Southern Culture Research Articles

All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South

In May 1861, Jefferson Davis issued a general call for volunteers for the Confederate Army. Men responded in such numbers that 200,000 had to be turned away. Few of these men would have attributed their zeal to the cause of states' rights or slavery. As All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South makes clear, most southern men saw the war more simply as a test of their manhood, a chance to defend the honor of their sweethearts, fiances, and wives back home. Drawing upon diaries and personal letters, Stephen Berry seamlessly weaves together the stories of six very different men, detailing the tangled roles that love and ambition played in each man's life. Their writings reveal a male-dominated Southern culture that exalted women as repositories of divine grace and treasured romantic love as the platform from which men launched their bids for greatness. The exhilarating onset of war seemed to these, and most southern men, a grand opportunity to fulfill their ambition for glory and to prove their love for women-on the same field of battle. As the realities of the war became apparent, however, the letters and diaries turned from idealized themes of honor and country to solemn reflections on love and home. Elegant and poetic, All That Makes a Man recovers the emotional lives of unsung Southern men and women and reveals that the fiction of Cold Mountain mirrors a poignant reality. In their search for a cause worthy of their lives, many Southern soldiers were disappointed in their hopes for a Southern nation. But they still had their women's love, and there they would rebuild.

Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory

This richly illustrated collection of fourteen essays examines the ways in which Confederate memorials from Monument Avenue to Stone Mountain and the public rituals surrounding them testify to the tenets of the Lost Cause, a romanticized narrative of the war. Several essays highlight the creative leading role played by women s groups in memorialization, while others explore the alternative ways in which people outside white southern culture wrote their very different histories on the southern landscape. The authors who include Richard Guy Wilson, Catherine W. Bishir, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and William M.S. Ramussen trace the origins, objectives, and changing consequences of Confederate monuments over time and the dynamics of individuals and organizations that sponsored them. Thus these essays extend the growing literature on the rhetoric of the Lost Cause by shifting the focus to the realm of the visual. They are especially relevant in the present day when Confederate symbols and monuments continue to play a central role in a public and often emotionally charged debate about how the South s past should be remembered. The editors: Art Historian Cynthia Mills, a specialist in nineteenth-century public sculpture, is executive editor of American Art, the scholarly journal of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Pamela H. Simpson is the Ernest Williams II Professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University. She is the coauthor of The Architecture of Historic Lexington.

Dostoevsky and the Literature of the American South

Many prominent southern writers, including William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Walker Percy, among others, have attested to the importance of Fedor to their work. (1) Many of these writers suggested that they identified with not just as American writers but specifically as southern writers and that their southern heritage had a lot to do both with their attraction to and interpretation of novels. It is surprising then that there are virtually no scholarly evaluations of impact on southern writers as a group. (2) Certainly, isolated and cursory remarks on the issue of reception by southerners may be found in the studies of individual southern writers, but even Jean Weisgerber, the author of the only book-length study discussing influence on a southern writer (Faulkner et Dostoevsky; et influences [1968]), in which he attempts to provide some context for Faulkner's reading of Dostoevsky, avoids the subject entirely. Several interesting observations on importance to southern writers are made in A. N. Nikoliukin's pre-Perestroika Soviet study, Vzaimosviazi literatur Rossii i SShA; Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoevskii i Amerika [Interrelations of and (American Literatures: Turgenev, Tolstoy, and America] (1987)--a significant work, despite the tendentiousness dictated by the time and place of its publication. Note must also be taken of Bertram Wyatt-Brown's provocative article, Russian Literature and the Southern Literary Modernists (1998), in which Wyatt-Brown, a prominent scholar of southern culture and literature, considers the affinities between the classical nineteenth-century novelists, including Dostoevsky, and modern southern writers. (3) To date, however, the only scholarly article that focuses specifically and exclusively on impact on a group of southern writers is Temira Pachmuss's essay, Dostoevsky and America's Southern Women Writers: Parallels and Confluences (1981), in which Pachmuss examines the works of Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and of Eudora Welty--the latter, in a much sketchier fashion--for signs of possible influence. Pachmuss's essay, written for a Festschrift more than twenty years ago, is frequently cited in discussions of influence on individual southern writers, not only because it represents one of the very few attempts to account for the ways in which the southern identity of a group of writers mediated these writers' reception of Dostoevsky, but because Pachmuss has an in-depth knowledge of writings and philosophy (she published extensively on his work), which makes her analysis particularly noteworthy. Pachmuss begins by claiming that despite originating from two completely different cultural backgrounds, the works of on the one hand, and of some of America's southern writers on the other, demonstrate a remarkable concurrence in themes, ideas, and techniques (115). She then proceeds to analyze the treatment of loneliness, love, spiritual searching, physical deformity, and violence in the writings of O'Connor, McCullers, Welty, and Dostoevsky. Throughout her essay, Pachmuss maintains that it is Christian credo that impresses southern writers most, namely, Dostoevsky's message that the existential, grotesque world of today ... may be saved from its spiritual perdition by the revelation of the fundamental principle of an all-forgiving and all-embracing (126). She posits earlier, by the way, that Dostoevsky ... argues that genuine love ... lies in Christ and radiates from Him (116). She concludes by saying that was a formative influence on twentieth-century Southern literature (126). The claims that Pachmuss puts forth in her article are generally well-argued, despite the fact that she never explains why southern writers would have to turn to a novelist for the message Jesus Saves--a notion that they were surely familiar with, if only through roadside signs and bumper stickers. …

