Southern Society Research Articles

The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a "Lost White Race" by Jason Colavito, and: Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts

Reviewed by: The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a "Lost White Race" by Jason Colavito, and: Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing by Edward Watts Nicholas A. Timmerman The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a "Lost White Race." By Jason Colavito. ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 386. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6461-8.) Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing. By Edward Watts. ( Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 278. Paper, $37.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4387-9; cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-4386-2.) Myths and folklore have held a strong influence in societies throughout human history and have the power to shape political discourse and sway public opinion. The United States was not, and is not, averse to the power of myth-making or what may be termed in the modern era as conspiracy theories. Edward Watts's Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing and Jason Colavito's The Mound Builder Myth: Fake History and the Hunt for a "Lost White Race" delve into the powerful myths that attempted to argue for a connection to "whiteness" in North America's ancient past that captivated scientific discourse throughout the nineteenth century. The existence of numerous Indian mounds throughout the North American continent provided many nineteenth-century antiquarians with quasi evidence to make unsubstantiated arguments that predicted the success of the young American republic by inventing a pre-Columbian past that included ancient connections to the Old World. Reasons behind these myths are as numerous as the number of myths themselves, but their creation stemmed from the social anxieties of a young nation and the colonial desire of the United States for empire. As Watts argues, "the vast unclaimed tracts of continental history before 1492 [were] unsettling" to white Americans, and the idea of "primordialism was invented to fill them" (Watts, p. 21). The creation of "nation-building myths and legends" around the concept of primordialism emerged in the early years of the nineteenth century (Watts, p. 1). Watts's important work on these myths focuses on the racial component of settler nationalism, settler nation-building, and settler colonialism, rooted in the idea of terra nullius and an invented pre-Columbian history of the continent with fantasies of ancient "white" people. Watts compellingly unpacks this argument about the powerful primordial myths by examining in five chapters five fictitious connections to the Old World: "Welsh Indians in the Early Republic"; "The Lost Tribes of Israelites and the Found Nation"; "White Mound Builders and the Lessons of Prehistory"; "Dwarf Epics and the Ancient Irish"; and "Norse Forefathers of the American Empire." Each myth provided early American antiquarians with a "white" prehistory that served their specific political agendas for a given time and space. For example, the nineteenth-century creation of an ancient connection to Irish immigrants claimed that [End Page 155] Saint Brendan, a sixth-century monk, crossed the Atlantic and settled in the Carolinas, and later in the tenth century, the Vikings supposedly substantiated this claim in the Icelandic sagas by recording the discovery of Irishmen in the Carolinas. Watts's argument convincingly demonstrates that this myth served the southern agrarian elites to support their slave society, in contrast to the mound builder myth, which argued for the success of industrialism in the North and circulated among antiquarians in states such as Ohio and Massachusetts. The claim of the presence of ancient Irishmen in the Carolinas gave white southerners the primordial argument that quelled social anxieties about the success of the young American republic, and proved southern society was compatible with the future aspirations of the nation. The invention of white mound builders was used to justify the colonial ambitions of the United States and the genocidal policies to remove or eliminate the Indigenous population forcibly. Jason Colavito's book about the mound builder myth explores the "Fake History and the Hunt for a 'Lost White Race,'" arguing that the mound builders provided the United States with an ancient "white...

‘Christian Patriots’: The Intersection Between Proto-fascism and Clerical Fascism in the Antebellum South

Abstract This article examines the convergence between clerical fascism and proto-fascism in the Antebellum South of the United States. The author employs Roger Griffin’s theories of palingenetic ultranationalism and clerical fascism to understand the worldviews of Southern intellectuals. The author argues that a cadre of Southern theologians rejected the liberal heritage of the United States and redefined the relationship between the individual and state. Southern clerical fascists reconceived of an alternative modernity that reflected God’s precepts. Slaves, laborers, and slave masters all had a mandate to guide secular and spiritual progress. Furthermore, these Southern clerics believed the best hope for securing God’s order was to be found in the birth of a new Southern society – the Confederate States of America. This study builds upon the works of other historians who discerned the illiberal and authoritarian qualities of the American South while also contributing to delineation of the protean qualities of clerical fascism.

