Southern Historical Association Research Articles

NATIONAL ACADEMIC ASSOCIATIONS OF AMERICAN HISTORIANS AS PARTICIPANTS OF HISTORICAL POLITICS IN THE USA

The aim of the study is to examine the activities of professional academic associations in the U.S., which are close to the memory institutions in Europe. The author examines the role of professional associations as memory institutions in the development of memorial culture through the representation of the past in contemporary politics, its reflection in public and public spaces of American society. The novelty of the study lies in the comparison of institutions that determine the main vectors and trajectories of historical policy as memory policy in the United States. The article analyses the problems of the activities of institutionalized actors of collective memory policy in the U.S., including the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. It hypothesizes that these groups can shape civil society versions of collective memory as alternatives to politically motivated use of the past by political elites. The article deals with the institutional and formal features of historical politics in the United States, the participation of historical associations in memorial conflicts and “memory wars”, issues of politicization of history and the academic community’s attempts at forming a canon of historical collective memory which is formally free from ideological influences. The activities of professional historical associations have supposedly been a factor in the development of revisionism in the interpretation of the history of the American South and the Confederate States of America. Therefore, the author considers the role and responsibility of American historians as public intellectuals who shaped compromise versions of memorial culture that contributed to the consolidation of society. The article highlights the contribution of professional historical associations as memory institutions to the development of mnemonic spaces of American society and its memorial culture. It analyses the attempts of American historians to preserve the “purity” of academic research in the context of the growing ideologization and instrumentalization of history by ruling elites. The research results suggest that memory institutions are an important factor in the development of contemporary identities in the United States in the context of revision of the past and the formation of new or alternative memorial canons in American political culture.

Time and Place, Time and Chance

Time and Place, Time and Chance Sebastian N. Page (bio) Editors’ Note: The following essay is the acceptance speech for the Tom Watson Brown Book Award, conferred on the best book published on the Civil War era in 2021. Tad Brown, president of the Watson-Brown Foundation, awarded the prize to Sebastian N. Page for Black Resettlement and the American Civil War, published by Cambridge University Press. Page delivered his speech during the Southern Historical Association’s annual meeting on November 11, 2022, in Baltimore, Maryland. The Society of Civil War Historians judges and administers the book prize. I’d like to thank the Society of Civil War Historians, the Watson-Brown Foundation, and the prize jury for this huge honor. I’d also like to thank, by name, Tad Brown, Joan Waugh, Lesley Gordon, Andy Lang, Dave Thomson, and Jim Marten. This is a night of firsts. It’s my first time in the United States . . . since 2019, for the same reason it’s the first “analog” meeting of the Southern in three years. It’s also my first appearance at any conference other than BrANCH, the Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians. For the prize, it’s the first time it has gone to an Englishman. There are two exceptionally generous awards in US history: this one and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Each has been won by a Briton just once—the Lincoln Prize by Richard Carwardine in 2004. While I’m gratified to note that Richard and I are both graduates of the University of Oxford, I’m delighted to say that we’re also graduates of Corpus Christi, the smallest—and evidently the best!—of Oxford’s historical colleges. Being associated with Richard’s name brings me such pleasure that I’ve just made sure to plant that association in your mind. I’m also the first winner of the Tom Watson Brown Book Award to declare themself a failed academic. But I’ve always suspected I’m a decent historian, which this evening’s events may confirm. Still, I tried and tried [End Page 147] again for an academic position and failed—ergo, “failed academic.”1 Others may spurn the f-word and identify as academics off the tenure track or even outside higher education—and that, too, is valid. Although I wouldn’t claim to represent those who didn’t make it, I will observe that my sort is underrepresented at conferences compared with tenured professors and graduate students who haven’t failed to make it . . . yet. So I’d like to thank every advisor honest enough, with themselves as much as anyone, to alert their students to the state of the market and at least speak respectfully of mainstream careers. And I’d like to highlight my own situation, which comes under the much-overlooked category of “employment allowing for study,” rather than “employment incorporating study skills.” I’m a weekend receptionist at Hertford College, another constituent college of the University of Oxford. From Monday to Friday, I do my own research, and from Saturday to Sunday, I do my own research, those being quiet days at the front desk. I’m lucky: I’m all about the research and get by with part-time employment because my needs are modest. From tonight, they’re even more so. Thanks to the Watson-Brown Foundation, I’m receiving a check for more than twice my gross annual salary. The charity is about to endow the independence of this researcher for life—and for that, I am, by definition, eternally grateful. And what’s my research like? Well, it’s thorough. I despair of summarizing a work that encompasses thirty countries and stretches from the 1770s to the 1890s. Don’t let the title fool you: it’s Black Resettlement and the American Civil War, not in or during, because any survey of the nineteenth century’s many schemes to separate black Americans from white must climax in the 1860s, a claim that might dismay some scholars. I didn’t set out to write this book, and I suspect several historians would rather I hadn’t written it, too. My intended PhD project...

Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime by Alecia P. Long

Reviewed by: Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime by Alecia P. Long Michael Wade Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime. By Alecia P. Long. Boundless South. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 247. $28.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6273-2.) Cruising for Conspirators: How a New Orleans DA Prosecuted the Kennedy Assassination as a Sex Crime analyzes Jim Garrison’s 1969 prosecution of retired executive Clay Shaw for his alleged part in an illusory New Orleans–based conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In providing crucial historical context for this crusade, Louisiana State University history professor Alecia P. Long argues that Garrison’s “homosexual thrill killing” campaign emanated from the Crescent City’s homophobic criminal justice system and public fascination with conspiracy theories linked to uncertainties about the post-assassination Warren Commission report (p. 108). With impressive research, abundant detail, and careful analysis, Long has crafted a convincing story of intolerance and abuse of power in that era. By 1960, New Orleans reformers and state legislators had “weaponized homophobia” with laws that linked homosexuality with criminal deviance (p. 8). This climate enabled first-termer Garrison’s new reason for President Kennedy’s assassination, focused on gays in the French Quarter. The Big Easy might be soft on organized crime, but not on deviance. Allegations that New Orleans native Lee Harvey Oswald was homosexual surfaced soon after JFK’s death. Airline pilot David Ferrie and the shadowy Clay Bertrand were the first mentioned. The Warren Commission was skeptical but was worried about connections between criminality and gays. So were the report’s critics. Jim Garrison was one of them. Reelected in 1966, as arrests of homosexuals were outpacing every other criminal category, Garrison returned to the stories discounted by the Warren Commission. Based on a new informant’s testimony, he homed in on Clay Shaw, thought to have used Clay Bertrand as an alias. This pursuit led to Shaw’s arrest in early 1967 and the subsequent exposure of his private life. Though he steadfastly maintained his innocence, Louisiana’s lax discovery laws ensured his indictment, while the “circus atmosphere” in the period preceding his January 1969 trial made his life a living hell (p. 119). An all-male jury required only fifty minutes to find him not guilty. Shaw later filed a civil suit claiming damages for violation of his civil rights. Finally decided after his death, it was unsuccessful. Long’s book is a worthy addition to Kennedy assassination literature because it reveals the dangers of conspiracy theories. Garrison further tarnished the image of New Orleans, already in tatters in the wake of the 1960 school desegregation crisis. Given today’s unsteady state of the Union and the existential perils of climate change, Americans should examine the threats posed by the conspiracy theorists and magical thinkers purporting to explain our circumstance. Ideas, both good and bad, are important. Knowing the difference between the good and the bad is absolutely critical. [End Page 395] Michael Wade Appalachian State University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales by Cynthia E. Orozco

