Louisiana State University Press Research Articles

American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era ed. by Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon and Laura Mammina

Reviewed by: American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era ed. by Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon and Laura Mammina Katherine E. Rohrer (bio) American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era. Edited by Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon, and Laura Mammina. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. 304. Cloth, $50.00.) George C. Rable, professor emeritus at the University of Alabama, left an indelible mark on the fields of southern and Civil War history. American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era offers a collection of essays as thematically diverse as the work produced by the contributors’ mentor. Editors Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon, and Laura Mammina have assembled an insightful and engaging volume that seeks to honor, yet expand upon, Rable’s eclectic scholarship, which spans military, political, religious, and gender history. The volume likewise captures Rable’s emphasis on the agency of everyday people. In the editors’ words, “All of these scholarly inquiries begin with the premise that ordinary human beings and their experiences matter—that the dynamics among family, friends, and enemies have not only local consequences but often sweeping national consequences as well” (3). The collection of fifteen essays is divided into three loosely chronological sections, exploring the sectional crisis, the war, and Reconstruction. The editors center each of these sections on a unifying topic: part 1 on “party politics and political culture,” part 2 on “political and military conflicts,” and part 3 on “Reconstruction and counterrevolution.” The four essays included in part 1 collectively reveal Americans, particularly northerners, to be disinterested in political compromise as they entered the 1860s. For example, Bever explores northern temperance reformers who, at the time of the 1860 presidential election, argued that intemperance was a national sin more threatening than chattel slavery and more pressing than even the secession crisis. Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. considers the crucial yet understudied role of newspaper advertisements in shaping public opinion. Americans widely read advertisements in the mid-nineteenth century, and partisan merchants in the North found effective ways to associate their products with politics. They exploited a new market for politically themed badges, biographies, and lithographs. Continuing the theme of political division, Christian McWhirter analyzes popular songs by northerners and southerners, Democrats and Republicans, written about Abraham Lincoln both before and after his 1865 assassination. Next, the six essays included in part 2 build on the previous section’s theme of internal conflict, particularly as it relates to issues of law, race, environment, and gender. Lindsay Rae Privette considers the role that contaminated water and dehydration played for both Union and Confederate troops during the siege of Vicksburg. Using an environmental [End Page 440] lens, Privette concludes that the inability to access safe drinking water not only was debilitating to soldier health, but also contributed to the consequential Confederate defeat at Vicksburg. Mammina offers an insightful analysis of the relationships forged between four Union soldiers and four southern women, Black and white, elite and nonelite. Mammina argues that all eight expressed a strong preference for domesticity. In her words, “This adherence to domesticity even in the turbulence of war reveals that this idea—with its emphasis on the patriarchal control of male heads of household, the duty of a husband to support and protect his family, the woman’s control over household matters, and the obedience and service that a wife owed to her husband—was intimately linked to ideas of political power” (165). Charity Rakestraw and Kristopher A. Teters focus on the little-known experiences of Black female refugees in Union camps. The coauthors ascribe significant agency to these women, maintaining that they actively controlled their own fates in an uncertain environment and with virtually no leverage. In 1984, Rable published But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction, which rejects the preexisting scholarship contending that Americans had failed to remedy the nation’s sin of slavery and racial discrimination. In contrast, Rable argues that Reconstruction did offer a radical agenda, one that prompted white southerners to respond via violent counterrevolution. The five essays included in part 3...

First Chaplain of the Confederacy: Father Darius Hubert, S.J. by Katherine Bentley Jeffrey

Reviewed by: First Chaplain of the Confederacy: Father Darius Hubert, S.J. by Katherine Bentley Jeffrey Gracjan Kraszewski First Chaplain of the Confederacy: Father Darius Hubert, S.J. By Katherine Bentley Jeffrey. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. 200 pp. $45.00. The first question that should be posed to author Katherine Bentley Jeffrey is why? Why write this book? Surrounding her work's central character—the Jesuit priest Darius Hubert, Civil War chaplain for the Confederacy—there exists an admitted paucity of primary sources. Why tell his story? Three pages into this excellent biography the answer is clear: because other scholars have become discouraged by problems of extant material, or intimidated by a subject's lack of star power, the vicious cycle of historiographical Catholic absence in the antebellum South has been perpetuated. From this, false assumptions emerge that Catholics were not present in the nineteenth-century South. If nothing else, Jeffrey has successfully joined the fight to remedy this problem. Fortunately for us readers, there is so much more here. Told chronologically following an opening vignette from February 1880, where Hubert, who was noted for his oratorical ability, commemorated George Washington's birthday with a speech, the story begins in France, where a procession honoring a relic of St. Augustine of Hippo inspired a priestly vocation. Young Darius joined the Jesuits and volunteered for the North American mission. Ordained in 1850, he spent much of that tumultuous decade as an educator in Louisiana Catholic schools where his polyglot abilities and affable character won him wide respect and admiration. Civil War scholars will find chapter four most interesting. It details Hubert's war years as a chaplain in the Army of Northern Virginia. It is here we find the strongest evidence for Jeffrey's claim that some considered Hubert to be "a perfect man" (xii, 77). Hubert did not shirk from the dangers of battle, bore the war's hardships and privations next to his men, was indefatigable in his care for the sick and wounded placing a man's spiritual considerations first, and was indiscriminately gracious to men Protestant, Catholic, and other. Hubert's postbellum record was marked by service rather than Lost Cause fanaticism. In [End Page 86] 1876, he travelled to Savannah to help with a yellow fever outbreak. A medallion he received afterwards from the Savannah Benevolent Association, with Matthew 25:36 inscribed thereon, remained one of his few cherished possessions. Father Hubert died in 1893, convinced, according to Jeffrey, of "the obligation to move forward as one people in a reunited nation" (139). This is a good book with much in it, biography done right, best suited for the graduate school seminar. It sheds light on Catholics in the Civil War, race relations in the Reconstruction South, and offers many an interesting anecdote, Margaret Gaffney Haughery's "Steam and Mechanical Bakery" but one example, illuminating the richness and variety of Southern Catholic life. But if there is a singular thesis here, an overarching theme and contribution, it is the brilliant way in which Jeffrey demonstrates Catholic acceptance and importance in nineteenth-century Southern culture. Catholics were not marginal members of Southern society but active, respected, and even admired citizens, Hubert but one such person. The best example of Hubert's seamless assimilation into Southern life comes from an article in the Baton Rouge Gazette in December 1858. Despite opining that "we are the antagonists of all his religious views," the paper was forced to admit that Hubert had "won golden opinions from all sorts of people," citing "his gentlemanly deportment as a citizen" and "kind ministrations to the sick and the afflicted during the late epidemic " and that "the most eloquent, impressive, and logical discourse we have ever listened to under the roof of St. Joseph's came from his lips" (35). While one can find themes of Catholic integration in Southern society in works such as Michael Pasquier's Fathers on the Frontier or Jon Wakelyn and Randall Miller's classic Catholics in the Old South, Jeffrey's book is a natural companion to Andrew Stern's Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross. What Stern shows concerning Catholic-Protestant cooperation in the antebellum era...