The University of Texas's “Racial Geography Tour,” designed by Dr. Edmund Gordon

The University of Texas's “Racial Geography Tour,” designed by Dr. Edmund Gordon

A War State All Over: Alabama Politics and the Confederate Cause by Ben H. Severance

Reviewed by: A War State All Over: Alabama Politics and the Confederate Cause by Ben H. Severance John M. Sacher A War State All Over: Alabama Politics and the Confederate Cause. By Ben H. Severance. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2020. 264 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-2059-1. Given the sheer volume of scholarship on the Civil War, one is hard pressed to declare any aspect of Confederate history to be understudied. One of the few areas that might merit this description is the Confederacy's wartime legislative, congressional, and gubernatorial elections. The absence of parties, incomplete voting results, low turnout, and limited extant newspapers complicate their inves-tigation. Recent years, however, have brought about a significant improvement in our understanding of voters, candidates, and results in several states. Ben H. Severance's A War State All Over adds Alabama to the list of states where we now have a greater understanding of the candidates, voters, issues, and results. [End Page 335] Severance's book challenges previous studies of Alabama which contend that the 1863 elections demonstrated an abandonment of the Confederacy. Severance's reexamination comes to the opposite conclusion: the results revealed that Alabama remained a "war state" committed to the Confederacy. He contends that the flaws of previous works stem from an unsophisticated correlation: the defeat of incumbents equated to a rejection of the war and the Confederacy coupled with a desire for reunion. Severance shows that these earlier studies are flawed as they highlight only a few high-profile races, do not pay enough to the subsequent actions of the men who defeated incumbents, and use inaccurate labels for the candidates. Previous studies often characterized candidates by their prior political affiliation. In those interpretations, in 1863, antebellum Whigs faced Democrats or secessionists squared off against cooperationists/Unionists. Severance convincingly maintains that these labels did not have much meaning by the middle of the war. Instead, he proposes using a new nomenclature: war Confederates and peace Confederates. The former category consisted of men who were committed to military victory and thus accepted all strong government measures—such as conscription and impressment of slaves—that would lead to victory. The latter category was more amorphous, including all those who wanted the war to end. They could range from outright Unionists to Reconstructionists, who unrealistically sought a return to the Union with antebellum southern society—including slavery—intact. In order to analyze the contests between war and peace Confederates, Severance divides his work into four sections: the congressional elections, the gubernatorial contests, the legislative races and subsequent senate elections, and the soldier vote. In each section, he provides not only the results, but also his explanation of how historians have often misinterpreted these results. Additionally, he looks beyond the outcomes of elections to the performance of the new officeholders. For Severance, even when incumbents lost, or did not run, the results changed merely the name of the man in the office but not necessarily the pro-Confederate votes of these officeholders. The conduct of the new officials proves that Alabama remained a [End Page 336] committed war state in the last years of the Civil War. This conclusion is surprising as, at first glance, 1863 represented a sea change in Alabama politics. Leading pro-war congressmen Jabez Curry and Jacob Ralls lost their reelection bids. John Gill Shorter was crushed in his attempt to retain the governor's office. In a rematch of his 1861 defeat of Thomas H. Watts, Shorter captured a stunning 29,133 fewer votes—a seventy-seven percent decrease—from his victory two years earlier. Similarly, state legislators replaced Alabama's fire-eaters in the Confederate senate. The seats of William Lowndes Yancey (who had died in July 1863) and Clement Claiborne Clay would now be occupied by the less bellicose Robert Jemison and Richard Wilde Walker. Severance's revisionist reading of the results warns against drawing simplistic conclusions from these races. While Curry and Ralls lost their races, Alabama's congressional delegation still contained a majority of war Confederates, an assertion which upends previous studies' conclusions that peace Democrats represented the majority of the state's delegation. Having served as attorney...