"Desirable Immigrants": The Assimilation of Transplanted Yankees in Page and Tourgee

This paper examines the literary representation of Yankees who have moved to the South in two novels: Albion Tourg�e A Fool's Errand (1879) and Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock (1898). Tourg�e was a northern liberal, and Page was a southern conservative, yet both novelists depict Yankees who successfully integrate into southern culture. The similarities between Page's and Tourg�e's constructions of the assimilated Yankee suggest a shared ideology that transcends any sectional differences over Reconstruction. Their novels reflect the ambivalence felt by many late nineteenth-century Americans about the massive influx of foreign immigrants. As they attempt to define the "desirable" immigrant, Page and Tourg�e contribute to the consolidation of a racial ideology that would structure the American imperialist agenda of the early twentieth century.

Black, White, and Brown

WITH EVERY PASSING DECADE SINCE 1954 WE CONTINUE TO ASK OURselves how much the South and the nation have changed since the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision ended but equal education in public schools. The hallowed words of Thomas Jefferson that men are created equal, proclaimed at the nation's founding 178 years before Brown, seemed finally to include black men, women, and children, at least insofar as public schooling was concerned. Yet decades after court rulings ending segregation--in schools, restaurants, hotels, housing, swimming pools, and buses--the color line has hardly faded. In fact, it is beginning to look as if the line were drawn in permanent ink: black people and white people--Americans all, but still very differently situated educationally, economically, and socially. Even with massive immigration from Asia and Latin America in the last half of the twentieth century and the recent displacing of African Americans by Latinos as the nation's largest minority, we cannot seem to break free from our vision of America as fundamentally a nation of whites and blacks, with Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans playing supporting roles. In many ways we remain, as Andrew Hacker argued more than a decade ago, two nations, black and white, separate and unequal. (1) The future that the Brown decision augured and that Martin Luther King Jr. devoutly desired could only be described as a dream, given the deep divisions that separated black America from white America since the end of slavery. Yet no other court decision in our history has done more to bring an end to state-sanctioned white supremacy, to close the long era of Jim Crow, and to offer blacks the hope of achieving equality in all walks of life. That Brown and subsequent court rulings dismantling Jim Crow have not, fifty years later, significantly narrowed the gap between whites and blacks on many fronts continues to trouble most Americans. Part of the problem has to do with the negative role blackness has played throughout our nation's history. No other group in America traces its roots to the institution of slavery, when blacks were bought and sold as the property of their white masters. After the emancipation of slaves, the enactment of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments did little to change white southerners' attitudes toward their former property, and as soon as federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, ex-Confederates wasted little time before using local and state laws to deny blacks the very rights the newly enacted amendments were supposed to guarantee. The Supreme Court not only acquiesced in this reassertion of white supremacy (the way of life for the euphemistically inclined) but administered the coup de grace in 1896 when it ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that separating blacks and whites on public transportation (and by implication in all public places) does not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other. (2) The nation's highest court had shamelessly asserted that segregating blacks from whites had nothing to do with the pervasive belief in the innate inferiority of blacks, the fundamental principle of southern culture since the antebellum era. With the exception of the Dred Scott decision in 1857, no other Supreme Court ruling had done so much damage to the cause of equality for blacks; Plessy stood for fifty-eight years as the law of the land and was cited in hundreds of state and federal court cases as the constitutional basis for segregation in virtually all areas of life. The very premise of the way of life rested on the assumption that blacks and whites could peacefully co-exist, but only if the color line were scrupulously observed where it counted the most--in the bedroom. Even before 1896, former slaveholders and state legislators (often one and the same) enacted laws to forbid black-white marriage, not only to ensure that mulattoes would have no inheritance rights that a white man was bound to respect but more urgently to prevent black men from marrying white women. …

The Infrapolitics of Slavery?