Dixie's Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South by Jessica Barbata Jackson

Reviewed by: Dixie's Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South by Jessica Barbata Jackson Tina A. Irvine Dixie's Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South. By Jessica Barbata Jackson. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. xvi, 238. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7172-1.) Standing on the shoulders of scholars James R. Barrett, David R. Roediger, and Thomas Guglielmo, historian Jessica Barbata Jackson shows that the concepts of Italian Americans as "white on arrival" and as a so-called inbetween people are insufficient for understanding that group's racial and citizenship status in the Gulf South (p. 7). Arguing that Italian Americans moved and were moved back and forth across the color line in that region between 1870 and 1920, Jackson offers a new term—"racial transiency"—for analyzing the group's shifting racialization and access to citizenship in the Jim Crow era (p. 8). Through chronological case studies examining the regional media's relatively neutral attitude toward Italian immigration before 1890, the lynching of eleven Italian Americans to purportedly preserve white supremacy in 1891, efforts to privilege Italian voters while disenfranchising African Americans in 1898, struggles over Sicilian children's place in white schools in 1907, and miscegenation disputes in 1921, Jackson demonstrates the instability of the group's racialization in those years. She also concludes, similarly to the scholars who came before her, that Italian Americans in the Gulf South were increasingly understood as white citizens by the mid-1920s, as politicians and laypeople worked to solidify a binary color line. Jackson's book provides a much-needed look into the Italian American experience in the South, as previous scholarship has often focused on the urban North. She is clear that her narrative—centered primarily on Sicilian immigrants in the Gulf South—is not indicative of Italians' experience outside the region but is nevertheless useful in understanding the complexities of the Jim Crow system. Observing that studies of the South are "usually told as a story of the black/white color line," Jackson contends that her book "is also an immigration story" (p. 6). She demonstrates the vagaries of southern ideas about race, immigration, and citizenship well, examining a wide range of New Orleans newspapers, including Italian-language and African American sources, in addition to court rulings and church, census, and marriage records in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Chapter 5, which explores how courts at times deemed Sicilians and other Italians as "'white' enough to unproblematically marry other 'white' Italians but racially ambiguous enough that their relationship with a black individual did not automatically prove miscegenation," is particularly strong methodologically (p. 140). Scrutinizing white, Black, and Italian southerners' marriage records and their children's subsequent racialization in the census, this chapter best reveals what Jackson calls "the crucial character of context" (p. 13). This phrase refers to her findings that Italians' ascribed and self-promoted color, race, and civic allegiance varied in time and space. Italian immigrants were sometimes criminalized for their Italian-ness or perceived nonwhiteness and sometimes not; they sometimes presented themselves as white Americans and on other occasions passed as persons of color; and their children were at times denied access to white schools because of economic competition and growing nativism. [End Page 353] Jackson's overarching argument is well reasoned, although the case-study format somewhat limits the author's ability to show change over time. Each chapter convincingly illuminates sites of Italian Americans' racialization and proves that the categorization process was neither binary nor static in the years critical to Jim Crow's formation. The book could be clearer, though, in emphasizing how the economic and political concerns of state and local actors—including Italians and their descendants—eventually shaped American understandings of the group as uniformly white. Jackson notes several instances when court decisions, media reports, and rumors expedited or derailed that trajectory, but the book could do more to show how these venues increasingly favored an interpretation of Italians as white citizens. The transition years from Italians' "racial transiency" to their position as firmly ensconced white Americans, in short, remain murky. That is a small quibble, though, for...

The Battle of the Wilderness in Myth and Memory: Reconsidering Virginia’s Most Notorious Civil War Battlefield by Adam H. Petty

Reviewed by: The Battle of the Wilderness in Myth and Memory: Reconsidering Virginia’s Most Notorious Civil War Battlefield by Adam H. Petty Angela M. Riotto (bio) The Battle of the Wilderness in Myth and Memory: Reconsidering Virginia’s Most Notorious Civil War Battlefield. By Adam H. Petty. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. 208. Cloth, $42.00.) Arguing that historians of the American Civil War have provided few focused analyses of the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, Adam Petty offers this military-environmental history of the region and the Civil War battles that occurred there, including Chancellorsville (April–May 1863), Mine Run (November–December 1863), and the Wilderness (May 1864). Identifying the gap in the scholarship, Petty reconsiders traditional interpretations of the Wilderness environment, especially how it affected military operations and combat. Furthermore, unlike other traditional histories, this one examines the changing memory of the interaction between military and environmental factors. To provide a more comprehensive history of the Battle of the Wilderness, Petty begins by identifying what he terms the “Wilderness myth” (x), a set of prevailing arguments emphasizing the dense forest vegetation, [End Page 119] the area’s uniqueness and mystique, and Confederate superiority within the terrain. Petty traces the conception of the myth to 1864 and William Swinton, a wartime correspondent for the New York Times. Shortly after the battle’s conclusion, Swinton published a report detailing its setting and the environmental obstacles within it. Petty contends that Swinton’s conclusions laid the foundation for professional historians’ assessments of the battle, and thus the Wilderness myth. In both his 1864 article and his 1866 Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, Swinton claimed that it was a horrific engagement that occurred in a unique forest. Moreover, Swinton reasoned, because of the advantages the Confederate army enjoyed in the Wilderness, General Robert E. Lee planned to fight there. Petty thus credits Swinton with the creation of a singular and much-replicated campaign narrative. After tracing the origins of the Wilderness myth, Petty explicates the five main tenets of the myth for his readers. First, the Wilderness was a nearly unbroken forest composed of thick, second-growth trees and underbrush. Second, the Wilderness’s extraordinary—perhaps even supernatural—characteristics imposed certain conditions on military actions, such as the inability to see for any distance, properly maneuver or maintain a battle line, and profitably employ artillery and cavalry. Third, the Wilderness exuded a mystique associated with death, destruction, fire, and hell. Fourth, because of the Confederates’ alleged superior knowledge of the region and the forest’s diminishing effect on Union military superiority, the Confederates excelled in combat. Fifth, Lee purposefully trapped the Federals in the woods to exploit these advantages. Petty uses the five elements of the myth to organize the chapters of his book. As a traditional environmental history, chapter 1 reconsiders the ecology and origins of the Wilderness. Petty argues that, contrary to the more familiar descriptions, the Wilderness was not a monolithic forest, but a patchwork. Chapter 2 merges environmental history with memory studies to analyze the oft-repeated notion that the Battle of the Wilderness was a unique engagement because of the environment in which it was fought. Comparing this action to both Chancellorsville and Chickamauga, Petty reveals that the battles of the Wilderness and Chancellorsville, which took place over the same terrain, were not the twins that many historians imply them to be. Rather, the Wilderness of Spotsylvania shared many similarities with the Chickamauga battlefield, and the Battle of the Wilderness was just one manifestation of the tactical problems that Civil War armies faced when operating in a forested region. Chapter 3 presents a more traditional memory study. Drawing on soldiers’ letters and diaries, Petty dissects the [End Page 120] mystique surrounding the Wilderness. Given the chaos of battle and the fires that consumed wounded and dead alike, Petty assesses that it is no surprise that individuals have described the Wilderness as a malevolent landscape associated with death, devastation, fire, and the supernatural. In chapter 4, Petty relies on conventional military histories, such as those written by Earl Hess, to reject the notion that the Confederates had an advantage in the Wilderness. In Chapter...

Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley (review).

