southern history, specializing in the post–Civil War and Reconstruction periods. Over the next half century, the two historians worked on research projects that resulted in six books and ten articles. This volume contains six of the essays they coauthored and one that Ward wrote alone. All have appeared in print except the one essay they were working on when Ward died in April 2006. That essay was about a personal quarrel between Alabama historian John Witherspoon DuBose and William O. Robbins, the warden of the state penitentiary at Wetumpka. There was a bitter and unusual feud, a little gem of history that Ward and Rogers discovered during research for their book on Alabama’s response to the penitentiary movement, 1829–1865. A P R I L 2 0 0 9 159 The essays in Two Alabama Historians are eclectic, with the only thread being the collaboration of Rogers and Ward. The essays cover topics as varied as Oscar’s Wilde’s 1882 visit to Alabama, a Civil War era story of Mississippi prisoners in the Alabama penitentiary, and two essays that deal with convict leasing in Alabama coal mines. One of their most in- fluential essays was on Jack Turner that appeared in the October 1972 Journal of Negro History. This introduction to Turner (“‘Jack Turnerism’: A Political Phenomenon of the Deep South”) was followed by a wellreceived book, August Reckoning: Jack Turner and Racism in Post–Civil War Alabama (Baton Rouge, 1973). David Ward had a special skill and a talent for writing and selecting the precise and best word, a result of having a mother who was an English professor at the University of Montevallo. He was at his best writing broad and general introductions or summations that captured the essence and the nuances of any topic. One of his finest was the short essay “Alabama Past and Future” that was the final chapter of Alabama: The History of a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa, 1994). It is fitting that this essay concludes the chapters in this volume, and David Ward’s sole authorship is recognized publicly for the first time. This volume allows one interested in Alabama history to have quick and easy access to a small collection of essays that are significant to the interpretation of the state’s past, and permits those who have followed the writing contributions of Rogers and Ward to read and review some of their finest work. LEAH RAWLS...

Reviewed by: Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum Southby Damian Alan Pargas Charles Vincent Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South. By Damian Alan Pargas. Cambridge Studies on the American South. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 281. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-107-65896-7; cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-1-107-03121-0.) Damian Alan Pargas has produced a valuable volume on the many aspects of the forced migration of enslaved people in the antebellum South. Forced migration took three forms: trade from older southern states of the Atlantic seaboard to other areas, local movement and moving about in rural areas, and being hired out to the city. In this well-crafted volume, Pargas poses vital questions and provides documented answers. How did American slaves experience forced migration? How did they get along with other slaves? How did they negotiate their removal and rebuild their lives while contending with the “consequences of forced migrations for identity formation” (p. 3)? With a map of the domestic slave trade, pictures, and impressive documentation, this volume uses a comparative perspective “juxtaposing and contrasting the experiences of long-distance, local, and urban slave migrants” (p. 3). One argument Pargas makes is that no southern slave owner was truly committed to paternalism but rather acted out of “financial self-interest” (p. 258). In chapter 1 the author observes that “between 1820 and 1860, at least 875,000 slaves were forcibly removed from the Upper South,” causing the enslaved population in Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama to increase by 68 percent and leading to a cotton boom after the invention of the cotton gin and a sugar revolution in Louisiana (p. 19). New Orleans became the South’s largest slave market. Owners sold or hired out slaves for reasons as varied as personal dislike, to cover up illicit affairs, to rid themselves of recalcitrant slaves, and to alleviate their own economic [End Page 926]indebtedness. Some of those sold had to endure the inhumanity of inspections and probing at the auction blocks, slave pens, and jails and being taken overland and by sea routes to various locations. Chapter 2 discusses how they reacted to the prospect of relocation, resisted or negotiated the terms of their relocation, and the organizational aspects of forced migration. Slaves preferred local over interstate moves, because they feared family separation and the reputation of the Deep South. The enslaved employed resistance techniques including religious appeals, physical violence, and self-mutilation. Chapter 3 describes the inhumane events that accompanied many forced migrants—slave pens, inferior food, bedbugs, lice, fleas, and sexual exploitation. A few who were hired or sold to urban areas found life a little more bearable. Chapter 4 discusses some of the struggles of learning new work routines and environments. Many forced migrants from the upper South had not seen cotton, and having to learn to pick and cultivate cotton caused slave owners to prefer younger migrants. Cotton was the great equalizer in terms of gender. While harvesting cotton or sugar was more difficult than tobacco, Pargas observes that the belief that upper South slaves were better off than lower South slaves is not true. Chapter 5 asserts that planters’ claims to paternalism and benevolence were inconsistent with the system of slavery and its ideological justification. The conditions of the slaves—housing, food, and clothes—were poor, and corporal punishment was frequent. Chapter 6 and the conclusion are insightful. Posing questions of how slaves experienced transitions and forged new relations, strategies, and identities, Pargas highlights many examples of collective resistance, including marriages among migrants and helping others escape. Worship services created bonds. Illicit visits to loved ones, “courting, marriage, and family formation” were likewise “ways to integrate into slave communities” (p. 240). Helping slaves with tasks, workplace cooperation, and lodging with newcomers also helped make some adjustment bearable. Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum Southhas added greatly to a vital topic. Well documented, this volume should be high on a list of mandatory reading for classes on slavery in the antebellum South, sociology, and southern history in general. Charles Vincent Southern University and A&M College Copyright...