The struggle to understand and give meaning to secession started in 1860-61 and has raged ever since. At the time, most southerners viewed secession as a justifiable and heroic act to preserve white freedom and state's rights against the centralized tyranny represented by an abolitionist president and his northern partisan allies, a rather spontaneous explosion of popular liberty analogous to the American Revolution. In the view of most northerners, a small clique of aristocratic, slaveholding ideologues orchestrated secession to maintain the power they were losing over the nation as well as over the South's non-slaveholding and pro-Unionist majority. Recent scholarship has simultaneously enriched, clarified, and complicated the story. On the one hand there is virtual unanimity that the defense of slavery lay at the heart of the secession movement. Yet because of slavery's manifold dimensions and consequences—it was a system of labor expropriation and of race control; it was the fountain of southern culture, ideology, and social ethics; and it was the foundation of economic and political power in the antebellum South—current explanations of secession appear no less divergent than those offered by the Civil War generation. Some scholars see secession as a response to the social and economic threats that the Republicans' non-extension policy regarding slavery posed to the South's ruling class. Secession would mitigate latent class conflict—and maintain slaveholder hegemony—by preserving the opportunities of non-slaveholders to acquire slaves and plantations of their own. 1 Others stress the non-slaveholders' interest in defending their traditional society based on white privilege, economic self-sufficiency, and patriarchal values against the abolitionist-Republican coalition and its modernizing, centralizing, amalgamating ways. 2 Still others emphasize the politics of secession, whether the story of the fire-eaters' ultimate triumph or the essential congruence between secession and the values of honor and manly independence that had long characterized southern political culture. 3 And in yet another approach to the problem, some scholars situate secession in a [End Page 41] broader party system perspective, stressing the Democratic party's dominance in the Lower South. The demise of party competition in the Lower South by the 1850s created a political dynamic that favored extreme reactions to the election of a Republican president. Those reactions, expressed through the apparatus of the southern Democratic party, simply steamrolled other efforts, principally of former Whigs in the Upper South and northern conservatives, to convince folks that genuine alternatives to secession existed in 1860-61. 4

Culture, Context, and Homicide of the Elderly

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the criminal victimization of elderly persons. Given that homicides of the elderly are thought to occur primarily in the context of robbery/burglary situations, this study seeks to identify situational as well as structural and cultural factors that influence the murder of older persons. In particular, it has been noted that Southern culture promotes a notion that one should ‘respect their elders.’ Using conservative Protestant affiliation as a proxy for Southern culture, this study also examines the relationship between Southern culture and homicide of the elderly. Findings show that Southern culture as reflected in conservative Protestant affiliation does not insulate the elderly from victimization.

"Lord, Have Mercy on My Soul": Sin, Salvation, and Southern Rock

In 1971 the five-member rock-and-roll group Black Oak released their debut album. songs on the record illuminated themes addressed by Black Oak and the larger Most southern lyrics glorified such stereotypically male values as fighting, gambling, and sexual conquests. Two other songs, The Hills of Arkansas and When Electricity Came to revealed a love of state and region that also permeated southern lyrics. Yet the most lyrically intriguing song on Black Oak was dried on My Soul. Although most Black Oak songs were anything but serious, Have Mercy began the deep, solemn voice of lead singer Jim Dandy Mangrum accompanied only by a church organ. spoken introduction recited the story that Mangrum eventually sang. In a somber tone, Mangrum vividly described how he recently walked through the halls of Karma and shook hands both the devil and God, whom he respected and had run with throughout his life. While the devil possessed his body and God possessed his mind, he explained, his soul currently belonged to both. Mangrum recalled that as they considered his eventual fate, the devil became excited while the Lord expressed sympathy. At the thought of facing God on judgment day, Mangrum begged, Lord, please have mercy on my soul. (1) constant repetition of this line at the song's end conveyed the sincere concern the band felt for their spiritual salvation. preoccupation damnation and salvation in on My Soul is no aberration in the southern movement. In fact, bands that belonged to the often expressed a seemingly earnest preoccupation religious matters. song lyrics and personal lives of southern rockers demonstrate a constant struggle between sin and salvation. At first glance, it appears that southern totally rebelled against the evangelical ethos that so heavily influences southern culture. use of evangelical vocabulary and images stands in stark contrast to the debauchery often promoted by southern bands in their songs. Drug use, violent brawling, distance from family members, and sleeping every female possible are not characteristics usually associated strong religious values. There is little doubt that southern bands were proud of their sinful ways, embodied in their excessive drinking and drug habits, but the musicians did frequently attempt to reconcile sinful lifestyles the religious fundamentalism that characterizes much of the South. Music has always served as an essential form of southern religious expression. Popular fascination native musical forms like the blues and, more recently, bluegrass confirms the importance of southern music in the nation's cultural heritage. Some historians, most notably Bill Malone, have even recognized the intellectual value of southern music in its multiple forms. Southern rock, however, is one form of the region's music that has received relatively little popular or academic attention. But what really is southern rock, and who are the hands that are affiliated the movement? former question is more difficult than the latter, as the movement means a variety of things to fans, record companies, and the bands themselves. Record producer Phil Walden more or less began the southern in 1969 by recording and marketing a distinctive style of regional rock-and-roll for his Capricorn Records in Macon, Georgia. Many of the bands Walden signed were made up of native southerners who had been playing a unique blend of rock, blues, and country music on regional circuits for years. Members of different groups often knew each other well and even traded musicians on occasion. Fans and critics soon gave the new sound produced by Capricorn (and other companies) the vague rock label. Five critically, commercially, and regionally successful bands of the also built a significant national following: the Allman Brothers Band, Black Oak Arkansas, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Marshall Tucker Band, and Wet Willie. …