케이트 쇼팽의 『각성』: ‘진정한 자아’ 추구

In this paper I offer a feminist analysis of Mrs. Edna Pontellier’s discovery of her “real self” in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In a tri-fold process, Edna 1) awakens to her duality, 2) pursues her “real self,” and 3) confronts her frustration with contemporary society. Edna’s initial awakening to her duality while at the summer resort Grand Isle emerges as she distinguishes her “real self” from the patriarchal image of the ideal woman in nineteenth-century American society. As she pursues her identity as an independent individual and rejects her false self, she takes bold steps, beginning with halting the onerous social obligation of hosting a weekly reception day every Tuesday−which she had done for every Tuesday for six years−and then denying the marriage system, then hypocritical religion, and then her patriarchal father. She moves out to her pigeon-house in order to gain financial independence from her husband, but after finding no true escape from her predicament, she drowns herself in the sea. Critics are divided between viewing this ending as Edna’s victory or as proof of her defeat. What I argue is that in this seemingly deviant and immoral act, Edna is expressing her angry rebellion against the social oppression of women, in the American Southern society in the late nineteenth century.

Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820–1860Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism

Book Review| September 01 2021 Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820–1860Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820–1860. By Burnett, Katharine A., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. 2019. xi, 266 pp. Cloth, $49.95.Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. By Brown, Nicholas. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. 2019. x, 219 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $25.95; e-book available. Christopher Bundrick Christopher Bundrick Christopher Bundrick is an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Lancaster. His research focuses on southern regionalism, and he is the author of essays about Thomas Nelson Page, Mary Murfree, Charles Chesnutt, and Elliott White Springs. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2021) 93 (3): 531–533. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361335 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Christopher Bundrick; Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820–1860Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. American Literature 1 September 2021; 93 (3): 531–533. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-9361335 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search Katharine A. Burnett opens Cavaliers and Economists with the premise that southern literature developed “in tandem with economic modernization—not in spite of it” (4). She goes on to suggest that, even as early as the 1830s, southern literary efforts “developed in resistance to shifts in an emerging capitalist system and used those shifts to rationalize slavery and southern society as it existed” (4). Burnett’s work is clearly influenced by recent attempts to approach southern studies through a global lens, yet her insistence that earlier southern literature embraces, rather than resists, global capitalism becomes especially interesting when she suggests that nineteenth-century southern writers used “the language of economics . . . to reframe mainstream representations of the region through popular literary forms and genres that proliferated in the early-nineteenth century transatlantic literary culture” (9). Hinting at a similarity between capitalist systems’ use of the marketplace to generate and sustain economic values... Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Challenging Queer Metronormativity

Challenging Queer Metronormativity

Reimagining “Defeat” in the Transnational West: John Newman Edwards, Mexican Exile, and the Confederate Experiment 2.0

Abstract Rather than surrendering to Union forces in 1865, various bands of ex-Confederates chose Mexican exile. From generals and elite politicians to rank-and-file soldiers, the majority of these “Confederados” journeyed to French-controlled Mexico to escape punishment, to tap financial opportunities, and to observe how southern society would function post-emancipation. Still others, as represented by the cavalry officer and Quixotic newspaper editor John Newman Edwards, understood the U.S. Civil War on more international terms. To these men, Mexico constituted a new, imperially subsidized laboratory to continue the Confederate Experiment and recreate a mythic version of the Old South. Although cut short by the violent death of Emperor Maximilian I, their saga reveals not only how adaptation to Confederate defeat took different forms in the immediate postbellum period, but also the extent to which conceptions of defeat and even the purpose of the Confederacy itself had never been monolithic in the first place.

Virtue Signaling and Moral Progress

Philosophy & Public AffairsVolume 49, Issue 2 p. 156-178 Original Article Virtue Signaling and Moral Progress Evan Westra, Corresponding Author Evan Westra philosophy.ewestra@gmail.com orcid.org/0000-0003-2005-7998 Search for more papers by this author Evan Westra, Corresponding Author Evan Westra philosophy.ewestra@gmail.com orcid.org/0000-0003-2005-7998 Search for more papers by this author First published: 23 February 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12187Citations: 11 Thanks to Dong An, Kristin Andrews, Jennifer Nagel, Adam Westra, and the editors of Philosophy and Public Affairs for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and to audiences at the University of Toronto and the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology for discussion; special thanks to Brendan de Kenessey for ongoing discussions and feedback throughout this project. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume49, Issue2Spring 2021Pages 156-178 RelatedInformation