Reviewed by: Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley Gregory A. Hargreaves (bio) Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation By Michael S. Frawley. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. 195. Down in Dixie (the southern United States) they did things differently. Or did they? Twentieth century historians, from Ulrich B. Philips to Eugene Genovese, argued that industrialization was incompatible with the antebellum (pre-Civil War) Southern economy of enslavement. Misled by the comparative scale of Northern industrial capital, or convinced of the essential backwardness of slavery, they wondered, where were the mills and mines, the foundries and factories of the slave South? Michael S. Frawley insists that, in fact, they were everywhere. In his concise reassessment of Southern industrialization, Frawley demonstrates how incomplete data and generations of misinterpretation have clouded our perception of the scope and significance of antebellum Southern industry. Marshalling new evidence and methods, he argues that industrial concerns in Gulf Coast states were more numerous than previously documented, and that industry and manufacturing were not aberrations but "firmly integrated" into the landscape and society of the antebellum South. In so doing, Frawley contributes to a growing body of scholarship that places the capitalist economy of enslavement in the mainstream of United States history—and debunks the myth of the Lost Cause. Frawley defines his study area as three Gulf Coast states: Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. Historians of technology may take interest in this geographical choice. Antebellum industry in the Upper South is comparatively well attested in the scholarship; this book breaks new ground in the less-familiar Deep South. The close association of this region with cotton monoculture has obscured its early industrialization. Frawley's portrait of [End Page 1289] industry in the Gulf South would be familiar to those who have studied contemporary industry in the Northeast or Midwest: urban and rural manufacturing, water- and steam-powered processing of food and fiber crops, and extraction and processing of primary materials, laced together by a system of riverine and railroad transportation. By 1860, the three-state region possessed 1,922 miles of railroad and employed around 20,000 manufacturing workers. Plantation capitalists invested in textile milling to convert the region's cotton staple into finished goods. Coal mining and iron production marked their move toward heavier industry, and Alabama served as the focus of the Gulf South iron and coal complex. In terms of scale, Southern industry ca. 1860 was on par with Northern industry ca. 1850, a significant gap, but one that shows the regions shared a developmental trajectory. Frawley frowns upon direct comparisons between North and South, since it has led prior scholars to overlook Southern industrialization, but his work demonstrates that technical and economic development in the antebellum Deep South was part of the United States mainstream. Rather than compare it with the North, Frawley prefers to measure the Southern industrial base against the mythologized belief in an entirely agrarian antebellum South. It is notoriously difficult to combat myths with data, but Frawley does useful work when he tracks Southern apologists creating the myth of a pastoral South through generations of Lost Cause obfuscation. Architects of the Lost Cause myth, like Edward Alfred Pollard, explained away battlefield losses by imagining a pastoral Confederacy steamrolled by an industrial Union. Prior to the war, however, Southern industrialization had advanced sufficiently to support four years of fighting. Slavery introduced no significant barriers to capital-intensive industrialization. The purpose of slavery was to create reserves of inexpensive labor, a key factor in industrial production. As Frawley demonstrates, Gulf South locations with high capital investment in enslaved people also had high capital investment in manufacturing and industry. Enslaved workers built railroads, mined ores, and toiled on factory floors. Specialists may not need this reminder, but the continuing influence of the Lost Cause myth in American politics makes Frawley's autopsy valuable. The most appealing aspects of this book are Frawley's meticulous attention to sources and innovative methods. Prior scholars relied heavily upon the 1860 Census manufacturing schedules, which Frawley found to be incomplete in his study area. Combining census data with information from...

Caught in the Fog

Caught in the Fog Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) Time for Bed Wendy Rawlings Louisiana State University Press www.lsupress.org/books/detail/time-for-bed/ 200 Pages; Print, $24.95 The women in Wendy Rawlings's third book act in a fog, and men occasionally appear through it. This is not to say that John Berger's axiom about gender roles is wholly reversed in Rawlings's work. All initiative and priority are not handed off wholesale to the female point of view. But the characters populating these thirteen stories, which range from military men, plus-size women, illegal immigrants from Ireland and the women who love them, have somehow forgotten how to conduct themselves. Their world has been upended by violence—mass shootings, the 9/11 terrorist attacks—and the resulting wounds have been coated over with consumerism. With their simplest implements of communication dulled, they stumble through relationships and careers, only to find themselves wherever they last left off: most of the time alone or with responsibilities they can't quite fathom. If they manage to connect, and only connect, their bonds, however temporary, rank as miracles or religious events. This theme, though loosely assembled, is sometimes stated directly, sometimes implicitly. The first story, "Coffins for Kids," is heartbreakingly upfront about the loss a mother experiences when her daughter is killed in a Sandy Hook-style shooting. But the damage done to the culture—indeed, the language—by capitalism, terrorism, and Second Amendment-ism also is vividly portrayed in other pieces, such as "Outlandish Plot": an American woman and an Irishman are having a thing. A what? A thing. He's married—that makes it a thing. If he weren't married, it might be a romance; it might be the most fulfilling blah-blah either of them has known … something blooms between them. A thing. What words cannot describe is dealt with through self-punishing behaviors, psychologically and, eventually, physically. It would be bleak, if it weren't sometimes funny and insightful. Rawlings is as deft chronicler of her characters' inner monologues as she is of their exterior circumstances. While she does not excuse their bad behavior, she does put their foibles into context. Such is the case in "Tics," which succinctly demonstrates the new normal. A pair of stepsiblings in a recently blended family embarks on an affair that could be scandalous, even ruinous. But their affair is no stranger than the recent conversion of one sibling to the Church of Ladder Day Saints and another sibling's to Scientology. That the mother of one set of siblings is with a woman, rather than another man, barely seems worth mentioning. Rawlings accomplishes several tasks in this story, within the tale itself and for the collection as a whole. She bravely makes one of the affair's participants someone with Tourette's syndrome: "There's something a little bit wrong with Glen," the narrator dares to think to herself. "At regular intervals, he twitches, and there's an accompanying click in his throat he doesn't seem to be able to control. … I would ask my father, but I'm threequarters sure he hasn't noticed anything unusual about Glen." Glen, it turns out, doesn't notice his tics either, though he acknowledges they might drive other people "crazy." Yet he has adapted, as too many people have, no matter how horrifying their circumstances. The narrator also adapts, as will her two families when necessary. What were once tics, disturbing blips, or warnings that society has begun to circle the drain, have become minor conveniences. Sometimes, they are endearing. On other occasions, they're dispiriting. Glen is one of two young men in the collection who specialize in wearing oxford cloth shirts. The other is Ron, a college student in "Love During Wartime." This may seem a mundane, even throwaway detail, but it speaks to what people have left to steady their vision when wartime looks and feels much like peacetime, except when it doesn't. Something inexorably changed after 9/11 for the Alabama professors and students in this tale, but no one can quite say what it is. "It was a ritual by...