Donald Davidson and Modern American Conservatism

26Historically Speaking · November 2003 Donald Davidson and Modern American Conservatism Paul V. Murphy T he presidency of George W Bush has, amongotherthings, laid bare the current dominance of conservatism in the United States. Despite runningforthe presidency as a moderate (tirelessly campaigning as a "compassionate conservative"), Bush's administration has successfuUy pursued an aggressively conservative agenda both in domestic and international affairs. Historians are increasingly analyzing the roots ofthis current conservative era, charting the initial rise ofpotent and mainstream conservative poUticians. In order to explain why conservatism triumphed, however, one must look beyond the particular causes of conservative political success in the 1960s and 1970s and study the roots ofAmerican conservatism and the Uves and ideas ofolder conservatives. One figure worthy ofrenewed attention is the southern poet and essayist Donald Davidson. Remembered, if at all, as a minor poet given to loving and elegiac celebrations of southern culture and the Confederate past, Donald Davidson pursued a long, frustrating career on the margins ofthe national Uteraryculture . His obscurityrests, in part, on his stubbornlyanti-modern aesthetic; he simply did not accommodate the dominant Uterary modes ofhis time. Neither, however, did he accommodate its dominant social and cultural trends. He was a key leader ofthe Southern Agrarians, the group ofpoets and professors associated with Vanderbilt Universityin NashviUe, Tennessee. In 1930 they co-authored a much-noted attack on industrial capitalism and modern culture entided I'll Take My Stand: The South and theAgrarian Tradition. Unlike his peers, Davidson did not gracefully navigate the transition from crankysouthernpubUcistto respected man of letters. While most ofhis more famous confreres —including John Crowe Ransom, AUenTate, and RobertPermWarren—pubUcIy repudiated segregation and embraced integration, Davidson remained an intransigent defender ofsegregation, identifying it with his core project ofdefending southern culture and traditions. This undoubtedly contributed much to his present obscurity. Andyet, given the current ascendancyof conservatism, Davidson's career is due for réévaluation. In some ways, he seems far more relevant and prescient than Ransom, Tate, or Warren today. The winners write the history, and Davidson alUed himselfwith the conservative movement in the 1940s and 1950s. He saw the potency ofa raciaUst politics ofculture in the South, anticipating the Republican Party's "southern strategy" by a number ofyears. Davidson early aligned himselfwith the Dbdecrat rebels within the Democratic Party; many Southerners would Ukewise leave the Democrats in the future. In his devout loyalty to the Confederate cause, he was the avatar of the huge Confederate nostalgia industry that attracts so many adherents today, from such distinguished figures as SenatorTrent Lott to the Civil War reenactors starving themselves to attain a properly haggard look.1 Moreover, Davidson was acutely aware of the way in which modernization undercut the taproot ofhis own cultural and social identity. This awareness was at the core of his Ufe's work. Far from being an anachronism, Davidson looms as one ofthe most instructive ofsouthern conservatives. Scholars have little appreciated Davidson 's ability as a cultural historian and, in a sense, as a cultural poUtician. Partial evidence of this lies in the way Davidson carefully crafted the historical memory of the most important coUective project ofhis Ufe—the writing ofI'll Take My Stand. His friends came to beUeve that Davidson could not get over his earlyAgrarianism and dismissed him because ofhis sometimes difficult personalityand the fact that, in theirview, he just did not seem to grow, to evolve. Davidson stubbornly held to what he conceived Agrarianism to be. Yetitis interestingtonote the malleabiUty ofDavidson's memory. In 1930 the Agrarians had railed against industrial capitalism because it damaged the sources of southern culture and values. What they diemselves felt distinguished their anti-modern manifesto from other Uterary symposia ofthe period—and specificallyfrom the quite similar anti-modern musings oftheir chief rivals, the New Humanists, led bythe prominent academics Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More—was their ability to situate their criticism ofmodern culture in a Uving social and historical context. Culture is not some soft material poured into socialvessels from the top, they argued. Rather, a social and economic context precedes and conditions cultural forms. With the quixotic claim that the South should, at least in part, renounce the promise of industrialization and modernization—this as...