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

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

Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy by Ann L. Tucker

Reviewed by: Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy by Ann L. Tucker Brian Schoen (bio) Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy. By Ann L. Tucker. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 272. Cloth, $45.00.) Antebellum white southerners were not the naval gazers previous generations thought them to be. They looked across the Atlantic and perceived themselves in relational and comparative ways. They proved particularly effective at spinning strands of international news and global ideas into webs of self-justification. Ann Tucker’s Newest Born of Nations offers probably the most probative treatment of how “elite white southerners used an international perspective [or at least a Eurocentric one] to understand, imagine, and defend their visions of nationhood” (4). For Tucker, this operated at a couple of levels. Events from unrealized nationalist efforts in Ireland and Hungary to eventually realized ones on the Italian peninsula offered reference points for considering and intensifying the sectional conflict. Southern sectionalists, for example, invoked and debated images of themselves as a Poland to the Tsarist-like North. Global events also “deepened” southerners’ sense of nationalism, as they looked for metaphors, foils, and models for their own efforts to construct [End Page 422] an independent nation (24). Tucker argues that a wider perspective served as a “mechanism for translating their concerns . . . into the more internationally resonant language of rights, values, and nationhood” (4). In short, white southerners learned to be, or at least talk, like a nation by watching and reflecting on the world around them and their place within it. Those mental efforts did not, however, bring agreement. Tucker identifies three oft-competing strains of southern nationalist thought. A “liberal nationalist”–turned–”liberal secessionist” vein tapped into the rights-based language of the American Revolution, which had been reanimated and romanticized amid the European revolutions of 1848. Southerners celebrated, for example, Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi and the European republicanism he symbolically led. This strand, especially prominent in Democratic circles, emphasized that the South had a right to greater self-determination. Aided by voices like exiled Irish nationalist editor John Mitchel, it cloaked “concerns about slavery within broader liberal principles” (114). A second variant that emerged from the embers of the 1848 revolutions was a “conservative nationalism” that, though also generally republican, emphasized the need for authority and law and order. In its balder versions, this strand of thought affixed the South as a bulwark against European-style radical “red republicanism” that many southern whites feared was being imported into the United States. Slavery was trumpeted as a tonic to the perceived excesses of free labor and excessive democracy. This conservative nationalism translated into a call for secession as the best means to defend southern society. In total, Tucker shows that thinking about European political changes taught southern whites to perceive themselves as different from the North. Overlapping southern liberalist and conservative impulses converged in a secessionist impulse that erupted in 1860. Revealing the necessarily slippery use of these labels, Tucker suggests that “it is more appropriate to refer to secessionists who used a liberal versus a conservative perspective, rather than referring to southern liberals versus southern conservatives” (118). It was not uncommon, it seems, for the same person or newspaper to invoke both liberal and conservative justifications. Yet there does emerge a clear trajectory of the emphasis within wartime Confederate global thinking. Early on, Jefferson Davis’s government appealed to liberal nationalist impulses that had helped free parts of Italy from Hapsburg rule and ultimately led to its unification under a constitutional monarchy. Yet for reasons not fully explored here, but presumably tied to slavery, those liberal nationalist arguments had little impact. Their failure forced Confederate propagandists to turn toward conservative [End Page 423] arguments they hoped would land with Hapsburg rulers and conservative Catholics, a point that reinforces the argument of Don Doyle’s synthetic work The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (2014). In seizing on the global roots of Confederate nationalism, Tucker builds on ground previously trod by Andre Fleche, Paul Quigley, Timothy Roberts, and Niels Eichhorn. But Tucker adds to...

