Reviewed by: Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South by Timothy J. Williams Patrick J. Doyle Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South. By Timothy J. Williams. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [xviii], 284. Paper, $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-1839-5.) “Most standard narratives of American higher education depict antebellum southern colleges as crucibles of an elite regional identity, where young men learned to be gentlemen and southerners above all else,” writes Timothy J. Williams (p. 1). In this thoughtful book Williams challenges this supposition, refusing to construe college education in the pre–Civil War South as a simple crash course in sectional, proslavery ideology. By focusing on the University of North Carolina and the men who attended it between 1795 and 1861, Williams seeks instead to probe the intellectual culture of the institution and how its students made sense of college life. In doing so, the book makes three broad, interconnected claims. First, Williams argues that higher education for southern white men was far more about “the transition from boyhood to manhood” than about strengthening their “regional identity” (p. 2). Second, this emphasis on personal development encouraged students to focus intensely on the self as a way of interpreting the world around them. Third, this self-centric worldview “was consistent with middle-class or bourgeois” values that encouraged personal ambition and self-improvement (p. 2). The ideological linchpin, according to Williams, is the notion of intellectual manhood. Intellectual manhood, a term that was used by antebellum college students, graduates, and teaching staff, was often seen as the key attribute one should acquire from university education. Indeed, this process of maturation was intended to give men mastery over their temperaments and impulses, making them independent, restrained, and thoughtful citizens. [End Page 158] In doing so, the acquisition of intellectual manhood legitimated the South’s social hierarchies because “the more grown up a young man became, the closer he approached intellectual manhood, and the more he ascended the South’s class and racial hierarchy” (p. 8). The book’s structure, which moves from detailed analysis of the university curriculum, to the students’ more independent learning activities, and finally to the University of North Carolina’s debate societies, critically assesses the idealization, construction, and application of intellectual manhood. This conception of intellectual manhood is the signal contribution of this book to our understanding of the antebellum white South and its intellectual culture. Williams does not simply recapitulate the conclusions of those scholars who have explored the construction of male gender ideals in the pre–Civil War South; instead, he refines them. He argues, “The transition from boyhood to manhood was the most important and pervasive feature of education for young men” (p. 205). Additionally, “While southern males took various routes to become men, those who chose to attend college sought more than what we consider manliness or masculinity; they sought mental maturity, or what contemporaries called intellectual manhood” (p. 205). Yet this quotation also alludes to a limitation of this book—its insularity. Williams certainly does a great job giving the reader a vivid depiction of both college life at Chapel Hill in the antebellum period and what this educational experience meant to the men who attended the university. But, outside the college, how did people react to these men? In particular, how did their families, friends, and neighbors, many of whom would not have gone to college, react to these claims of manliness rooted in a newfound intellectual maturity? A more thorough probing of the relationship between these men, their wider communities, and southern society would have enriched this book. In all, Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South is a deeply researched and highly interesting contribution to the scholarship on education, gender, and intellectual culture in the antebellum South. Williams persuasively demonstrates that when these men left the University of North Carolina they often took with them the distinct set of values that were enshrined within intellectual manhood. Patrick J. Doyle Royal Holloway, University of London Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association