A Peculiarly Southern Form of Ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor

Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor have all acknowledged in one way or another ugliness that saturates their fictional worlds, an ugliness that is so frequently embodied--literally--in their female characters. (1) In this essay, I concentrate on those texts which are most readily recognized as grotesque--Welty's A Curtain of Green, McCullers' The Ballad of Sad Cafe, and O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find (2)--in order to reinvigorate an understanding of a peculiarly southern form of ugliness. Concentrating on female grotesques, I want to suggest that these freakish women that so loudly dominate these stories engage in a politics of dissent. And this occurs on two levels. Firstly, raucous women in Welty's, McCullers', and O'Connor's fiction challenge idealised and, needless to say, oppressive visions of white southern womanhood--the southern lady and southern belle--that have dominated southern gender regimes from antebellum period right up to present. Secondly, contorted and fragmented bodies that fill these writers' stories at same time own up to a tragic history in which they have partaken, even if in silence. Such a history not only revolves around burdensome models of femininity, but also slavery and its tragic legacy and a literally fatal regional patriotism, and it becomes marked on bodies of Welty's, McCullers', and O'Connor's women, just as spidery scars on Seth's back write over and over violent history of slavery and racism in Toni Morrison's Beloved. First we must ponder why it is female body in particular that has become a contested site of southern history and politics. Anne Goodwyn Jones stresses importance of female body in southern culture: body of privileged white woman was revered as a marble statue, a Grecian urn, a human body that by nature resembled finest productions of masculine art. As such, it needed protection from vandals.... [F]or white men, this image implied purity of blood and thus of white patriarchal lineage: white supremacy a [sic] well as male line of succession and inheritance were guaranteed by chastity and desirelessness.... Dividing women into categories--black and white, lady and woman--was one way to maintain a sense of control.... The white woman's fragility further guaranteed distance from earthy interests and gave man an opportunity to construct his own manhood in protecting her. (3) Jones' account is insightful. While southern white woman's value was invested in body, she was at same time dis-embodied: her fragility further guaranteed distance from earthy interests. Her position is thus a tortured one, torn between image and reality. Elsewhere, Jones includes two accounts from first decades of twentieth century that further attest to foregrounding of women's bodies in southern culture. One clergyman warned of dangers of antithesis of southern lady and belle, that is, a new northern style of woman, who had developed hands, bigger feet, higher cheek bones, lanker limbs, flatter chests, hook noses, lips thin and tight. Here, movement away from feminine ideal transforms a female body into an androgynous, sterile one, type of ugly body we frequently encounter in Welty's, McCullers' and O'Connor's fiction. Another observer remarked that the rapidity with which [white southern] women have aged in past, their invalidism, mental breakdown and early death have been in part because of strain of concealing irritation that was not permitted self-expression. (4) Once more, painful experience of southern womanhood is lived on and marks body. Historians now generally acknowledge that ideal of southern womanhood has always been bound up with south's particular relationship to race. (5) Even as recently as Civil Rights Movement, conservatives appealed to this ideal in order to resist changes to insidious system of Jim Crow. …

Jean Toomer's Eternal South

"This book is the South," declared Waldo Frank in the 1923 foreword to his friend Jean Toomer's Cane (Frank 138). Toomer's fresh, new treatment of southern folk, he averred, made Cane "a harbinger of the South's literary maturity" (139). Yet neither man was southern. Frank was a white northeasterner who had visited the South on three occasions then wrote a bad novel, Holiday, ineptly interpreting southern culture and lynching. For his part, Jean Toomer visited the Deep South only twice, totaling less than three months. Nonetheless his own anonymous review of Cane, intended for publication in The Call, emphasized his achievement in depicting the South. 1 Noting the emergence of contemporary regionalists such as Frost, Sandburg, Masters, and Sherwood Anderson, he claimed that in the South, too, "a splendid birth was imminent" (Jones, Selected Essays 11). As to Cane, despite its inclusion of considerable material not set in Georgia, he emphasized that it all "is so evidently Southern in content" (15).