Reviewed by: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales by Cynthia E. Orozco Rolando Avila Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales. By Cynthia E. Orozco. Foreword by Julián Castro. Hispanic Civil Rights Series. (Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 2022. Pp. xxxviii, 537. Paper, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-55885-896-1.) Cynthia E. Orozco’s stated purpose in her new book Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales is to rectify a deficiency in the historical record. Orozco explains that even though Alonso S. Perales (1898–1960) was a major civil rights leader, he “has largely been forgotten” (p. xix). [End Page 376] However, that is not entirely true. Perales’s own works are still on library shelves. Although Perales died in 1960 “before the field of Chicano history in the academy existed,” significant works on Perales were indeed published beginning in the 1970s (p. xix). For example, Adela Sloss-Vento published Alonso S. Perales: His Struggle for the Rights of Mexican-Americans (San Antonio, Tex., 1977), and Michael Olivas published In Defense of My People: Alonso S. Perales and the Development of Mexican-American Public Intellectuals (Houston, Tex., 2012). While it may be true that Perales is not as prominent in the literature as he should be—he remains absent, for example, from the American National Biography—he is included in numerous Mexican American reference works, anthologies, and monographs. However, compared with writings about other groups in American history, the dearth of Mexican American political biographies remains glaring. In this regard, Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights is a welcome addition to the literature and will surely become Perales’s standard biography for years to come. Orozco’s book is, to date, the most extensive study of Perales’s life and work. She presents an engaging, well-organized narrative. Twenty-four chapters deal with Perales’s poor upbringing in Texas, military service during World War I, education, political activities, law practice, work as a U.S. diplomat, religion, character, family life, friends, adversaries, events leading to his death, and controversies. The author artfully uses historiography to frame this narrative, and each chapter is bookended by introductory remarks and concluding thoughts. One of the biggest strengths of Orozco’s work here is her use of an extremely large number of available sources, including archival material that was not available to other researchers until recent years. In fact, approximately one-third of the book is composed of supporting documentation, including a selected bibliography (divided by types of sources), a timeline of major events, and extensive notes for each chapter. In sum, the last third of the book is a gold mine for any prospective researcher in this field. Nevertheless, the absence of an index is a major drawback. As a champion for the civil rights of Mexican Americans, Perales was instrumental in the establishment of the Order Sons of America (Orden Hijos de América) in 1921 and the Latin American Citizens League in 1927. In 1929, these two organizations merged to form the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which is still active today. Perales was recognized for his contributions with several honors during his lifetime, the highest of which was awarded to him by Spain in 1952 to honor his advocacy for Spanish-speaking people. It is regrettable that Perales’s contributions were overlooked during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but he is no longer forgotten thanks to conscientious writers like Orozco. Orozco does not shy away from controversies. She makes every effort to present her subject accurately. However, her advocacy for Perales becomes apparent when she confronts critics. This is not a negative. It is part of the book’s overall purpose that the author masterfully achieves. Over the span of this expansive biography, Orozco makes a compelling and well-documented case for Perales’s great importance as a pioneer of Mexican American civil rights. [End Page 377] Rolando Avila University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer by Davis W. Houck

Reviewed by: Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer by Davis W. Houck Julie Buckner Armstrong Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer. By Davis W. Houck. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022. Pp. xiv, 153. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4078-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4079-0.) Davis W. Houck’s small book raises big questions about Freedom Summer. Coming in at 127 pages, not counting notes, Black Bodies in the River: Searching for Freedom Summer examines two intersecting historical memories. One is the murder of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James E. Chaney, whose deaths became a touchstone for the 1964 summer when college students from across the country, most of them white, converged on Mississippi to register Black voters and work in Black communities. Another is the belief that, during the search for the three men after they disappeared, federal authorities discovered multiple unidentified Black bodies (more than two dozen in some accounts) in the state’s rivers, swamps, and bayous. Why, Houck asks, did the names “Goodman-Schwerner-Chaney” evolve into “the six syllables that today form something of an American civil rights anthem,” while two Black men whose bodies were found around the same time—Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee— wound up largely forgotten (p. 8)? And what are historians today to make of the unsubstantiated but persistent claims of books, films, songs, museums, and more that Mississippi’s waterways were awash with far more bodies than those of Moore and Dee? Houck structures his exploration of these questions in an unconventional manner: not by chapters but into sections headed by quotations from the events’ various actors. The book thus operates as a long essay or meditation on the myth, and meaning, of Freedom Summer. In the first half, Houck examines an important but less widely known precursor. The 1963 Freedom Vote set the stage for bringing white college students to Mississippi on a large-scale basis. Their presence was considered newsworthy, unlike Black residents’ grassroots organizing and the persistent violence their communities faced. Houck describes Freedom Summer as a tactic of leveraging racism against itself to create change. An unintended consequence of this tactic was how the students’ presence—along with the deaths of Goodman, Schwerner, and [End Page 388] Chaney (even though the latter was Black)—bolstered a white savior myth. Claims of multiple “Black bodies pulled out of rivers,” Houck explains, call into “question the centrality of murdered white men in the larger story of Freedom Summer” (pp. 71, 9). In the book’s second half, he explores how these claims originated in the deaths of Moore and Dee, killed by the Ku Klux Klan and discovered by two people fishing, not, as erroneously reported, in the search for the missing civil rights workers. The story took on a life of its own, erasing Moore’s and Dee’s names and expanding the number of bodies, first in folk songs and later through academic studies and documentary films about Mississippi and Freedom Summer, eventually making its way into historical markers and school curricula. Some readers might want more discussion of why figures such as historian John Dittmer and the creators of the documentary series Eyes on the Prize accepted without criticism claims not supported by evidence. Comparisons with other violent events that became fodder for urban legend might also provide broader context. Still, Houck provides an excellent case study of how historical facts coalesce into stories accepted as “truth.” Julie Buckner Armstrong University of South Florida Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria W. Wolcott