National Narratives and the Colonial Politics of Historiography

National Narratives and the Colonial Politics of Historiography Rochelle Raineri Zuck (bio) Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel elizabeth fenton New York University Press, 2020 272 pp. Mourning the Nation to Come: Creole Nativism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature jillian j. sayre Louisiana State University Press, 2019 264 pp. Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing edward watts University of Virginia Press, 2020 292 pp. Many scholars have highlighted the role that literature plays in the development and maintenance of collective national identities. Benedict Anderson famously defined the nation as an "imagined political community," the rise of which was linked to the development of print capitalism, which allowed disparate individuals, separated by space and time, to see themselves simultaneously as part of such an imagined community (6).1 Important work in literary studies has since focused on the development of "national narratives" (to borrow Jonathan Arac's term) and how such narratives allowed individuals in what had been loosely confederated colonies to imagine themselves as citizens of the United States.2 Key examples include Priscilla Wald's Constituting Americans (Duke UP, 1995), David Waldstreicher's In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes (UNC P, 2012), Robert [End Page 907] Levine's Dislocating Race and Nation (UNC P, 2009), and Jonathan Arac's The Emergence of the American Literary Narrative (Harvard UP, 2005). Waldstreicher in particular attunes us to the way the ascendance of certain national narratives is predicated on the collective forgetting or active suppression of other stories: "The nation' is never just an idea or a thing; it is also a story, an encompassing narrative or set of narratives with the potential to crowd out other narratives that may have rather different political implications" (142). Throughout the process of nation-making in the "New World," some stories have gained traction while others have been "crowd[ed] out" or suppressed. A trio of recently published works—Jillian J. Sayre's Mourning the Nation to Come (2019), Edward Watts's Colonizing the Past (2020), and Elizabeth Fenton's Old Canaan in a New World (2020)—attends to these national narratives and, through their engagement with issues of temporality, reminds us that such stories exist in time and, particularly in the context of settler colonialism, participate in the creation of an organizing temporal logic that positions readers as national citizens in time. These three impressive works of scholarship not only engage important currents in the field such as the transnational and temporal "turns" but also model a hermeneutic that reveals how some of the most trenchant national narratives positioned readers as participants in an unfolding national temporality informed by both sacred and secular understandings of history. Mourning the Nation to Come, Colonizing the Past, and Old Canaan in a New World explore the ways European colonists and their descendants crafted national narratives through the retelling or co-optation of histories (sacred and secular) so as to advance their colonial aims and subvert the territorial sovereignty of Indigenous Americans. They attend to the stories that gained prominence as settler nations were formed in the Americas and those that were ignored, reconfigured, and/or suppressed. All three of these works, to varying degrees, engage Anderson's work as part of their explorations of collective fantasies that sought to resolve the tensions between the settler status of Europeans in the Americas and their desire to claim territorial sovereignty by presenting themselves as somehow "indigenous" to the lands they sought to colonize. These works offer fresh perspectives on literary expressions of the Vanishing Indian trope by emphasizing that the ways narratives of Indigenous "vanishing" circulated alongside (and were informed by) recovery projects that sought to produce histories [End Page 908] that could be put in service of the colonial project. In addition to the Vanishing Indian trope, there are other points of connection between these works, and, to an extent, they consider some of the same primary source materials, including the "Lost Tribe" theory of American Indian origins, the Mound Builders, the Book of Mormon and other Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) writings, historical romances like those of James Fenimore Cooper, and...

Review: Free and Natural: Nudity and the American Cult of the Body, by Sarah Schrank

Book Review| October 30 2020 Review: Free and Natural: Nudity and the American Cult of the Body, by Sarah Schrank Free and Natural: Nudity and the American Cult of the Body. By Sarah Schrank (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019, 288 pp., $39.95 hardcover). Stephen L. Harp Stephen L. Harp Stephen L. Harp is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Akron and author of Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014) and Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Southern California Quarterly (2020) 102 (4): 459–461. https://doi.org/10.1525/scq.2020.102.4.459 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Stephen L. Harp; Review: Free and Natural: Nudity and the American Cult of the Body, by Sarah Schrank. Southern California Quarterly 30 October 2020; 102 (4): 459–461. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/scq.2020.102.4.459 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentSouthern California Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The Historical Society of Southern California. All rights reserved.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuba Fight for Freedom and Equality 1812–1912. Edited by Aisha Finch and Fannie Rushing (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2019) 340 pp. $55.00

<i>Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuba Fight for Freedom and Equality 1812–1912</i>. Edited by Aisha Finch and Fannie Rushing (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2019) 340 pp. $55.00

Michael W. Fitzgerald, Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 464. $47.76 (cloth).

Michael W. Fitzgerald, <i>Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South</i>. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 464. $47.76 (cloth).

American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832-1863, by Peter O’Connor

Reviewed by: American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863 by Peter O’Connor Christopher Hanlon (bio) American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863, by Peter O’Connor; pp. x + 268. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017, $47.95. Peter O’Connor arranges American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863 between two methodological insights. The first is historical and relates to O’Connor’s understanding that British apprehension of the American Civil War cannot be understood through reference to 1861–65 alone, because sectional discord in the United States and British perception of it evolved over the course of decades. The second insight is archival, in O’Connor’s decision to reference extensively what he calls “texts by cultural commentators,” a category comprised of texts “not written with the expectation of immediately altering government policy” (4). Though he is also informed, for instance, by politicians’ speeches, O’Connor is especially drawn to writers of travelogues, novels, poems, longform essays, and editorials. Five chapters document the fits and starts of British understanding of American disunion over the course of three decades, when the dominant feeling among Britain’s elite toward the U. S. North was lukewarm. Chapter 1 details British understanding of American slavery and emancipation—in many Victorian minds, an issue shaped by a more complex set of questions than could be reflected in any reductive polarity aligning the South with slavery and the North with freedom. Surveying a series of influential British opinion-makers on the issue of American slavery—ranging from the trenchantly anti-slavery Harriet Martineau and John Robert Godley to lesser-known Southern apologists like Charles Lyell and Matilda Charlotte Houstoun—O’Connor shows the ways in which commentators such as the latter “intend[ed] to highlight the hypocrisy of the free states rather than launch a crusade for racial equality” (35). Chapter 2 explores British views of the ethnic distribution of the United States according to which the South was composed of a British Cavalier culture; the Northeast, a Puritan derivation; [End Page 123] and the mid-Atlantic formed a more ethnically diverse region shaped by immigration. The Puritan/Cavalier dichotomy came to subsume more complex considerations of the ethnic dimension of U. S. sectionalism, though O’Connor never broaches the ways in which this polarity evolved into other sectional discourses in the United States that pitted so-called Southern Normans against Northeastern Saxons. These chapters set the stage for O’Connor’s third and fourth chapters, which take up the core issues at play in British understandings of American sectional strife. These deeply informed explorations of the works of British opinion-makers such as Martineau, Frederick Marryat, Frances and Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray open up the ways in which a series of such writers understood variously the precarious situation of the United States in the aftermath of the nullification crisis, which brought questions over federalism and states’ rights to the forefront of much British commentary. Writers such as Martineau, for instance, recognized the depth of sectional antipathy between North and South and yet viewed the United States as fundamentally cohesive. For many other commentators, questions over the potential endurance of the federal union related to other concerns over the potential for mob rule and despotism in the United States. Abraham Lincoln’s and William Seward’s reputations in Britain as Anglophobes, for example, contributed to such anxieties, as did the Trent affair (during which a Union naval frigate boarded a British merchant vessel in the process of delivering three Confederate ambassadors to Britain). As the Civil War approached, many British commentators sympathized increasingly with what they saw as a more Anglophile, Cavalier South under the yoke of an arrogant North, but O’Connor closes his study describing the process by which British equivocation during the war itself transformed to the detriment of the South. And in an intriguing epilogue, O’Connor describes the transformation of Anglo-American relations in the postbellum period when a new generation of transatlantic thinkers created an atmosphere of rapprochement in which the United States came to be viewed by Britons as a unified and kindred nation that had endured a struggle over...

Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954–1989 by Stephanie R. Rolph

Reviewed by: Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954–1989 by Stephanie R. Rolph Austin C. Zinkle (bio) Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954–1989. By Stephanie R. Rolph. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 237. $48.00 cloth) Literature concerning the mobilized pushback to desegregation and larger right-wing movements responsible for such resistance [End Page 379] continues to grow in interest and popularity among academics and the general readership. Far too few works, however, delve into the specific actions and mobilization of one of the greater organized antagonists to the civil rights movement as directly as Stephanie R. Rolph's Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954–1989. Rolph explores the origins, activism, and, most importantly, the perseverance of the Citizens' Council's philosophies from their founding until their collapse toward the end of the twentieth century. Intending to push the lifespan of the Council far past the conclusion of the freedom movements in the 1960s, Rolph challenges and expands upon previous scholarship on the Council, in particular Neil McMillen's The Citizens' Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–1964 (1971). With chapters dedicated to local growth, political outreach, national allies, and global expansion, Rolph's study of the Citizens' Council is an engaging examination into the resiliency of white resistance and white supremacist organizations, even though it will leave some readers desiring a more thorough national examination of the movement. Resisting Equality is extensively researched, drawing heavily from personal papers, correspondence, newspapers and periodicals, and digital collections. The bulk of the analysis focuses on conservative and anti-civil rights movement activism via information gathered from the weekly television program Citizens' Council Forum. Unlike McMillen's scholarship, which chronicles the Citizens' Council as an organization specifically within the confines of the civil rights movement, Rolph stretches the scope of the project past the civil rights era and into the Reagan administration. Moving beyond just their opposition to school desegregation in the 1950s, the book details how Council members and chapters survived and evolved after the rise of school integration and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. Rolph writes, "the Council recommitted itself to white supremacist ideology (following 1964)," and by the 1970s, members merged with "wider trends of white flight" to better blend in within the larger New Right and conservative movements (pp. 156, 160). [End Page 380] Unfortunately, for something that Rolph deems such a significant change from previous scholarship, all details of post-1964 Councils are unsatisfyingly isolated to a single penultimate chapter of the book. This is not necessarily an issue of a lack of detail—as the chapter does explore the evolution of the organization's support for other causes in the radical Right. Yet, the chapter and what it offers feels less significant than what was advertised in the book's introduction. Despite the book's claims for a larger approach to the history of the Citizens' Council, it is also disappointing that Rolph centers her analysis of the Citizens' Council primarily on their work and activism in Mississippi. While the book does include organizing from other states, and sometimes in great transnational detail in the case of the Council's later interest in South Africa, the frustration around Resisting Equality is how it continues to find itself stuck in Mississippi. This is a bit of a shame, as Rolph tends to make broad claims about the Council's activism, longevity, and national popularity in some chapters, only to follow up with these claims with details coming from a singular Deep South state. Source bases could be a possible explanation for this particular geographical attention, although this is unclear. In fairness, Rolph does recognize and defend this choice as she reminds readers that "Mississippi was (the Citizens' Council's) birthplace and its burial site," and that the state held "the deepest impact of organized defiance" (p. 8). It is just unfortunate that other states do not receive more attention, such as the successor and Atlanta, Georgia, founded Council of Conservative Citizens, as it would enhance her argument of the organization's "adaptability" (p. 187). While there are unsatisfying deficiencies in scope, Resisting Equality...

Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War by Niels Eichhorn

Reviewed by: Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War by Niels Eichhorn Mischa Honeck (bio) Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War. By Niels Eichhorn. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Cloth, $45.00.) “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing,” Abraham Lincoln famously remarked at the opening of the Baltimore Sanitary Fair in April 1864. According to Niels Eichhorn’s new book, this aphorism might have been just as valid had [End Page 563] Lincoln spoken of separatism. In Liberty and Slavery, Eichhorn charts an understudied ideological current that connected violent nation-building projects on both sides of the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic. Too much ink has been spilled on the irreconcilability of liberalism and slavery, the author suggests, while Civil War historians have largely overlooked Euro-American actors who viewed southern secessionism and European separatism as kindred movements. Highlighting the difficulties and contingencies involved in transplanting revolutionary experiences made in one place to nationalist conflicts raging in another, Eichhorn is at his best when he shows that many immigrants forced to choose sides in the U.S. Civil War dreaded centralized modern leviathans as much as they loathed reactionary aristocracies. At its core, Liberty and Slavery is a book about the “other” Forty-Eighters—those participants of the failed European revolutions of the late 1840s and early 1850s who were more concerned with breaking away from oppressive states than with nationalist unification. But it also provides useful orientation in acquainting readers with little-known separatist revolutions that preceded the formation of the southern Confederacy. The first chapter ably sketches a string of tumultuous uprisings in 1830, stressing the common view held by independence seekers in Hungary, Poland, Ireland, and Schleswig-Holstein (less so in the U.S South) that “they were enslaved people who needed liberation” (12). What may sound cynical to modern ears—whites likening themselves to slaves—proved an effective rhetorical tool for secessionists of different origins. The upheavals of 1848, which are the subject of the second chapter, furthered the separatist creed across the North Atlantic world. Justifications for secession and the intensity with which such demands were articulated varied from place to place, and from person to person. Regrettably, the chapter is somewhat elusive on whether these differences were the product of cross-border exchange and adaptation or mainly an outgrowth of local circumstances. Transnationalism occupies a more prominent spot in the ensuing chapters. After briefly retracing the migratory routes of influential European separatists who fled to the United States after 1848, Eichhorn turns to what he calls “antebellum separatist interaction.” The analysis spans from a fresh reading of Lajos Kossuth’s quasi-diplomatic tour in 1851–52 to incisive portrayals of lesser-known exiles such as the Polish radical Adam Gurowski or the Schleswig-Holstein journalist Theodor Olshausen who struggled to adjust their European backgrounds to the increasingly bitter divisions of their host country. Their stance on slavery, Eichhorn argues, ultimately depended on whether they saw white southern leaders as political allies standing on firm constitutional footing or, conversely, as [End Page 564] progenies of Europe’s oppressive nobilities. The fifth and sixth chapters follow these exiled separatists through “America’s separatist revolution” of 1861 and the war that erupted in its wake. Eichhorn’s collective biography approach permits him to illustrate that nationality and ethnicity barely determined immigrant loyalties. Civil War careers like the one of the Polish Novembrist Kapcer Tochman, who offered his services to the Confederacy, disrupt the monolithic image of European revolutionists throwing their unquestioned support behind the Union. In one of the most fascinating episodes, Eichhorn presents the case of Rudolf Schleiden, a revolutionary-turned-diplomat from Schleswig-Holstein who embarked on a passionate yet ultimately quixotic quest in April 1861 to convince Union and Confederate leaders to step back from the brink of war. Throughout the book, Eichhorn makes clear that the immigrants’ “political roots” (11) and their continued reevaluation mattered. Very likely, the separatists’ choice of residence along with the personal and professional relationships they formed in the United States mattered...

Lowcountry at High Tide: A History of Flooding, Drainage, and Reclamation in Charleston, South Carolina by Christina Rae Butler, and: The Place with No Edge: An Intimate History of People, Technology, and the Mississippi River Delta by Adam Mandelman