South to the Future: An American Region in the Twenty-first Century (review)

Until recently, the American South has often been treated in isolation by historians and literature scholars. In these essays five scholars of southern history and literature evaluate elements of contemporary - and future - southern experience, including place, community, culture, class, gender, and racial roles. Fred Hobson observes in his introductory essay that the U.S. South must be seen in relation to a larger world - the Caribbean and Central and South America, as well as European countries with a similar grounding in hardship and defeat. Moreover, the South can no longer be viewed in black-and-white terms - especially if the subject is race. Joel Williamson's essay challenges fellow historians to broaden their purview by getting acquainted with Gone with the Wind, Elvis Presley, and other phenomena of southern culture(s). Linda Wagner-Martin discusses the innovative ways that contemporary southern writers such as Charles Frazier take on traditional southern concerns and shows us how place becomes space for Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, and other southern-born writers whose works are often set outside the geographical South. Thadious Davis looks at the youngsters of southern poetry, fiction, and drama, revealing how their work reflects a racially and ethnically mixed, digitized, and otherwise reconfigured South. In the writings of Shay Youngblood, Randall Kenan, Donna Tartt, Mona Lisa Salloy, and others, one can see the collapsing of distinctions between the literary and the popular, and a greater comfort with social fluidity and mobility. The concluding essay by Edward Ayers, set in 2076, offers a witty glimpse of things-perhaps-to-come. Through a series of short dispatches from a sixteen-year-old narrator of Scottish-Ghanian-Honduran-Korean-Cherokee descent, Ayers transports us to the Consolidated South that counts Incarceration Incorporated among its largest employers. As these writings signal new depths and directions in southern historical and literary studies, they compose a witty and erudite album of snapshots, revealing a region on the verge of big changes.

Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class (review)

Hank Williams once remarked on the important connections between so-called hillbilly music and the hardscrabble rural backgrounds of its singers. "He sings more sincere than most entertainers," Williams explained, "because the hillbilly was raised rougher than most entertainers. You got to know a lot about hard work. You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly." Southern white working people probably made their single greatest contribution to American popular culture with country music. From its humble beginnings, the music has risen to become a multi-billion dollar global industry, so popular internationally, in fact, that it is not uncommon to find Japanese bluegrass bands and German rockabillies. Now, Bill C. Malone, professor emeritus of history at Tulane University and one of the leading authorities on country music, explores the southern, working-class origins and development of the music in his insightful new book, Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class. One of the pioneers of serious country music scholarship, he has written or edited four well-received books on the subject, including Country Music, U.S.A. (originally published in 1968, revised and enlarged in 1985), which remains the definitive history. But Malone was a fan of country music long before [End Page 102] he became its most distinguished scholar, and insights about southern culture and music drawn from his working-class youth in east Texas during the 1930s and 1940s inform Don't Get Above Your Raisin'.

Review: Highland Heritage in the USA

In Scottish Affairs no. 35 (Spring 2001), cultural anthropologist Celeste Ray challenged Edward Sebesta's questionable allegations in Scottish Affairs, no. 31 (Spring 2000) linking a sinister white supremacist 'Neo-Confederate Movement' in the American South with a nationwide post-World War II Scottish-American heritage revival movement that is especially strong in the Southern states. Ray took Sebesta to task for misquoting and misrepresenting her descriptions of the Scottish heritage movement in a 1998 Southern Cultures article encapsulating key points of her recently published book Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans In The American South.

"What Else Could a Southern Gentleman Do?": Quentin Compson, Rhett Butler, and Miscegenation