Reviewed by: Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria W. Wolcott Alison Collis Greene Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement. By Victoria W. Wolcott. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. x, 262. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-226-81725-5.) Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement links several cohorts of twentieth-century utopian radicals who worked to build a world they envisioned in the midst of one they lamented. Among the broader range of liberal and radical freedom movements, Victoria W. Wolcott focuses on utopians tied by an emphasis on racial and economic justice and a commitment to cooperative economics, interracialism, and nonviolent direct action. This “matrix of intentional communities” included key members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and, later, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) (p. 10). Wolcott argues that these utopians—all well-documented individually—together “situated utopian interracialism and radical nonviolence at the center of the civil rights movement” (p. 10). Wolcott’s first chapter opens with “The Workers” at Brookwood Labor College in New York, founded in 1921 by the pacifist Christian labor organizer A. J. Muste, and Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, established by Myles Horton in 1932. The workers’ education movement “went beyond trade unionism to advocate for a new and more just world that would embrace racial and gender equality” (p. 18). Brookwood and Highlander provided a practical democratic education to many women and created “a new generation of Black activists,” including Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, and Rosa Parks (p. 18). This chapter establishes an argument central to the socialist utopianism of the 1920s and 1930s that Wolcott traces directly into the civil rights movement: that “the working classes could only rise on the basis of full racial equality,” and that Black workers in particular faced myriad forms of individual and systemic injustice based specifically on race and not reducible to class (p. 17). To live into a future of racial and economic justice in the midst of the profoundly segregated North was difficult and often dangerous; to do so in the Jim Crow South could be deadly. Chapter 2, “The Cooperators,” explores the Christian socialist dreams that shaped Delta and Providence farms, two agricultural cooperatives constructed to house displaced Black and white sharecroppers in Depression-era Mississippi. As historian Robert Hunt Ferguson has recently argued in his book Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (Athens, Ga., 2018), the farmers’ own dreams carried them through two remarkable decades of work before they fell to racism from within and without. “The Divinites” of chapter 3 proved “the most successful utopian community in the twentieth century”; theirs is not coincidentally also the first Black-led movement that Wolcott discusses (p. 88). Following the lead of scholars Judith Weisenfeld and Father Divine biographer Jill Watts, Wolcott analyzes both the religious and the political work of the Peace Mission movement to demonstrate the real-world value of a utopian vision in which class, racial, and gender hierarchies (and even gendered difference) did not exist and where self-sufficiency came from shared resources and vision. Chapters 4 and 5, “The Fellowshippers” and “The Pacifists,” follow the utopian dreams of the pre–World War II era into Cold War antiradicalism and [End Page 391] the freedom movements led by FOR, CORE, and the inheritors of the prewar socialist Left. Here, Wolcott focuses on a number of outward-facing communes, from cooperative farms to the Catholic Worker movement to the Harlem Ashram. Wolcott contrasts—and defends—these activists’ radical, provocative, and nonviolent interracialism with the ameliorative liberal interracialism of more conventional white-led organizations. Wolcott demonstrates a coherence of vision across civil rights efforts where historians have more often seen fracture and rupture. This is not a consensus history, but it is a history of coherent, deeply rooted, and ideologically cohesive dissent—and a plea for its continuation. Alison Collis Greene Emory University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199 by John Hennen

Reviewed by: A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199 by John Hennen O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199. By John Hennen. West Virginia and Appalachia. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2021. Pp. x, 260. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-952271-24-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-952271-23-6.) A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199 is an important contribution to the scholarship that examines the complexities of labor organizing. Utilizing both local and national lenses, John Hennen traces the evolution of Local 1199 from its early days as a union for pharmacists and drugstore employees founded in Depression-era New York City through the merger that joined it with the Service Employees International Union in 1989. Hennen positions the members of Local 1199’s chapters in Appalachia as some of the twentieth century’s [End Page 398] most notable organizers of healthcare workers, and he explores their radicalism and local activism. Labor scholars continue to do the work of expanding the discourse and exploring the complex nature of a history that has yet to be fully uncovered. The radical roots and contested origins of both Local 1199 and its early leaders provide a backdrop for its progress as a militant organization. It is important to note that the union’s radicalism was multifaceted. Hennen discusses the communist backgrounds of early Local 1199 leaders. Historically, the interests of communism and unionization have intersected; however, Hennen argues that this association became an obstacle that members of Local 1199 had to strategically overcome. Building on its communist roots, Local 1199 radicalized labor organizing by focusing on the plight of New York hospital workers during the 1950s and 1960s. Hennen asserts that Local 1199 organized hospital workers during a time when it was not customary to do so. According to the author, hospital workers were considered “forgotten workers” by midcentury organizers, and Local 1199 broke down barriers when they began the work of organizing this particular group (p. 18). Hennen positions the student-led activism of the 1960s and 1970s and the civil rights movement as the backdrop to Local 1199’s efforts to organize Appalachian healthcare workers. He chronicles the influence of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), “the most visible, vocal, publicized, and chastised student mass movement on the political left” of the period, and describes how its initial leftist stance on inclusion, equality, and accountability in American government later expanded to include grievances of the American working class (p. 40). SDS and Local 1199 formed new alliances in the mid-to-late 1960s around a shared concern for the plight of working Americans. Hennen also highlights the inextricable links between the labor and civil rights movements by examining Local 1199’s “Union Power, Soul Power” campaign (p. 49). The 1969 Charleston, South Carolina, hospital workers strike, the union’s first attempt at organizing in the South under this banner, and its subsequent efforts to eradicate the ills that plagued the experiences of African American healthcare workers drew criticism for the union’s attention to issues of race. Hennen argues that, despite these attacks, Local 1199 utilized its connections to student-led organizations and the civil rights movement along with the skills, tactics, and ideals ultimately born from those relationships to build successful campaigns for Appalachian workers. Critiques of this project are minimal. Hennen’s work to shed light on Local 1199 from both national and local perspectives is commendable. The author uses a wide range of sources to weave together a narrative about the complexities of local labor organizing in tandem with other broad-based movements of that era. Positioning Appalachian healthcare workers at the intersection of Local 1199’s organizing, student-led activism, and the civil rights movement offers an opportunity to examine the most critical aspects of America’s protest tradition. A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers is an important contribution to the scholarship. [End Page 399] O. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight Winthrop University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920 by Ballard C. Campbell

Reviewed by: The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920 by Ballard C. Campbell Peter J. Kastor The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920. By Ballard C. Campbell. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. x, 365. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-3256-5; cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-0-7006-3225-8.) In The Paradox of Power: Statebuilding in America, 1754–1920, Ballard C. Campbell attempts nothing less than a grand narrative of how Americans governed themselves in the era before 1920. That is no simple feat. Add to this the fact that he discusses not only the federal government but also state governments, all the while navigating tumultuous changes in governance and politics, and the degree of difficulty (to borrow that familiar phrase from Olympic scoring) increases considerably. Campbell accomplishes his goals with clarity, elegance, and authority. Where this book struggles is equally informative, revealing some of the fundamental challenges in telling the story of statebuilding. Two particular concerns (or two paradoxes, as the title suggests) animate this story. The first is a governmental structure that must wield power in order to achieve its goals despite a political culture with deep anxieties about centralized power. The second is federalism itself, a system created by the Constitution that afforded new powers to the national government while nonetheless preserving important policy-making roles to the states. Tracing the long arc of this narrative of two paradoxes, Campbell has constructed a book divided into two parts, but he really describes three eras of statebuilding. Part 1 discusses the British colonial roots of governance, the crucible of the American Revolution, and the struggle to build effective governance structures under the Constitution. Part 2 shows how that system was transformed by the Civil War, a conflict that refashioned the relationship [End Page 338] between state and federal powers while also granting the federal government new and expansive capacities. This section concludes with a description of the birth of the “modern” state as Progressive reform, bureaucratic theory, and the demands of modernization extended what the Civil War had begun. “Modern” belongs in quotations here because the term is indicative of the difficulties facing Campbell. He is quick to push back against scholars of the twentieth century who have claimed that there was no true “state” in the United States until the emergence of bureaucratic management and social welfare systems. In doing so, he makes a powerful case for seeing early statebuilding on its own terms. If Campbell resists the impulse to normalize the state, he does normalize its locations and its purposes. Most of his examples of the organization and services of states and localities come from the cities and states of the Northeast. Not surprisingly, New York and Boston loom large. In the end, this book generally treats the state as an engine of progress. Enslavement appears most significantly in the context of the federal government’s effort to end the institution during the Civil War, and its struggle with the authority of states during Reconstruction. And yet states and the federal government had a much longer tradition of working together to secure racial supremacy. Campbell acknowledges this history in passing references to Native Americans, but he does not explore the ways that state capacity (whether the invention of uniformed police forces in southern cities, the elaborate civil-military administration of federal territories, or the complex state-level requirements of Jim Crow) expanded to pursue specific racial objectives. Writing in prose that is sophisticated but remains accessible, Campbell eschews the risk of deploying either the jargon or the narrow debates that too often encumber the discussion of statebuilding. The result is a book that situates statebuilding front and center in the American experience, with a clarity of argument that is both thought-provoking and compelling. Peter J. Kastor Washington University in St. Louis Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World by Andrew N. Wegmann