Editorial

Editorial Margherita Zanasi The October 2020 issue has been published under unprecedented circumstances as the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply affected the academic and publishing communities. As scholars shelter in place and have very limited access to libraries and archives, carrying out research has become a challenge. Twentieth-Century China (TCC) is grateful to our publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP), for its response to this crisis. During the spring, the press granted free access to its journals (including TCC) to support scholars worldwide. JHUP was also able to print and deliver copies of the May 2020 issue. This October 2020 issue is also available in both electronic and print formats. The TCC editorial team hopes that all our authors and readers remain safe in these difficult times. With this issue, we welcome two new associate editors, Joshua Howard (associate professor at the University of Mississippi) and Jan Kiely (associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong). The two previous associate editors—Margaret Kuo and Yiching Wu—stepped down with the May 2020 issue. We thank them for all their work. The journal has greatly benefited from their contributions. This issue presents seven research articles. The articles of Federica Ferlanti, Cheng Yi Meng, and Mark Baker aim at shifting from a national to a local dimension the scholarly discussion on the rise and fall of the Nationalist Party and its attempt to gain centralized control over China’s resources. Ferlanti discusses the power struggle among different elite groups in Wannian County (Jiangxi Province) and the Nationalists’ attempt to dominate local politics in the aftermath of the Northern Expedition. Focusing on the wartime period, Cheng illustrates how the Nationalists’ drive for economic control affected the societal economy in Fengshun County (Guangdong Province) as the central government attempted to nationalize private toilets to gain direct control over night soil, an important fertilizer for wartime agriculture. Baker’s article centers on the city of Zhengzhou (Henan Province) during the summer of 1948, bringing to light the local struggles over refugees, taxes, corvée labor, and the militarization of the city. He concludes that these conflicts ultimately undermined the Nationalists’ authority. Wenwen Wang’s article explores the ideology of Manchukuo female education and the female students’ responses to its patriarchal and colonial objectives by examining female writings in school journals. Even if they eschew direct criticism of the colonial state, these writings clearly highlight “the tensions among colonialism, anticolonialism, patriarchy, and feminism.” Lu Pan explores the diverse imagination of Asian modernity projected by the exhibit Contemporary Art in Asia. Launched by Cathay Pacific in the [End Page 225] mid-1960s, this exhibit reflected a Hong Kong perspective of a cosmopolitan Asian identity that went beyond both national ideals and an Asia-West dichotomy. Aymeric Xu takes the Southern Society as a case study to explore Chinese conservatism in the 1910s and 1920s. In this article, Xu challenges the prevailing understanding of Chinese conservatism and of its “depoliticized” nature. Finally, Steve Tsang discusses the significance of Taiwan in the eyes of the Chinese government, arguing that its designation as “sacred territory” depends more on historical contingencies than objective geostrategic factors. This issue also includes one note on archives and sources, one review essay, and five book reviews. Nagatomi Hirayama introduces the qingcha diwei dang’an xiaozu dang’an (清查敌伪档案小组档案 archives of working groups for the investigation of records of enemies and puppets). Qiliang He’s review essay discusses two recent books on the publishing industry in modern China. The book reviews are available online through Project MUSE. They include Benno Weiner’s review of Melvyn C. Goldstein’s A History of Modern Tibet, vol. 4, 1957–1959: In the Eye of the Storm; Gina Anne Tam’s review of Joshua Hill’s Voting as a Rite: A History of Elections in Modern China; Andrea Goldman’s review of Hsiao-t’i Li’s Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China; David Clayton’s review of Lu Yan’s Crossed Paths: Labor Activism and Colonial Governance in Hong Kong, 1938–1958; and Kelly A. Hammond’s review of Taomo Zhou’s Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia, and the Cold War. Finally, Federica Ferlanti...