Reviewed by: Lowcountry at High Tide: A History of Flooding, Drainage, and Reclamation in Charleston, South Carolina by Christina Rae Butler, and: The Place with No Edge: An Intimate History of People, Technology, and the Mississippi River Delta by Adam Mandelman John Dean Davis Christina Rae Butler. Lowcountry at High Tide: A History of Flooding, Drainage, and Reclamation in Charleston, South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2020. ISBN: 9781643360621 Hardcover: 304 pages Adam Mandelman. The Place with No Edge: An Intimate History of People, Technology, and the Mississippi River Delta. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780807172834 Hardcover: 304 pages Fifty percent of the land under Charleston, South Carolina is artificial. The effort to transform what was a "marshy, flood prone finger of land" into one of the U.S. South's most important coastal cities has been nothing short of monumental.1 Christina Rae Butler's Lowcountry at High Tide: A History of Flooding, Drainage, and Reclamation in Charleston, South Carolina recounts in detail this centuries-long struggle between the city and the geology of the soft landscape on which it was built. Charleston, like much of the lowcountry coastal plain along the southeast and Gulf coasts, has historically been a place where what we know (or think we know) about building becomes irrelevant or, at least, significantly transformed. Butler divides the building of modern Charleston into three categories that outline reclamation, filling, and drainage as distinct modes of construction, each with their own design, engineering, and labor issues, means of financing, and assembly of political support. At the heart of the construction of Charleston is an alliance between public health and private investment that has shaped the city's margins into profitable and mosquito-free building lots. Butler's accounting, however, for the various causes and effects of urban expansion goes beyond simply parsing how much bureaucratic paternalism and naked real estate speculation might be responsible for urban form. Instead, this construction history acknowledges the technical and environmental aspects of city development, placing much needed emphasis on how labor, race, and class played important roles in raising the city from the mud. Butler's technical knowledge and familiarity with building practices animate just how laborious the city-building process was. Charleston lacked durable building materials, making [End Page 125] stone masonry prohibitively expensive and forcing ad hoc and creative construction methods. Using archival specifications and bid documents, Lowcountry at High Tide details building practices, describing palmetto gabions and cribs, pile-driving machines, and even the sequencing of planks and placement of bricks. This level of detail provides an excellent case study for the material history of construction and humanizes citybuilding as both personal and bodily practice. Butler interleaves a larger citywide narrative with portraits of hard work in moments of crisis. For example, in an episode describing a frantic three-shift construction effort while centrifugal pumps kept the waters at bay behind a cofferdam, the reader can appreciate Butler's technical skill in illuminating what the stakes really were. Lowcountry at High Tide's focus on the scavenger provides its most fascinating intervention in urban historiography. Scavengers, who were mostly Black, appear as the true urban maintainers, essential for the city's function and responsible for much of its surface area. Scavengers swept streets of all sorts of detritus and then used this organic fill to plug the city's overly deep cellars and marshy pits. The fight over the geographical limits of Charleston's grade line was extensive, lasted hundreds of years, and was waged with weapons of clay, sawdust, and all manner of urban filth. Black scavengers formed the front line of this struggle. There was little concealed about the way Charlestonians felt about this kind of work, relegating this essential but truly odious task to marginalized sections of an urban society with a strict racial and class hierarchy. More urban histories might benefit from centering these castaway characters and how they underpin the civic and economic functions that occupy most historians' attention. The alliance between public-minded, progressive governance reforms and lucrative private investment set the stage for the explosion of development in the twentieth century that formed Charleston's modern...

A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain's Court: Letters from Grace King's New England Sojourns ed. by Miki Pfeffer

Reviewed by: A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain's Court: Letters from Grace King's New England Sojournsed. by Miki Pfeffer Jane Turner Censer A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain's Court: Letters from Grace King's New England Sojourns. Edited by Miki Pfeffer. The Hill Collection: Holdings of the LSU Libraries. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. xxiv, 304. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6973-5.) Although this volume's title, A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain's Court, mentions an important focus, its subtitle, Letters from Grace King's New England Sojourns, gives a fuller indication of its contents. These letters by Grace King, a New Orleans author renowned for her portrayals of Louisiana creole culture in novels and short stories, show her long friendship with the Clemens family, including Samuel (who wrote as Mark Twain), his wife, Olivia, and daughters. The letters go beyond that friendship to an excellent account of King's important relationships with northern intellectuals; they also detail well her entry into the publishing world. In 1885 Grace King was an unmarried but well-educated thirty-three-year-old woman of good family with few prospects when, through the World's Industrial and Cotton Exposition in New Orleans, she first met famous Boston poet Julia Ward Howe and northern editors Charles Dudley Warner and Richard Watson Gilder. In revitalizing a New Orleans literary society that King joined, Howe provided an important initial support group. More important, through Howe, King was able to catch the interest of Warner, editor of the Hartford, Connecticut, Courantand part of the editorial staff at Harper's Monthly Magazine. Warner, then in his fifties, very much enjoyed the attentions of King, who was flattering, flirtatious, and witty. He helped shepherd her stories to publication in Harper's; even more important, Warner and his wife, Susan, encouraged King to visit them in Hartford. Through them she met his neighbors, the Clemenses, as well as Frederic E. Church, the celebrated landscape painter, and his wife. King's long sojourns in the North in 1887, 1888, and 1891, as well her European visits in 1892 with the Clemens family, form the bulk of the letters presented. Even though Grace King undoubtedly enjoyed her northern trips, she, as one who had lived through the Civil War and still believed in the superior virtues of white southerners, cast a wary eye at the northerners she encountered. During the 1888 elections, when she was in Hartford as a guest in a Republican family, she wrote her sister, "How I loathe, despise and hate the Republicans!" (p. 135). Over time, after a disagreement with the Warners, King resorted to sectional explanations as she described her relationship with Susan Warner: "She is rather trying as I found, but Northern people are so queer" (p. 102). Certainly King in her visits to the North was at first expecting her acquaintances there to provide material or career advantages, as is apparent in a letter to her sister: "I feel that I may be put in the way of doing some well paid work, by frequenting these masters of literature" (p. 95). Over time, however, King came to care deeply for the Clemens family, especially Olivia Clemens. [End Page 928] The letters in this book are drawn primarily from either the voluminous collections of King family papers at Louisiana State University or the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California at Berkeley. Editor Miki Pfeffer presents them well, with minimal editorial changes and helpful introductions and annotations. Pfeffer often uses partial letters and even excerpts, a practice decried by some historical editors, but made necessary in this case by the number and length of the letters with which she is dealing. A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain's Courtis fascinating reading. While adding to our understanding of Grace King's entry into publishing and her career, this edition of letters also provides many useful insights into the cultural, intellectual, and literary life of late-nineteenth-century America. Jane Turner Censer George Mason University Copyright © 2020 Southern Historical Association

Reassessing the 1930s South ed. by Karen L. Cox, Sarah E. Gardner

Reviewed by: Reassessing the 1930s South ed. by Karen L. Cox, Sarah E. Gardner Nancy K. Berlage Reassessing the 1930s South. Edited by Karen L. Cox and Sarah E. Gardner. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. viii, 261. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6921-6.) This collection of thirteen essays from contributors with backgrounds in history, art, and literary studies offers a broad and engaging examination of the 1930s South. At the same time, it interrogates notions about the South and the ways those notions were formed. It is an expansive topic that editors Karen L. Cox and Sarah E. Gardner take on, and the volume makes a valuable [End Page 214] contribution in fleshing out the conversation. The essays successfully push back against what the editors describe as the artificial but culturally powerful binary that has either pathologized or romanticized the South and instead reveal the complexity, contradiction, and tension in southerners’ responses to change. It seems to me that the volume’s true value is its probe into how notions of the South are constructed and produced, although that aim is not explicitly framed as such. Readers see this process through the examination of various forms of cultural media, including art, literature, documentary writing and film, theater, visual arts, academic accounts, and news reporting. Additionally, the focus on culture allows the authors to assess new as well as familiar topics from fresh perspectives, helping explain the heft and longevity of particular constructs about the South. Several essays describe contemporary perspectives that gestured toward southerners’ need for a radically different South. Emily Senefeld shows how the Highlander Folk School helped build support for the labor movement, and she convincingly positions these activities as central to a broader culture of southern radicalism. Robert Hunt Ferguson takes a fascinating look at the radical social vision of William R. Amberson, a physiologist and Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union leader who rejected the entrenched agricultural system and New Deal rural programs. As an alternative, Amberson helped found the Delta Cooperative Farm on the principles of collectivism and interracial cooperation. Coauthors Rebecca Sharpless and Melissa Walker discuss the fieldwork of social scientists Ruth Allen and Margaret Jarman Hagood, who documented rural women’s labor and asserted a powerful gendered indictment of southern economic and social systems as the root of women’s poverty and disempowerment. The essay will be useful for historians interested in comparing this fieldwork with that conducted in other regions by home economists in agricultural extension service, who also pressed gendered critiques. Technological change shaped conceptions of the South in relationship to modernity, as several chapters illustrate. Two essays closely examine cultural production associated with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Lisa Dorrill offers a fresh take on post office and courthouse murals; they showcased dam engineering, electricity, and conservation measures but failed to depict those affected, thus glossing over social issues the TVA supposedly addressed. Ted Atkinson urges readers to rethink southern encounters with modernism, previously interpreted as antagonistic. He compellingly argues that the documentary The River (1938) and the play Power (1937) exemplified “TVA modernism,” a perspective that viewed technology and infrastructure as crucial to the transformation of the South and its unification with the nation (p. 125). While federally supported cultural production could serve New Deal objectives, Scott L. Matthews illustrates that southerners sought to control notions of place and identity for their own purposes. In response to an alarmist photo essay published in 1938 by Collier’s magazine on sharecropping in Greene County, Georgia, local elites, federal photographers, and sociologist Arthur F. Raper developed an alternative narrative in newspapers, a congressional speech, and Raper’s Tenants of the Almighty (New York, 1943). Douglas E. Thompson also disrupts notions of the South as backward by suggesting that southerners eagerly adopted automobiles but in ways that “fit their understanding of themselves as possessing independence, self-reliance, and freedom” (p. 108). Another important theme in this collection is race. Nicholas Roland’s excellent essay examines how the organizers of the 1936 Texas Centennial [End Page 215] Exposition sought to project values of modernity and racial harmony despite the reality of ongoing discrimination, the denigration of black people’s cultural...