Reviewed by: An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World by Andrew N. Wegmann Darryl G. Barthé An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World. By Andrew N. Wegmann. Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 238. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6078-2; cloth, $114.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6076-8.) Andrew N. Wegmann is a talented researcher who has ventured bravely into the murkiest of historical contexts with his monograph An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World. Histories of race and nation are, presently, among the most treacherous of scholarly discourses, and the author should first be commended for wading into those waters in the first place. Some of his observations are contentious, and it is certain that future scholars will take him to task for an incomplete contextualization of Gulf Coast Creolité and for Indigenous erasure. However, Wegmann has elected to have a hard conversation at a time when many prefer to avoid hard conversations, and that deserves recognition. The book itself is well written. Wegmann accomplishes a skillful navigation of the legal discourses surrounding race across two centuries and three colonial regimes. This is no small feat in itself. At its best, An American Color demonstrates the dialectical progression of racist thought and legislation in Louisiana, showing the consistencies (and/or lack thereof) from one regime to the next. Scholars have long recognized that racial lines in Louisiana were often blurrier and more negotiable before 1803 than in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, under the American regime. That fact can often give the impression that Latin Louisiana was, somehow, more enlightened or tolerant when it came to issues of race and caste. Wegmann does not fall into this trap, however, and rightly observes that every colonial regime in Louisiana—French, Spanish, and American—has been predicated on white supremacy. Yet, in his attempt to emphasize the commonality and experiential continuity between the communities of free people of color in Francophone and Creolophone New Orleans and communities of free African Americans in Anglophone colonial spaces in the United States, one cannot help but feel at times that the author overstates his case. Wegmann attempts to place “New Orleans and its foreign, bizarre, frightening ‘mulattoes and quadroons’ into the narrative of American racial identity and relations during the first half of the nineteenth century” (p. 7). This, however, is an effort that defies nineteenth-century Louisiana Creole people’s own self-identification as neither “American” nor “foreign” to the land where they lived. An American Color does not engage the subject of Louisiana Creole Afro-Indigeneity at all. By the end of his work, Wegmann announces with authority that Creoles in New Orleans were “American. It just took them a while to admit it” (p. 145). This observation, however, is not consistent with New Orleans Creoles’ own [End Page 349] views of themselves during the nineteenth century (or during the first half of the twentieth century, according to primary source accounts left by A. P. Tureaud, Marcus Christian, and Gilbert Martin, among others). In the end, readers are left to wonder at the distance between Wegmann’s perception of nineteenth- century New Orleans Creoles and nineteenth-century New Orleans Creoles’ perception of themselves. One does not have to agree with Wegmann’s conclusions—and often I do not—in order to recognize the skillfulness of his labor. Future scholars of Creole Louisiana will, no doubt, derive some benefit from his efforts. At the same time, I could not read An American Color without being reminded that in Louisiana, French is not taught as a heritage language but as a “foreign” language to people with names like “Boudreaux” and “Poché,” “Broussard” and “Barthé,” even when those people are, as I am, only a generation removed from native Francophones and Creolophones. This is Americanization contemporarily manifested, and, to be certain, Wegmann’s is an American’s history of Creole New Orleans, constructed from the outside looking in, with all that that entails. Darryl G. Barthé Dartmouth University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association...

Fifteen Hurricanes That Changed the Carolinas: Powerful Storms, Climate Change, and What We Do Next by Jay Barnes

Reviewed by: Fifteen Hurricanes That Changed the Carolinas: Powerful Storms, Climate Change, and What We Do Next by Jay Barnes R. Scott Huffard Jr. Fifteen Hurricanes That Changed the Carolinas: Powerful Storms, Climate Change, and What We Do Next. By Jay Barnes. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. x, 374. Paper, $27.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6630-3.) Historians of the South know that this region is haunted by disaster, and they know that these tragedies are more than just intriguing stories—they can reveal and exacerbate existing social tensions. In Fifteen Hurricanes That Changed the Carolinas: Powerful Storms, Climate Change, and What We Do Next, Jay Barnes, the author of several previous books on hurricane history, adds to our understanding of the past, present, and future of one of the most brutal of these southern disasters—the hurricane. Barnes picks fifteen storms from the voluminous historical record and tells the stories of hurricanes including Hazel, Donna, and Hugo—names that, even decades after landfall, still make Carolinians shudder. His prose is accessible and clear, and he skillfully balances the big picture—including the track and meteorological data for each of the selected storms—with gripping personal stories of heroism and tragedy that humanize these disasters. As Barnes notes, impacts from these storms were felt not just on the coasts but also far inland, where heavy rains triggered events like the Asheville Flood of 1916. With an eye to the future, every chapter concludes with a helpful series of “takeaways,” or lessons from each storm. As Fifteen Hurricanes That Changed the Carolinas moves chronologically through the presented storms, Barnes offers a narrative of progress in improved warning systems, forecasting, and state and federal responses. Yet despite all [End Page 402] of these advancements, the book is striking in the continuities it presents. As they have historically, Carolina hurricanes disproportionately impact poorer southerners and communities of color. Barnes describes an 1804 storm that turned slave quarters in the Lowcountry into “hurricane death traps,” and he discusses the Sea Island Hurricane of 1893, which killed thousands of African Americans on coastal islands (p. 39). He also highlights how the endless rains from Hurricanes Florence and Matthew swamped eastern North Carolina’s poorer communities in 2016 and 2018. Poverty has always dictated one’s ability to evacuate or to live outside a floodplain or dangerous river corridor. Perhaps the greatest continuity of all is that Carolinians continue to build and cluster on the coasts even as hurricanes continue to menace the region. Coastal populations and sea levels are rising, all while warming oceans threaten to make future storms even worse. In the final chapter, Barnes delves into the complex debate about climate change and the strength of storms. Conclusions here are understandably murky and potentially ominous, but, sounding a note of optimism, he emphasizes the growing trend toward “resiliency” (p. 339). Those seeking to further investigate these stories may take issue with the absence of footnotes and in-text references. But Barnes does usually try to name newspapers and sources in the prose, so it should not be an onerous task to track down these stories. Historians might also wish for a little more historical context in Barnes’s presentation of storms from before the twentieth century. This narrative is heavily weighted toward more recent hurricanes, so perhaps more engagement with the secondary literature would help better situate earlier storms in their contemporary contexts, more fully explaining how race and class shaped the experiences of Carolinians in these storms. All in all, Fifteen Hurricanes That Changed the Carolinas should serve as an invitation for future scholarship on the impact of hurricanes on southern history. Every one of these storms could conceivably be the focus of a compelling and relevant dissertation or monograph. And as the Carolinas continue to be challenged by tropical weather in an era of climate change, heeding the lessons of the past will be even more important. [End Page 403] R. Scott Huffard Jr. Lees-McRae College Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Surfing the South: The Search for Waves and the People Who Ride Them by Steve Estes

