The Historian behind the History: Conversations with Southern Historians ed. by Megan L. Bever, Scott A. Suarez

Abstract

The Historian behind the History: Conversations with Southern Historians. Edited by Megan L. Bever and Scott A. Suarez. Introduction by George C. Rable. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 202. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-1851-2.) The suggestion that might lurk somewhere behind the history they write seems a little jarring in an era when members of the younger set advertise their presence within it, littering conference papers with my and argue. Odd title aside, this valuable volume draws together ten interviews that appeared between 2005 and 2014 in Southern Historian, a journal written and edited by graduate students. The subjects--William W. Freehling, Laura F. Edwards, James M. McPherson, Gary W. Gallagher, Richard J. M. Blackett, J. Mills Thornton III, Dan T. Carter, Theodore Rosengarten, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Pete Daniel--are southern historians in the sense of being scholars of the American South. But they are evenly divided between those born or brought up in the South and those elsewhere. Nativity seems not really to matter in most respects though. Every one of them has changed our minds about the South's struggles and the struggles of southerners. None appears inclined by their origins either to be more gentle or more fierce in approaching their subjects. But, not surprisingly, the native southerners seem to have had a more visceral introduction to their subjects. For example, Thornton grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott, learning early that local events participated in a broader history, one he became determined to track. It was very clear to me that the world was being changed by folks I passed on the sidewalk every day, he said (p. 121). Gilmore, who said she was raised as a white supremacist, saw the sit-in movement erupt in her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina, and thought, Everything that I thought was true and forever was under siege (p. 166). Carter had his epiphany at age twelve, seeing a young African American girl bawled out by a white bus driver for sitting up front. The nonsoutherners, by contrast, seem to have arrived at their lives' work by more roundabout routes. The interviewers ask questions about subject matter and craft that any of us might pose. How did Freehling light upon the subject of nullification? How did Rosengarten get along with the family of Ned Cobb, the protagonist of his epic book All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York, 1974)? …