When Coercive Economies Fail: The Political Economy of the Us South after the Boll Weevil

How do coercive societies respond to negative economic shocks? We explore this question in the early 20th-Century United States South. Since before the nation's founding, cotton cultivation formed the politics and institutions in the South, including the development of slavery, the lack of democratic institutions, and intergroup relations between whites and blacks. We leverage the natural experiment generated by the boll weevil infestation from 1892-1922, which disrupted cotton production in the region. Panel difference-in-differences results provide evidence that Southern society became less violent and repressive in response to this shock with fewer lynchings and less Confederate monument construction. Cross-sectional results leveraging spatial variation in the infestation and historical cotton specialization show that affected counties had less KKK activity, higher non-white voter registration, and were less likely to experience contentious politics in the form of protests during the 1960s. To assess mechanisms, we show that the reductions in coercion were responses to African American out-migration. Even in a context of antidemocratic institutions, ordinary people can retain political power through the ability to ``vote with their feet.'' Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

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

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

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Reviewed by: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers Jeff Forret They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. By Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 296. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers contends that southern, white, slave-owning women were as deeply invested in the institution of slavery as anyone in the U.S. South. The women she writes about were not subordinate onlookers, femes covert, or deputy husbands, but rather “mistresses of the market” (xiv) who owned, governed, and traded enslaved people in their own right and reaped the profits of captive labor. In advancing an argument that southern white women were complicit in slaveholding and, by extension, the development of American capitalism, Jones-Rogers’s work contributes in equal measure to the scholarship on both nineteenth-century women and slavery. In her introduction, Jones-Rogers carefully spells out the target of her investigation: not “the wealthiest single or widowed women” (xi) of the antebellum South, but married women who owned and maintained control over enslaved property. She accesses them using court cases and other legal records, correspondence, and newspapers, but her most important sources are the slave narratives that allow her to recover the voices of those whom slave-owning women held in bondage. The benefit of viewing slave-owning women through the lens of enslaved people is that Jones-Rogers’s study does not focus on only the most elite female slaveholders in the South. Relatively less prosperous but more numerous non-elite slave owners are central to the book. They Were Her Property is divided into eight topical chapters. Jones-Rogers first traces the process through which young girls, “mistresses in the making” (1), were acculturated into the slave system and learned the power dynamics at play in southern society. It further discusses how slave-owning women came to possess enslaved people of their own. The doctrine of coverture did not function in practice as thoroughly as the written law might suggest, leaving pathways for married women to manage enslaved property independently. And, as Jones-Rogers makes clear, slave-owning women exercised the powers southern society conferred upon masters. They bought and sold enslaved people in private transactions or at slave auctions. They administered punishments, at times with the same brutality as slaveholding men, and extracted forced labor from their enslaved workforces. Jones-Rogers classifies wet nursing as a uniquely exploitive form of skilled labor foisted upon enslaved women at the expense of black infants. Countering Sally McMillen’s work on elite southern white women, she finds the practice of using enslaved wet nurses widespread among non-elite slave-owning women. In the final chapters of the book, Jones-Rogers explains how the South’s slave-owning women navigated the Civil War’s [End Page 476] challenges to slaveholding, perhaps by selling their enslaved property or by becoming refugees with them in Texas or other areas deemed safer for the preservation of the slave regime, and how they suffered economically as a consequence of emancipation. Jones-Rogers offers a bold reinterpretation of the relationship between slavery and slave-owning women in the nineteenth-century South. The prose in They Were Her Property is strong and clear, containing no shortage of appalling stories of the violence and cruelty endemic to southern slavery. Her far-reaching research engages such seldom-studied topics as “ladies auctions” and slave-owning female brothel operators. The sweeping geographical coverage of the book may disguise some regional variations among slave-owning women’s practices, however, and in a few instances, slave-owning men lurking in the examples imply the persistent social constraints their wives confronted. Still, as Jones-Rogers shows, nineteenth-century slaveholding households were not as patriarchal as has been assumed. The South’s married, slave-owning women were thoroughly enmeshed in the world of slavery and were also the direct economic beneficiaries of its fruits. Their financial ties to bondage as an institution meant that “they were not passive bystanders” to the slave system, but “co-conspirators” in it (205). Jeff Forret Lamar University Copyright © 2020...