Reviewed by: Surfing the South: The Search for Waves and the People Who Ride Them by Steve Estes Thomas Blake Earle Surfing the South: The Search for Waves and the People Who Ride Them. By Steve Estes. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. [xii], 201. Paper, $19.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6777-5.) Combining history, travelog, and memoir, Steve Estes’s Surfing the South: The Search for Waves and the People Who Ride Them follows the odyssey of Estes and his daughter, Zinnia, as they hunt for surf in an unlikely place: the American South. Stretching from Brownsville to the Chesapeake, the southern coast is hardly known for its waves. The region’s choppy surf is a far cry from the breaks of Waikiki and Malibu that fostered the development of modern surfing. But as Estes shows, the South has incubated a surf culture all its own, one that “reflect[s] many of the major trends that shaped the region and nation since World War II: Cold War militarization, civil rights, the counterculture, the women’s movement, environmentalism, and coastal development” (p. 3). Estes takes an unconventional approach to his subject. In contrast with the staid prose that characterizes much academic writing, Estes weaves together a familiar, and at times humorous, style with the insights and erudition of a professional historian. Surfing the South follows Estes and his daughter as they road-trip along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, leapfrogging from (unheralded) surf breaks in Grand Isle and Pensacola to (unheralded) surf breaks in Daytona Beach and the Outer Banks. Estes is as comfortable musing on the ups and downs of the trip—riding secondhand surfboards, staying in ratty motels, and navigating the father-daughter relationship during the preteen years—as he is analyzing the major currents of twentieth-century southern history that have shaped how surfing has developed in the region. Apart from Estes and his daughter, the other characters who populate this search for the stoke are dozens of southern surfers. At every stop along the way Estes connects with locals intimately familiar with the surf scene. As Estes observes, “anywhere with waves can produce wild surf and even wilder surfers” (p. 3). Through his southern surfari, Estes introduces the reader to characters like a born-again board-rider in Galveston, a Vietnam veteran who found waves to surf wherever Uncle Sam sent him, and a Black surfer in Charleston who rides the waves along a once-segregated beach. These interactions have [End Page 401] produced an invaluable source base that not only provides the foundation for Surfing the South but also is available for future research. Estes conducted more than forty interviews that are now preserved as part of the University of North Carolina’s Southern Oral History Program. Speaking of sources, some readers may be left wanting. The text is free of citations. “Writing without footnotes,” Estes tells us, “felt like performing acrobatics without a net or surfing without a leash” (p. 191). However, if the absence of citations is a trade-off for Estes’s more engaging style, that is a deal this reviewer is more than happy to make. While wave riding may seem far removed from the major currents of southern history, surfing proves to be a valuable opening through which readers can see the South’s modern past. Readers can also see that the region has ties to the maritime world that go beyond cotton shipping, commercial fishing, and oil drilling. In bringing together surfing and the South, Estes has been careful to avoid the kinds of caricaturing that have often been deployed when discussing surfers and southerners alike, identities that Estes himself shares. “I sought a balance,” Estes professes, “between the inherent sympathies of a native southerner and the crucial objectivity of a California outsider. I realized that I was both part of the ‘we’ and the ‘y’all’ of the story” (p. 4). Estes has given historians of surfing and of the South, not to mention historians who are surfers or southerners, a valuable gift. Thomas Blake Earle Texas A&M University at Galveston Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840 by Mark Milton Chambers

Reviewed by: Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840 by Mark Milton Chambers Sonia Toudji Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840. By Mark Milton Chambers. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 258. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-698-8.) Le Pays des Illinois, a region of French Louisiana in the upper Mississippi River Valley, was a theater for early encounters between Europeans and Native [End Page 340] Americans, and eventually became part of the frontiers and borderlands of the United States. This region was first claimed as part of the French empire, was transferred to Spanish control following the Treaty of Paris in 1763, and finally became an American territory after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Consequently, historians of the early United States have tended to overlook the pre-1803 colonial history of this region, often incorporating it into histories of the American West that begin with the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804. In the process, stories of those pre-1803 encounters became part of state-level histories, consigned to their own “colonial” chapter. In Gray Gold: Lead Mining and Its Impact on the Natural and Cultural Environment, 1700–1840, Mark Milton Chambers attempts to recover the history of Kaskaskia, an outpost on the present-day Illinois-Missouri border, where “the meeting between Native Americans and French miners . . . fits, in some sense, in the story of American mining long before the western gold rushes” (p. 7). As the title suggests, Chambers argues that lead mining in this corner of the eighteenth-century West promoted local wealth and improved the national economy in ways similar to the gold and silver mining that shaped the nineteenth-century West. In four chronologically organized chapters, Chambers sets out to remind the reader that the “American West” before the Lewis and Clark expedition was not empty, and that the history of American mining encompasses the mining practices of Native peoples before contact with European empires. The first chapter explores the “prospecting, extracting, and smelting” of lead in the Native communities that established themselves around Kaskaskia (p. 13). Chambers argues that during the eighteenth century, French and Native mining practices “converged” in the Illinois Country (p. 13). Chapter 2 assesses Spanish administrative efforts to increase productivity in the lead mining industry by introducing new methods and technologies. In chapters 3 and 4, the narrative moves into the post-1803 era, with a focus on the consequences of lead mining in the region. Chambers details how an increase in lead production led to environmental problems such as arsenic water pollution. Similarly, he explains how the American industrialization of lead mining, which brought new technologies and practices, negatively impacted the landscape, settlements, and Native Americans. Scholarship on the colonial upper Mississippi Valley has mostly focused on Native-French relations, the fur trade, and frontier histories. Gray Gold revisits those relations while highlighting what Chambers calls a “mining middle ground”—a zone where Euro-American and Native miners learned from one another, blended their prospecting and smelting practices, and created a new alliance centered on mining lead ore (p. 13). Chambers also notes that the literature on mining in the West has traditionally focused on nineteenth-century gold rushes, overlooking the extraction of gray gold in the eighteenth-century West. Thomas Jefferson wrote about lead mining in the Illinois Country in his Notes on the State of virginia in 1785. And as president, Jefferson reported to Congress about the rich lead mines of the Louisiana Purchase, which he hoped would “encourage more Americans to settle in the region for the benefit of national wealth” (p. 103). Gray Gold weaves together several stories over two centuries of history of lead mining in the upper Mississippi Valley. Well researched and wonderfully [End Page 341] written, this book builds on the most recent literature and uses a wide variety of approaches to the history of mining, the West, and Native Americans. Sonia Toudji University of Central Arkansas Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household by Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson

Reviewed by: Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household by Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson Karen A. Johnson Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household. By Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 215. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8139-4665-8.) In Jim Crow America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, employment options for African American women with a minimal level of education were limited to domestic labor and agricultural work, especially in the South. As Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson remind readers in Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household, Black women also constituted the vast majority of domestic servants in southern cities and, to some extent, northern cities during this period. Indeed, the intersections of race, gender, class oppression, and geographical location impacted Black women’s work experiences as domestic servants. This was the case of Mable Jones (1909–1995), the subject of Limited Choices. In 1922, at age thirteen, Jones began a long career in domestic service work that took her to Charlottesville, Virginia, and Larchmont, New York. She worked as a household servant until she was eighty-five, well into an era when many Black women gained entry to occupations beyond domestic labor. In Limited Choices, Abel, a historian, and Nelson, a sociologist, examine Jones’s lived experiences. Abel and Nelson, who are biological sisters, note that they wanted to document Jones’s life because they realized that “although she played a major role in shaping our lives, we knew little about hers” (p. 2). Jones began working for their family as a domestic servant in Washington, D.C., in 1944 and, after World War II, in suburban New York. As they explain, “until 1953, she lived with us for long periods of time doing the cleaning, some of the cooking, and a lot of the childcare” (p. 3). Abel and Nelson, who grew up in a Jewish, upper-middle-class family, note that their research gave them “an opportunity to study the impact of the relational dynamics of race, class, and gender not only in the South but also in an affluent northern suburb, during the 1940s and 1950s” (p. 5). They also argue that their personal stories intertwine [End Page 379] with Jones’s in that her domestic labor allowed them to enjoy a privileged lifestyle, while simultaneously disadvantaging her lifestyle, at the intersections of race, gender, and class. Abel and Nelson draw on primary and secondary sources in order to unpack Jones’s lived experiences as a domestic laborer. They have interviewed her pastor, family members, friends, and acquaintances, read a handful of letters she wrote, examined Black newspapers from Virginia, and watched a 1995 interview with her collected by the Ridge Street Oral History Project. Where appropriate, they also interweave their personal family narrative with Jones’s in an effort to portray her experiences as a domestic worker in the North. Additionally, Abel and Nelson draw from extensive historical and sociological literature on institutionalized racism, classism, and sexism in the United States as a way to reconstruct Jones’s biography in sociohistorical context, thereby revealing a broad and objective understanding of the life that she lived. Jones did not leave behind a diary, a compilation of letters, or other traditional primary sources. I argue that this fact puts major limitations on Abel and Nelson’s understanding of Jones’s own thoughts regarding her experiences with domestic labor and structural oppression. Instead, the reader gets only snippets of Jones’s voice. Despite this limitation, the premise of Limited Choices is unique, and the book makes an important contribution to fields including labor studies, gender studies, African American studies, and American studies, to name a few. Karen A. Johnson University of Utah Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

A Deserving Brother: George Washington and Freemasonry by Mark A. Tabbert

Reviewed by: A Deserving Brother: George Washington and Freemasonry by Mark A. Tabbert Andrew M. Schocket A Deserving Brother: George Washington and Freemasonry. By Mark A. Tabbert. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. xxviii, 271. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8139-4721-1.) Mark A. Tabbert, the author and compiler of this volume, and longtime George Washington scholar Edward G. Lengel, who contributed its introduction, define eighteenth-century Freemasonry and George Washington’s engagement with it as much by what they were not as by what they were. In this respect, while swatting the swirling popular myths concerning its subject, A Deserving Brother: George Washington and Freemasonry falls squarely within mainstream scholarship. Freemasonry emerged from artisanal guild rites in seventeenth-century Scotland, which shaped its terminology and iconography. But by the 1800s, the organization was no longer particularly [End Page 344] Scottish, and it appealed to members of the gentry rather than to craftsmen. Freemasonry did entail a few secret rituals, and a pamphlet or two appeared during the 1700s warning of masonic conspiracy. But despite the fervid imaginings of more recent novels and movies, including the National Treasure film franchise, Freemasonry operated more as a benign, fairly passive, and loose network of men’s social clubs. Freemasonry was aligned with a vaguely non-sectarian Christianity but did not promote deism. Notwithstanding the bizarre Anti-Masonic conspiracy theories of the 1820s and 1830s, Freemasonry seems not to have taken up much mental bandwidth among Revolutionary-era Americans. Similarly, while George Washington was an early member of a masonic lodge in Fredericksburg, Virginia, he was probably not among its founders. He reached the highest of the society’s three levels—“Master Mason”—but never led a chapter (p. 4). Though he supported the establishment of masonic lodges in the Continental army, Washington did not join one, nor did he join—or, it seems, attend—the many lodges across the new nation that invited him. He was neither officially asked to head a national association of freemasons, nor did he decline such an office. Washington appeared to value his Freemasonry brotherhood, but no evidence indicates that he gave fellow masons a leg up when considering appointments or promotions. He included freemasons in the ceremonial laying of the Capitol’s cornerstone, but he did not push for masonic imagery to be included in the Great Seal of the United States and other official insignia. Echoing this analysis, Tabbert describes this handsomely published book, which includes dozens of glossy, full-color photographs of images and artifacts, as much by what it is not as by what it is. Unfolding in five chronologically arranged chapters corresponding with stages of Washington’s life and a fascinating epilogue on freemasons’ commemoration of Washington to the present, A Deserving Brother makes no explicit attempt to biographize. Instead, Tabbert aims to “present all known physical evidence” associated with Washington’s Freemasonry (p. xviii). Each chapter begins with a succinct, clear narrative covering Freemasonry and Washington’s involvement during the period under examination. With considerable authority (Tabbert has long served as the George Washington Masonic National Memorial’s director of archives and exhibits), the volume claims to include the transcribed text of every written source and the image of every artifact that has a strong provenance directly associating Washington with Freemasonry. Most of these are lightly contextualized, usually with enough explanation for readers to understand the logic of the sources, but not extending to broader analysis of their meanings for Washington, Freemasonry, or eighteenth-century Anglo-American society. A Deserving Brother is not an edited papers project along the lines of the many heavily footnoted volumes presenting the archives of prominent early Americans. That is not to say that this book should be ignored by scholars. For historians considering Washington’s life, Freemasonry, the history of voluntary associations, or the material culture of the memory of the Founders, there is much here of potential research value, surprise, and occasional delight. [End Page 345] Andrew M. Schocket Bowling Green State University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War by Chris Lamb

Reviewed by: Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War by Chris Lamb Robert Greene II Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War. By Chris Lamb. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. xxii, 344. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4962-1945-9.) The history of sport in American life has long been an important place to explore how race, sectionalism, and politics collide. While books such as Jules Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York, 1983) and Adrian Burgos Jr.’s Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (Berkeley, 2007) showcase the interplay of sport, cultural, and political histories, Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War offers another excellent example of this approach. For Chris Lamb, the story of the Cannon Street All-Stars is a stand-in for the larger story of the civil rights struggle in South Carolina. Describing this story of young Black boys who were not allowed to compete in South Carolina’s Little League tournament due to Jim Crow segregation as “inextricably linked to postwar Charleston,” Lamb has written an important history of a Little League ball club and a narrative of Charleston’s long and vexed history of racism (p. 3). The civil rights movement’s history was partially shaped by Jackie Robinson’s 1947 desegregation of Major League Baseball. Whether one argues for a “long civil rights movement” thesis or posits that the civil rights movement as we know it began in the mid-1950s, it is clear that Robinson’s symbolism was a crucial marker for Black American activists and their white liberal allies. The story of the Cannon Street All-Stars, like the slow desegregation of the majors after Robinson’s arrival, illustrates the halting pace of desegregation across American society in the 1950s and 1960s. As Lamb points out, the Cannon Street All-Stars were denied the right to play against white teams in South Carolina just a year after the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. In another historical irony, the team traveled to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to accept an invitation to watch the Little League World Series—after being denied a chance to play for it—the same week that Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. One of the strengths of Lamb’s work is his ability to tie the earlier history of Charleston as a slave port and a flashpoint during Reconstruction to the plight of the Cannon Street All-Stars. For instance, Lamb highlights the Charleston Baseball Riot of 1869. Sparked by a confrontation on a baseball diamond between Black baseball fans and Charleston police, it became both a moment when the Reconstruction-era dreams of Black Americans were confronted with the reality of powerful support for white supremacy and an example of how much baseball was intertwined with American political struggles during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lamb does an exemplary job of showing how the Cannon Street All-Stars served as a nexus of both change and continuity in South Carolina’s history of racism. For example, he reminds the reader that the white teams’ refusal to play the Cannon Street All-Stars led to the creation of Dixie Youth Baseball, a segregated youth league that “didn’t become integrated” until after its founder’s death, and that continues to play tournaments today (p. 197). He also points out that the Cannon Street All-Stars became an example of how the public [End Page 382] memory of the past is actively shaped by the public. Lamb tells the story of researcher Augustus Holt, whose investigation into why Dixie Youth players (including his son) wore Confederate flags on their uniforms in the early 1990s led to his becoming a prominent voice for greater recognition of the All-Stars in Charleston. Stolen Dreams works as a history told at the intersection of sports, civil rights, and southern memory, reminding readers of how often those fields are closely woven together. Robert Greene II Claflin University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