American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863 by Peter O'Connor

Reviewed by: American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863 by Peter O'Connor Konstantin Dierks (bio) Keywords historiography, Anglo-American relations, U.S. Civil War, sectionalism, travel narratives, race, slavery American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832–1863. By Peter O'Connor. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 268. Cloth, $47.95.) American Sectionalism in the British Mind strives to bridge a newer historiography that has been globalizing the American Civil War and an older historiography concerned with Anglo–American relations in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Peter O'Connor insists that we cannot understand British responses to the American Civil War without properly considering a longer history of Anglo–American relations. Why, for instance, did certain antislavery British liberals come to favor the Confederacy over the Union? How does one explain such counterintuitive political alignments? For that matter, how does one explain general British ambivalence about the outbreak of the American Civil War, on its surface a starkly delineated conflict? Arguing that it is not enough to start historical analysis with the onset of the American Civil War itself, O'Connor instead begins his investigation in the 1830s utilizing British cultural commentary about American life in the form of firsthand travel narratives. Such travel narratives blossomed in the 1830s and continued to flourish in the ensuing decades, even during the American Civil War itself. [End Page 181] O'Connor devotes three chapters to analyzing travel narratives from several angles. Chapter 1 covers race and slavery, while Chapter 2 focuses on ethnicity, and Chapter 3 examines American sectionalism with respect to economic and political differences. This is how the sources have spoken to O'Connor, who discerns a broad and sustained historical pattern in this cultural commentary. At bottom, British cultural commentators tended to be somewhat sympathetic with certain elements they supposed characterized the South: its paternalism toward enslaved blacks, its ethnic homogeneity and Britishness, its free-trade preferences, and its aversion to democracy. At the same time, they tended to be unsympathetic with certain supposed elements perceived in the North, especially the Mid-Atlantic region between New York City and Philadelphia: its racism toward free blacks, its ethnic heterogeneity harboring the Catholic Irish, its protectionist preferences, and its allowance of anarchic mobs and scurrilous press. O'Connor is keen to emphasize that British cultural commentators did not closely associate the North with abolitionism and did not solely associate the South with slavery. British interpretation of American sectionalism proved more complex, concerned not only with race and slavery but also with ethnicity, economics, and politics. The baseline lesson drawn by British cultural commentators seemed that American culture was disunited not just by slavery, but in multiple ways. Furthermore, when British travelers extended their gaze beyond slavery, they often registered more affinities with southern culture praised for its Anglophilia than with northern culture condemned for its Anglophobia. These patterns were generally true of British travelers in the 1830s, the 1840s, and the 1850s, and they would remain true of British cultural commentators in 1861 and 1862—the subjects of Chapters 4 and 5. O'Connor devotes an individual chapter to each year to stress continuity between the antebellum decades and the initial years of the American Civil War itself, when British cultural commentators sustained their habitual ambivalence about the South as well as their habitual distaste for the North. In the end this would change. The key historical pivot, according to O'Connor, was the Emancipation Proclamation in late 1862. This established the North's antislavery bona fides, and prompted a prevailing British public preference for the North, even if it did not alter official British neutrality. Lacking recognized nation–state status, the rebellious [End Page 182] South paid a higher geopolitical price for British neutrality than did the North. Altogether, O'Connor's book is something of a long tracking shot of British ambivalence about American sectionalism before and into the Civil War. O'Connor provides ample evidence for his main historical argument with close textual analysis tracing British ambivalence toward American sectionalism. Of course, O'Connor is not the first historian to note that unexpected ambivalence, but he pulls the historical question out of high-level Anglo...

Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley

Reviewed by: Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley James Sanders Day Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation. By Michael S. Frawley. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 195. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7068-7.) Asserting that southern industry was well developed before the American Civil War, Michael S. Frawley contends that historians who compare northern and southern industry miss the mark. In fact, industrial development in the South lagged behind the North by a decade. Nevertheless, southern industry, when evaluated on its own merits, represented a viable industrial base by 1860. Debunking traditional views that slave labor compromised the basic tenets of free enterprise, Frawley posits that slaves “served as both labor and capital for antebellum southern industry” (p. 92). The combination of plantation-based [End Page 470] agriculture and industrial production constituted “pure and simple” capitalism (p. 95). Consequently, entrepreneurs invested money in whatever would earn a profit. Citing DeBow’s Review, Frawley notes that the slave population eventually exceeded the number of agricultural jobs, thus creating the need for industry. Cotton production generated profits, and planters invested those proceeds in land, slaves, and manufacturing. Although industrial output always ran second to “King Cotton,” the development of southern industry proved significant. Addressing several historiographical arguments, Frawley confirms that former studies tended to corroborate preconceived notions—the institution of slavery was incompatible with industrial development; industry disrupted the agrarian way of life; and industry was not integrated into southern society. In contrast, he argues that the Panic of 1837 prompted planters to invest in industry to counter agricultural slumps, thereby leading to a diverse southern economy. Frawley examines A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy by Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss (Chapel Hill, 1981), one of the first cliometric studies of southern industry. This work, grounded in the 1860 manufacturing census, arrived at conclusions that Frawley describes as inconclusive and unrepresentative. He argues that census marshals failed to record approximately 20 percent of all manufacturing firms in the Gulf South. Therefore, in addition to the 1860 census, he considers “all available sources” using a “geographic perspective” (p. 17). For example, applying Geographical Information System (GIS) software, he charts and maps the combined effects of physical environment, technology, and social institutions. Moreover, he consults newspapers and journals, city and county directories, R. G. Dun and Company credit reports, and local histories to determine that industry was more widespread in the South than previously thought. Having created a vast database of Gulf South industrial firms operating in 1860, Frawley concentrates on Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, three states that constituted the richest part of the Gulf South region. He also presents five major themes: location, organization, and ownership; resources and raw materials; transportation and markets; capital and labor; and production and scale. As the southern economy expanded, a growing transportation network connected roads, rivers, and railroads. Rivers were the dominant transportation routes, facilitating trade both upstream and downstream. Railroad construction complemented river traffic by connecting remote areas to outside markets and by linking interior points to nearby rivers or to the coast. Consequently, southern industry developed along railroad lines and in areas rich in raw materials. Ultimately, Frawley constructs a convincing argument. Refusing to evaluate southern industry by looking backward through the lens of the Civil War, he uses maps, tables, and charts to present data in digestible form. Too extensive for publication in book form, his Appendix C (located on a personal website) provides 140 additional pages of pertinent information. Although he seems to ignore the reality of nonstandard gauges, he concludes properly that southern railroads were designed to support local and regional trade, not to provide logistical support for a major war. Configured for a peacetime economy, much of southern industry was “worn out or destroyed” by the Civil War’s end [End Page 471] (p. 125). In summary, Frawley suggests that southern industrial development before the Civil War might have represented “the beginning of the ‘New’ South” (p. 127). James Sanders Day University of Montevallo Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Texas and World War I by Gregory W. Ball, and: North Carolina’s Experience during the First World War ed. by Shepherd W. McKinley, Steven Sabol, and: The American South and the Great War, 1914–1924 ed. by Matthew L. Downs, M. Ryan Floyd