"ЛЮДИ ДВАДЦАТЫХ ГОДОВ": ПАВЕЛ ПЕСТЕЛЬ И ИВАН БУРЦОВ

The article deals with the everyday life of participants in secret political organizations of the 1820s, Decembrists. To characterize the generation to which the Decembrists belonged, the definition of Yuri N. Tynyanov is used: “people of the twenties”. It is noted that this generation primarily belonged to young noblemen who took part in the war of 1812 and whose political views were formalized in the postwar period. The main conflict experienced by the Decembrists is formulated: between romantic ideas about life and the harsh reality of political conspiracy. The article describes the main milestones in the biography of P.I. Pestel – the head of the Southern society, one of the brightest representatives of the radical wing of the conspiracy. At the same time it is emphasized that the author of these lines has already repeatedly described his biography, and the difference in the attitude of critics to the assessments made by the author and to Pestel’s personality is revealed. It is formulated that this difference is due to the difference in attitude towards Pestel of his contemporaries. The political confrontation between Pestel and the representative of the “liberal wing” of the conspirators, I.G. Burtsov, is analyzed. It describes Pestel’s opponent, his attitude to the problem of interaction between society and the authorities, and his activity in secret society. The conclusion is made that it is impossible for Burtsov’s “line” to defeat Pestel’s “line” under specific historical conditions of the 1820s.

The History of American Slaveholders by Wang Jinhu

Reviewed by: The History of American Slaveholders by Wang Jinhu 王勇 [Wang Yong] 美国奴隶主史 [The History of American Slaveholders]. By 王金虎 [Wang Jinhu]. (Beijing, China: Peking University Press, 2019. Pp. [viii], 574. ISBN 978-7-301-30144-9.) American history is a hot field for Chinese historians who study world history. For Chinese scholars, American history is national and federal history, the history of the United States as a whole, and the importance of regionalism or sectionalism, or the history of a specific region or state, has been almost unanimously neglected. One reason for this approach is Chinese historians' misperception of the United States based on Chinese politics. Another reason is the influence of traditional class struggle ideology, which overemphasizes class struggle and denies regionalism as a driving force of American history. When interpreting American history, Chinese historians deem the American South a loser and an outsider with little significance in the historical development of the country. As a result, there are very few Chinese academic works on the history of the American South. Although some scholars of American literature have shown interest in southern literature and culture, the South as a region has been almost forgotten by Chinese scholars more broadly. American history is interpreted as a process dominated by the North, especially the Northeast. For Chinese scholars of American history, diplomatic history and social history are attractive fields, while the history of American slavery is an understudied field with few modern implications. Wang Jinhu, a professor at China's Henan University, is a leading Chinese scholar of U.S. history who has been studying the topic for almost twenty years. Fifteen years ago, the author [End Page 900] published a monograph based on his doctoral dissertation called The Slaveholders and the Civil War (Beijing: People's Press, 2005), which apparently was the first published book in China on U.S. slavery. The History of American Slaveholders, the fruit of Wang's ten-year effort, is an outstanding book that pioneers U.S. slavery studies and American southern studies in China. The History of American Slaveholders presents a comprehensive history of slaveholders from the early seventeenth century to the end of the Civil War. In the beginning, the author defines the slaveholders' impact on American history as the most persistent, most powerful, and most profound: "White slaveholders existed for over two and a half centuries, from the British colonists' establishment of the first colony in North America to the end of the American Civil War. Slaveholders controlled southern society for two and a half centuries; from the formation of the country to the 1850s, they even dominated the federal government. The inequality between the blacks and the whites created by the slaveholders lasts until today; thus their impact on American society is indeed deep and far-reaching" (p. i). The book illustrates several important topics chronologically. The rise of the slaveholders is the topic of chapter 1. The transatlantic slave and economic trade nurtured the rise of slaveholders in North America. The rise of the slaveholders is well illustrated by the impressive family stories of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and several other well-known figures. The topic of chapter 2 is slaveholders and the American Revolution, and the chapter covers a series of actions and events such as North America's protests and resistance, the War for Independence, the formation of a republican confederation, and the creation of a federal state. "In this epoch-making transformation, among the elite groups that led the Revolution, the slaveholders' role was the most significant," Wang writes (p. 71). In the American Revolution, the elite slaveholders were important revolutionaries, becoming leaders of the cause. However, Wang also writes that "the slaveholders, as a very influential group, stubbornly refused to abandon enslaving the black people; thus the principle of equality and human rights proclaimed by the revolutionaries did not apply to the black slaves" (p. 72). This dilemma is well explained in this chapter through the vivid illustration of the Founding Fathers' complicated attitudes toward slavery. Chapter 3 talks about the expansion of the slave economy. The further development of the Atlantic world market pushed by the industrial revolution, the increase of the enslaved population...