Review: Curating the American Past: A Memoir of a Quarter Century at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, by Pete Daniel

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: Curating the American Past: A Memoir of a Quarter Century at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, by Pete Daniel Curating the American Past: A Memoir of a Quarter Century at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History by Pete Daniel. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2022. 260 pp.; 75 images; clothbound, $16.46; eBook, $13.17. Marla R. Miller Marla R. Miller University of Massachusetts Amherst Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2023) 45 (2): 141–143. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2023.45.2.141 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Marla R. Miller; Review: Curating the American Past: A Memoir of a Quarter Century at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, by Pete Daniel. The Public Historian 1 May 2023; 45 (2): 141–143. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2023.45.2.141 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 ContentThe Public Historian Search Pete Daniel is well known to many public historians as the first practicing museum professional to serve as president of the Organization of American Historians (2008–9; he also had been the first curator to serve in the same role for the Southern Historical Association, in 2005-6). By that time Daniel had spent more than twenty-five years as a curator at the National Museum of American History (NMAH), and so his election signaled for many a real sense of public history’s “arrival.” An award-winning historian of the rural south, Daniel has also authored several monographs on a wide range of subjects rooted in southern, labor, and agricultural history, including his powerful study Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Curating the American Past is also a work of labor history—an account of tensions between bosses and workers, contexts... You do not currently have access to this content.

Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World by William A. Link

Reviewed by: Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World by William A. Link Tracy Campbell Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World. By William A. Link. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 343. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6493-4.) North Carolinian Frank Porter Graham occupies a lofty perch in twentieth-century southern history, compared by some of his admirers to Gandhi and Christ. In William A. Link’s well-researched biography, Graham emerges as more complex and human, and his career exposes the limitations of white liberalism in the post–World War II South. After graduating from the University of North Carolina (UNC) in 1909, Graham earned an M.A. in 1916 at Columbia University under William A. Dunning and then attended the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. Although known affectionately as “Dr. Frank,” Graham never finished his Ph.D., but that did not keep him from returning to UNC to teach history. In 1930, Graham was president of the university, and during the height of the Great Depression, he battled legislative budget cuts and countered attacks on academic freedom. His outspoken support of labor causes made him many powerful enemies throughout the state. In 1938, at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Graham proclaimed racial justice was “the primary test of American democracy and Christianity” (p. 106). Throughout his life, Graham sought to bridge divides through education and religion, while avoiding federal directives or legislation. A frustrated John Hope Franklin, like so many others who witnessed Graham’s focus on evolutionary change, was unimpressed. “Graham’s reasonableness, sweet as it was, was on one side. On his side,” Franklin recalled (p. 111). During World War II, Graham served on the National War Labor Board, where, in a crucial 1943 case, he supported equal pay for equal work. He used the occasion to proclaim that the nation should celebrate “‘the vigor and variety of its differences’” and “refuse to become a ‘stronghold of bigots,’” but he retreated when the opportunity arose to further loosen the grip of segregation (p. 147). After the war, President Harry S. Truman appointed Graham to the President’s Commission on Civil Rights. Graham dissented from the committee’s landmark 1947 report, To Secure These Rights, because he opposed federal efforts to ensure voting rights and to pass an antilynching bill. Instead, he encouraged a tepid philosophy of “nondiscrimination, not nonsegregation” (p. 166). In the end, Graham’s attempt to reconcile gradualism and goodwill with the reality of white supremacy satisfied no one. When U.S. senator J. Melville Broughton died in 1949, Governor W. Kerr Scott appointed Graham to fill the seat. Link describes Graham’s 1950 campaign to remain in the Senate as “weak and overconfident” and the candidate himself as “disinterested” (p. 205). Graham relied on his reputation for personal integrity to overcome charges of communist subversion. He won more votes than his opponent, Willis Smith, in the Democratic primary but fell short of the required majority. In the runoff election, Smith’s supporters, in a pattern that became all too common, warned that Graham favored Blacks working and living alongside “your wives and daughters.” They urged white people to “Wake Up!” if they wished to avoid a “mingling of the races” (p. 211). [End Page 182] Graham lost the race by 19,000 votes and never ran for elective office again. Afterward, during his appointment as a United Nations mediator, Graham failed to resolve a dispute in Kashmir between Pakistan and India. When he died in 1972, one friend eulogized that the martyred Graham may have “lived too long” (p. 250). Link’s well-crafted and thoughtful account can be paired with his excellent biography of North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York, 2008). The differing tactics and political trajectories of Graham and Helms tell us much about the contours of southern history and American politics since the 1950s and provide a timely context for understanding our current dilemmas. Tracy Campbell University of Kentucky Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture by Deanna M. Gillespie

Reviewed by: The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture by Deanna M. Gillespie Evan Faulkenbury The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture. By Deanna M. Gillespie. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2021. Pp. xviii, 260. $95.00, ISBN 978-0-8130-6694-3.) Across Savannah, Georgia, in 1963, Black women educated community members about taking collective action against Jim Crow. Cassie Pierce led discussions that tackled current issues, noting, “The project has . . . awakened the individuals that were asleep and caused interest and understanding” (p. 89). Another teacher, Daisy P. Jones, similarly observed in her students how the material covered “changed [a student’s] attitude toward voting and helping his people and himself instead of always kowtowing to someone” (p. 89). And another instructor, Dorothy Boles, found that after Black men and women took citizenship classes, “They walk, talk, and act like new people with determination and more courage to face the future” (p. 89). Stories like these populate historian Deanna M. Gillespie’s important book, The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture. Gillespie focuses on the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), which originated in 1957 and ended in 1970. The CEP, Gillespie argues, was a vital, though underappreciated, component of the Black freedom movement [End Page 184] in the South. According to Gillespie, “Everyone and no one knew about CEP classes,” because they were such a regular part of Black community life across the American South (p. 3). As a result, the CEP has remained in the background of the historiography of the movement. In CEP classes, Black men and women learned how to read, write, advocate, vote, and participate in a democracy. In so doing, the CEP “contributed to the groundswell for social justice” (p. 2). The CEP first took shape in the South Carolina Lowcountry during the late 1950s. Teachers received training at the Highlander Folk School and brought their knowledge, handbooks, and course materials to local communities. They led classes in churches, community centers, and beauty salons, with a staggering amount of local interest. Students learned how government functioned, how they could get involved in political life, what they could do to maximize their citizenship capability, and how best to use their individual and collective voices to decry the racial caste system. In 1961, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took over from Highlander to administer the CEP. Operating throughout the South, the CEP, its teachers, and its students laid the groundwork for local civil rights movements in many communities. “This was subversive work in the Jim Crow South,” as Gillespie writes, “because reading, writing, and calculating was empowering” (p. 2). Drawing on oral histories, administrative files, attendance records, narrative CEP meeting reports, and other primary sources, Gillespie reconstructs this behind-the-scenes history of the civil rights movement. She focuses on several case studies from the states where the CEP was most active, including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The chapters trace the CEP’s growth, impact, and eventual decline during the late 1960s as monetary contributions dwindled and momentum shifted. But even though the program remained in the background and ended with little fanfare, Gillespie shows why we must take the CEP into account when we consider the sweep of the Black freedom struggle in the South. She quantifies the program’s impact: between 1961 and 1970, the CEP cultivated 2,349 teachers who taught 7,280 classes with an enrollment of 26,686 people. Women like Cassie Pierce, Daisy P. Jones, and Dorothy Boles were crucial to the success of not only the CEP but also the larger civil rights movement. By advertising their services, gathering around tables, teaching neighbors how to fill out forms, and informing them about their rights as citizens, these Black women sustained the movement. Gillespie’s book does their story justice. Evan Faulkenbury SUNY Cortland Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Boggy Slough: A Forest, a Family, and a Foundation for Land Conservation by Jonathan K. Gerland