Reviewed by: Texas and World War I by Gregory W. Ball, and: North Carolina’s Experience during the First World War ed. by Shepherd W. McKinley, Steven Sabol, and: The American South and the Great War, 1914–1924 ed. by Matthew L. Downs, M. Ryan Floyd Petra DeWitt Texas and World War I. By Gregory W. Ball. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2019. Pp. [viii], 156. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-1-62511-050-3.) North Carolina’s Experience during the First World War. Edited by Shepherd W. McKinley and Steven Sabol. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 347. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-414-4.) The American South and the Great War, 1914–1924. Edited by Matthew L. Downs and M. Ryan Floyd. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. viii, 248. $47.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6937-7.) The centennial of World War I has contributed to new published studies about the conflict and its impact. The three works under review focus on the [End Page 202] home front in southern states and battlefront encounters by southern men. Together they offer new insight into regional experiences during a national emergency and thus fit well with the growing number of local studies about American involvement in the First World War. Individually, they demonstrate that, although the need to produce foodstuffs and weaponry hastened the transition of the agricultural economy of the South into a more modern and industrialized one, social and political traditions changed at a much slower pace despite new challenges brought on by the war. Texas and World War I by Gregory W. Ball is a concise study that evaluates the many changes the war caused in Texas. The author expertly places the arrival of World War I into the context of Texas’s heightened sense of preparedness for military action owing to the unrest along its border with revolutionary Mexico. Texans, like so many Americans, greeted the declaration of war with public assertions of patriotism, formed home guard companies in several communities to counter any potential threats from Mexico, joined American Red Cross chapters, and purchased more Liberty Bonds than required. The state’s Council of Defense created hundreds of county and community councils to coordinate the war effort at the local level. Despite drought conditions, Texas increased food and livestock production. Women in Texas, as they did throughout the nation, conserved food, served as nurses, and worked in factories. Although strained racial tensions contributed to the Houston riot in 1917, African Americans nevertheless held patriotic meetings, supported the war effort, and sent their men to war. Texans were also suspicious of foreigners, especially German immigrants who were not naturalized citizens. Newspapers fanned growing anti-German sentiment by publishing rumors of German spy activities and the arrests of suspected saboteurs. Ball, however, does not evaluate just how many of the accused actually received convictions under the Espionage Act (1917) and whether any of the existing German-language newspapers suffered as a result of the Trading with the Enemy Act (1917). Such analysis could have measured the depth of anti-German sentiment in the state. The remaining chapters focus on military aspects, especially the implementation of the Selective Service Act in Texas (1917), the turning of men into soldiers at several training camps in the state, and their experiences on the western front in Europe. The author effectively illustrates that the appeal to the volunteer spirit to enlarge the ranks of the Texas National Guard and the drafting of men into the regular army was quite successful because the state was already prepared for military action due to unrest along the Texas-Mexico border. Ball concludes that the war also had a political impact on the home front because younger politicians, such as Sam Rayburn, replaced the older ones and guided the nation into a new political direction by asking what power the national government had over its citizens. Ball has read numerous Texas and out-of-state newspapers and letters to learn about the battlefield encounters of Texas soldiers assigned to the Thirty-sixth and Ninetieth Army divisions. These primary accounts are the best aspect of this well-structured study. The...

The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History by Scott S. Ellis

Reviewed by: The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History by Scott S. Ellis Nathalie Dessens The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History. By Scott S. Ellis. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 280. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6935-3.) In his latest book, Scott S. Ellis explores the three-hundred-year history of the Faubourg Marigny, one of New Orleans’s oldest neighborhoods. Although he covers the history of the faubourg from its eighteenth-century origins as the Marigny de Mandeville plantation, his focus is on the period after 1805, when Bernard Marigny subdivided the plantation into lots. Ellis meticulously describes the evolution of the faubourg through the Civil War and subsequent emancipation of the slaves, the Great Depression, desegregation, the hippie movement in the 1970s, the late-twentieth-century gentrification period, and the difficult post–Hurricane Katrina era. While the book is a step-by-step chronological narrative, it also offers readers specifics on the faubourg’s founder, Bernard Marigny, his family, several racial and ethnic groups that made the faubourg home in the nineteenth century (including free people of color and Irish and German immigrants), and its later revival by the gay community. Ellis also includes more focused studies, like that of the twentieth-century evolution of Frenchmen Street, the main artery of the Faubourg Marigny, which is well known today for its many jazz venues. The book provides a very thorough history of the Faubourg Marigny’s population, economic development, and architectural and social reconfigurations. It shows a neighborhood in constant evolution, due to the ebb and flow of the city’s economy, only more godforsaken than the French Quarter and its sibling neighborhoods. Historical events, migrations, wars, economic depressions, epidemics (be they yellow fever, cholera, or AIDS), and natural disasters like hurricanes have kept reconfiguring the faubourg, its main commercial artery Frenchmen Street, its population, and even its idiosyncrasies. This book is meticulously sourced. Ellis not only taps an extensive secondary literature but also mines the sacramental and notarial records, the city directories, and federal censuses and includes information gathered from locals he interviewed. He relies on these sources to denounce an “enduring legend, parroted uncritically,” about Bernard Marigny and other myths about the faubourg (p. 9). Ellis uses city directories (starting with the first 1811 directory) and censuses to track each of the minute changes the faubourg has undergone in the past two centuries. His chapter on the commercial evolution of Frenchmen Street, between the 1930s and 2016, is especially fascinating. The book’s digressions and anecdotes, which may be deemed superfluous by academics, will enchant nonacademics interested in the history of New Orleans. The narrative may sometimes appear too general and insufficiently focused on the neighborhood itself (in the passages on urban slaves, for instance), but they make the book more readable for large audiences. The early parts of the book (on the nineteenth century, in particular) are slightly uneven, with very brief chapters, extremely general presentations, and, [End Page 147] at times, a focus on certain groups without explanation (firemen, for instance), but these shortcomings do not prevent the book from being fascinating and informative. Despite a few small inaccuracies (Jean Boze, for instance, was never the overseer of a Gentilly plantation), and the methodological lack of precision (the academic reader would have needed to know more about the numerous interviews the author conducted, how the interviewees were chosen, what the conditions of the interviews were, and how they were analyzed), the book is a much-needed addition to the historiography of New Orleans, and its novel-like narrative will undoubtedly draw larger audiences. Nathalie Dessens University of Toulouse–Jean Jaurès Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association