Nineteen thirty-six was a banner year for both historical and southern novel. It witnessed publication of Gone with Wind, most successful novel ever written in either genre in America, and Absalom, Absalom!, most complex and important work of historical fiction of South's most enduring and talented novelist. The coincidental timing of these two novels, (1) while not necessary to ensure importance of either, does provide an ideal starting point for a comparison between two. And such a comparison goes far deeper than merely timing or genre, (2) as two novels, and particularly development of two of their central figures, epitomize two key strains of southern thought about past and about issue of race in that past, two interpretations of history which were coming into conflict at precisely moment of this coincidental joint publication. Quentin Compson's development, from obedient southern boy to questioning Harvard student to tormented old soul, is paralleled by development of his understanding of central role of miscegenation in southern culture and of guilt of South in denying its existence. Similarly, Rhett Buffer's growth from cynical, self-absorbed critic of Old South to nostalgic southern gentleman is directly caused by his deepened sense of possibility and consequently dangers of miscegenation in Reconstruction South. Mitchell's view reflected--or, more exactly, projected to millions of Americans--the standard historical interpretation of Reconstruction in first three decades of twentieth century, while Faulkner's analysis resembled revisionist interpretations of contemporary historians such as W. E. B. DuBois and W.J. Cash. In this essay, I will give most of my attention to two novels, and particularly to development of those two characters; however, in conclusion I will examine way in which novels fit into, critique, and interact with broader context of southern historical thought in mid-1930s. The use of African American characters and themes to develop and enrich characterizations of whites is hardly unique to these two novels, of course. As novelist and critic Toni Morrison persuasively argues in her short but brilliant work, Playing in Dark, American novelists have used African Americans for that purpose for as long as there has been an America. However, Morrison is most interested in whiteness to which those novelists turn as a response to blackness they portray, what she calls the impenetrable whiteness that surfaces in American literature whenever an Africanist presence is engaged (32). Because of that focus, and because she sees African American characters as allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked (17), Morrison does not delve deeply enough into statements--conscious or subconscious--about interracial relations that can be found in many of those novels. A similar focus can be found in a very different recent work, Grace Elizabeth Hale's Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in South, 1890-1940. Like Morrison, Hale sees southern construction of whiteness as largely based on a parallel construction of blackness. Her striking first sentence, To be American is to be both black and white (3), suggests that her analysis, unlike Morrison's, will focus on interconnectedness of two races, and thus give equal time to each. Yet this is not case, and Hale's largely one-sided focus is most evident in her misreading of importance of race in Gone with Wind. Writing about that novel's Ku Klux Klan ride, Hale argues that it serves no racial role in novel because Mitchell constructs no racial (263). It is, however, precisely a racial drama that drives much of action of novel's second half, a drama that leads to drastic changes in Rhett Butler's character and opinions, which I will discuss later. …

Selected List of Periodicals on the South and Southern Culture

An annotated list is presented describing eighteen periodicals that cover significant aspects of the South and Southern culture in whole or in part. The titles included are a selective and representative sampling. The entry for each periodical includes the following information: periodical title, publisher/editor and address, basic information, publication data, content, Internet information and an abstract/annotation.

An Early and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms

Art Early and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms. Edited by John Caldwell Guilds and Charles Hudson. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. iii, 604. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $39.95.)For some time now, John C. Guilds has led a dedicated drive to the recovery and revivification of the writings of William Gilmore Simms. Guilds has written a full biography and has edited an anthology sampling Simms's many genres, not to mention tirelessly encouraging Simms studies through conferences. In this latest venture, he teams up with anthropologist Charles Hudson to focus on one theme: Simms' s literary use of southeastern American Indians. An Early and Strong Sympathy brings together most of the essays, letters, short stories, and poetry (but not, clearly, the novels or histories) where Simms used Indian characters or themes. It is a thick book, which of course it would be, given Simms' s extraordinary output. Included here are stories familiar to Simms readers (Caloya: The Loves of a Driver, Jocassee: A Cherokee Legend), plus many hard-to-find nonfiction essays and a full account of his Indian poetry, much of which was previously unpublished.It is best to ask up front what the intent of such a collection might be. Guilds has been properly anxious to call more attention to Simms, whose reputation languished on the margins for most of a century after his death in 1870. That period of neglect is decidedly over now, partly because of Guilds and partly because antebellum southern intellectual history is itself a hot field and Simms must and should play a central role in its evolution. This revival presents its own problems, as Guilds points out. Renewed interest is fine, but too often Simms gets treated as the planter class's pet litterateur, a kind of cultural artifact. The actual Simms was contradictory and ambivalent, at once in love with southern culture and at war with it. was a complex iconoclast (xiii) whose considerable talents displayed a sensitivity and ambiguity that is easy to overlook. Pursuing a single theme through his writings is to follow a mind that was curious and restless and evolutionary. As a topical exploration of Simms's changing attitudes, this anthology is superb.As an examination of Indian culture in the Old Southwest, on the other hand, it is necessarily limited. Charles Hudson's introductory essay on the ethnographical potential in Simms's writings is candid. Simms, Hudson notes, lacked the knowledge and skills to understand the complexities of Indian culture. He viewed it as an appropriate subject for belles lettres, not as an exotic human institution that begged for explanation(xxxxix). This is a sensible caution. Simms tried in his own way to make his stories as accurate as possible, but he was the first to admit that historical fact could not contain his imagination. he wrote to instruct and to capture the genius of a people or a time, so he gave his inventiveness free play. Many of his stories were myths of place-tales concocted to explain the origins of so many Indian place-names-and show almost nothing of actual Indian culture. More commonly, he tended to take universal plots of love and revenge and place them in Indian settings, and much of his characterization of Indian kinship relations and power structures was more European than native American.If we learn little about Indians, we nonetheless learn quite a bit about Simms. What is most striking is his willingness to challenge-through the use of Indian scenarios-two sacrosanct conventions of white culture. …