Reviewed by: Boggy Slough: A Forest, a Family, and a Foundation for Land Conservation by Jonathan K. Gerland Kenna Lang Archer Boggy Slough: A Forest, a Family, and a Foundation for Land Conservation. By Jonathan K. Gerland. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2022. Pp. x, 360. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-995-2.) Jonathan K. Gerland’s Boggy Slough: A Forest, a Family, and a Foundation for Land Conservation is a popular history that combines the beautiful production of a coffee-table book with the methodology and theory of a more traditional history. The book explores the eponymous Boggy Slough Conservation Area, a 19,055-acre tract of hardwood and pine forest in East Texas. Gerland considers the broader economic and social history of the region—discussing land use among the Hasinai Caddo, detailing early efforts at settlement by Europeans and Americans, and deconstructing the productionist mind-set that shaped the region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To this framework he adds a natural history that gives tangible form to the landscape using detailed taxonomic references and well-chosen photographs. This interdisciplinary approach works very well. After establishing the broader historical context in chapters 1 and 2, Gerland zeroes in on Thomas Lewis Latane Temple, whose descendants shaped the development of the land from the late nineteenth century to the creation of the conservation area in 2013. Subsequent chapters detail the [End Page 170] Temples’ work with the Southern Pine Lumber Company and identify the forces that shaped their holdings over the course of a century, with a special focus on railroads, ranching, game management, and the challenges of the Great Depression. The final two chapters examine the personalities that shaped Boggy Slough and the processes that ultimately created the conservation area. The book’s topical organization (for example, a chapter on enclosure is followed by a chapter on game management, and then another on land sales) creates occasional issues with repetition, and the narrative does jump around chronologically, but these are minor issues. Gerland’s story flows well, and the book never gets lost in proverbial meanderings. Gerland does not ground this book in a single, overriding argument. Instead, his goal is to describe the history of land use in Boggy Slough while also highlighting enduring connections between the land and the Temple family. He accomplishes these aims by centering “the inseparability of Boggy Slough’s natural and social history” (p. 27). For example, Gerland states more than once that the people living on and working in Boggy Slough shaped the land and were also shaped by the land. This is a basic idea but an important one, and it is a foundational framework for the field of environmental history. Gerland also engages this idea of “inseparability” by articulating sophisticated historical theories. For example, he discusses the power of names and what it means socially and culturally for different groups to name the land or to see their names stripped from the landscape. Gerland has made a valuable contribution to the environmental history of Texas with Boggy Slough. Some readers may feel overwhelmed by the amount of detail in the interior chapters, but the book is well written and well researched, and the content never becomes inaccessible. Indeed, Gerland moves easily between scientific and historical analysis and writes as competently about scientific processes as he does about economic structures. Moreover, the photographs, many of them taken by Gerland himself, add dimension to the portrayal of bottomland forests and the individuals who have shaped the region. Gerland has done credit to Boggy Slough with this compelling portrait. Kenna Lang Archer Angelo State University Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World by Adrian Brettle

Reviewed by: Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World by Adrian Brettle Mark Grimsley Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World. By Adrian Brettle. A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 313. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-4437-1.) Because we know that the Confederacy died in 1865, it can be easy to miss the fact that not only did Confederates anticipate victory on the field of battle, [End Page 150] but also they had specific ideas about the society that the blood sacrifice of their solders would conjure into being. This lucidly written, historically imaginative, and deeply researched study by Adrian Brettle weaves these ideas into a valuable picture of the postwar world envisioned by Confederate policy makers and opinion makers. Confederate ambitions fell into four main categories. The first was territorial expansion, which would carry slavery into the New Mexico Territory and parts of Mexico, replace Spain as the overseer of Cuban slavery, and resurrect southern dreams of a Caribbean empire. In a quixotic corollary, some Confederate expansionists believed that both the border states and the states of the Old Northwest would exit the Union to join them. Second, Confederates recognized the importance of internal improvements and better technology. Third, they disregarded indications that slavery was on the wane throughout the world and expected to rely on the slavery-based, staple-exporting economy that, in their view, had served the South so well. Finally, they believed that, despite the war’s carnage, interwoven economic interests and a common foreign policy goal of maintaining the Monroe Doctrine would lead the Union and Confederacy to forge an informal or even formal confederation, perhaps extending to include Mexico and Canada. Underpinning the Confederate program as a whole was confidence in the institution of slavery; an exalted view of southern history, culture, and religious faith; and a desire to play a major role on the world stage. The book’s subtitle, which speaks of “planning” for a postwar Confederate society, is a bit extravagant, since the word implies meetings and concerted thought by specific groups, and Confederate policy makers and opinion makers did not do this. Nonetheless, Brettle teases out strands of ambition from the writings of these Confederates. Some of these thinkers made extended arguments, but many of their ideas appeared here and there in correspondence, speeches, and so on, suggesting that such thinking was not fully fleshed out. It is nonetheless notable that the same basic ideas cropped up repeatedly and depicted a coherent worldview. The extravagance of Confederate ambitions is striking. Even given a victorious war of independence, it is difficult to see how many of their goals could have been achieved. By mid-1863, the military manpower necessary for territorial expansion had been squandered on the war’s battlefields. Plans for an economy based on specie derived from the export of cotton failed to recognize that during the war, Great Britain discovered major cotton sources in Egypt and elsewhere. And a slaveholding society badly disarranged by the advance of Union armies, even if those armies were beaten back, could not be easily stabilized—although Confederate thinkers convinced themselves otherwise by fantasizing that “African Americans would have a better future in the Confederacy than anywhere else in the world, especially that to be had in the United States” (p. 181). As the war progressed, the declining fortunes of the Confederacy forced a reimagining of these ambitions, but not nearly to the degree one would expect. Confederate thinkers apparently overlooked key issues such as an overhaul of the financial system, which failed the Confederacy so miserably during the war, and the expansion of higher education, on which the construction of a [End Page 151] modern infrastructure depended. Indeed, based on the skillful portrait the author creates, one would not be far wrong to argue that Confederate thinkers looked backward to a perfected antebellum world rather than forward to a realistic postwar world. Mark Grimsley Ohio State University Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association