Robert E. Lee, George Peabody, and Sectional Reunion

In the Reconstruction years some of the few centers of Southern culture were the Springs of Virginia. At White Sulphur Springs in August, 1869, occurred the earliest gesture of friendliness the South made toward the North after the Civil War. Robert E. Lee and George Peabody were the chief actors in this drama. Lee, Virginian and West-Pointer, had chosen to lead the Confederate Army in war. Peabody, Northern-born banker with many Southern friends, had supported the Union financially. Now, after the war and in their old age, both men had turned to the reviving power of education. Spurning many lucrative business offers, Lee had preferred to become president in 1865 of impoverished Washington College in Lexington, Virginia. Disdaining a life of extravagance his wealth made possible, Peabody had climaxed his career by creating a multimillion dollar education fund for the defeated Southern and Southwestern states. For Lee at sixty-two this was next to the last summer of life; for Peabody at seventyfour it was the very last summer of life. It was by pure coincidence that Peabody, Lee, and eight other former Confederate generals and several prominent educators gathered at the Old White Sulphur Springs that summer. Peabody had arrived from Massachusetts by way of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore on July 23, about two weeks before Lee. Peabody was very feeble, crippled with rheumatism so that he could hardly walk, and suffering badly

The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s–1880s. By Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001) 395 pp. $55.00 cloth $19.95 paper

<i>The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s–1880s</i>. By Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001) 395 pp. $55.00 cloth $19.95 paper

The Conquest of Labor: Daniel Pratt and Southern Industrialization

The Conquest of Labor: Daniel Pratt and Southern Industrialization. By Curtis J. Evans. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Pp. 337. Illustrations. $49.95.) Daniel Pratt, a New Hampshire carpenter's apprentice, sailed to Georgia in 1819 seeking work that would help pay his master's debts. Pratt succeeded and then returned to set up shop in the new capital, Milledgeville. By 1827, the transplanted Yankee become a man of substance and a slaveholder, a development he defended to his father with the commonplace evasion that he had brought no man to bondage (7). Pratt relocated to Alabama in the flush times of the 1830s. There he erected a cotton gin factory and cotton mill in an Autauga County village that would bear his name. By 1860, this sixth-generation New Englander manufactured more gins than anyone in America and owned more than a hundred slaves. He shed his ambivalence about the peculiar institution, as evidenced by several proslavery letters sent to New Hampshire newspapers. His reputation crystallized as a northern man who embraced southern culture and a Whig who urged industrialization aided by publicly-- financed banks, internal improvements, and railroads. Elected to the Alabama legislature in the secession winter, Pratt went with his adopted state and supported the Confederate war effort after his cooperationist views were rejected. After the Civil War, an aging Pratt lent his prestige to the creation of the iron industry in Birmingham before his death in 1873. Throughout, Pratt championed education, the arts, and the cause of temperance in much the same manner of contemporary factory owners in New England. Curtis J. Evans offers his account of the life of Daniel Pratt less as a biography than as an examination of the town, businesses, and public policies that Pratt sponsored. Evans wants to revisit questions that have been on southern historians' agendas since the days of Rupert Vance and Broadus Mitchell: Was the antebellum South hostile to industrialization and urbanization? If so, did such hostility arise from the political domination of planters who rejected an emerging world of bourgeois culture, a la Eugene Genovese? Was putative opposition to state-supported industrial capitalism immutable or was it giving way to new ideas in the 1850s, per J. Mills Thornton's assessment in Politics and Power in a Slave Society (1978)? Finally, what was the tenor of public culture in a southern mill town like Prattville, vis-a-vis such supposedly northern developments as reform movements focused on education or temperance? Evans's analytic framework implicitly regards rural industrialization and its accompanying social evolutions of New England or Mid-Atlantic towns as the norm for the middle third of the nineteenth century. Evaluating what happened in Prattville as comparable, Evans asks whether the town represents a genuinely southern-inspired counterpart or should instead be viewed as an alien growth imported by Pratt and maintained solely by his zeal. …