What Made Chinese Conservatism a Cultural Movement: A Case Study of the Southern Society

What Made Chinese Conservatism a Cultural Movement: A Case Study of the Southern Society

"(Obvious now)": Forgetting How Race Works in Requiem for a Nun

"(Obvious now)":Forgetting How Race Works in Requiem for a Nun Garrett Bridger Gilmore (bio) Two recent volumes of Faulkner scholarship, Michael Gorra's monograph The Saddest Words and the edited collection Faulkner and Slavery, have relatively little to say about Requiem for a Nun. To those familiar with Faulkner studies this is likely not a surprising state of affairs, as Requiem is typically regarded as a curious dud of an attempt at narrative experimentation. Many of the extended critical accounts of the relationship between slavery, race, and Faulkner's fiction that I find most fruitful, Thadious Davis's Faulkner's Negro, Richard Godden's Fictions of Labor and An Economy of Complex Words, Edouard Glissant's Faulkner, Mississippi, and the smattering of references to Faulkner contained across Hortense Spillers's writing as collected in Black, White and In Color, likewise have little or nothing to say about Requiem for a Nun. Further complicating matters, most extended discussions of Requiem for a Nun have little to say about slavery. Noel Polk, for example, calls slavery's presence in Jefferson "ominous" without much elaboration (44). These silences strike me as odd given the fact that Requiem contains perhaps the single most comprehensive account of the political and economic history of Yoknapatawpha County and one of Faulkner's most straightforward attempts to do legibly racially liberal work by confronting and undermining, "demystifying" in Deborah Barker's account, the racist cultural trope of the Mammy in his depiction of Nancy Mannigoe (71). One might conclude from the preponderance of critical attention that Requiem is not particularly suited for thinking slavery, and therefore not fit for a certain contemporary iteration of "the work of anti-racism." In this essay I read Requiem as an anxious and regressive rewriting of the historical contradictions contained under what Hortense Spillers calls "the sign of race" previously worked through in Faulkner's earlier and more critically prominent novels (348). "'Race' alone bears no inherent meaning," Spillers writes, "even though it reifies in personality, but gains its [End Page 231] power from what it signifies by point, in what it allows to come to meaning" (380). Race points to different structures of power in Requiem for a Nun than it does in Faulkner's earlier work; what emerges, I will argue, represents an uncritical retreat into racial ideology Faulkner had previously exposed as contradictory and is therefore less analytically powerful than what had come before. I read Requiem's attempts to provide a concise history of Jefferson not as a sign of continuity with his earlier works' presentation of the meaning of slavery and race in the minds and lives of the planter class and its descendants,1 but rather as the production of new historical memory and racial self-fashioning whose pathologies are metacritically revealed in works such as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury but whose symptoms merely appear in the first order in Requiem. If Steven Weisenburger is right that in Requiem we see Faulkner "literally in the process of retrenching, making a last stand on a radically conservative idea of individual sovereignty," this retrenchment takes form in part through a revision of the centrality of slavery to white Southern society (750). I argue that continuity across the novel's dramatic and narrative sections is forged to substantiate the Jacksonian "principle that honor must be defended whether it was or not since, defended, it was, whether or not" (Requiem 545).2 Though trafficking in Jacksonian frontier mythology in its historical construction of white Southern experience and identity, Requiem also borrows from emergent discourses of racial liberalism in its depictions of interracial cooperation and emphasis on the moral importance of individual attitudes in explaining and resolving racial conflict. The interlocking valorization of frontier sociality, of white characters' ability to accurately observe and explain racial difference, and of Nancy's apparent agency, grounds a redefinition of the South as a multiracial space of flawed individuals worthy of protection from external threats. That is, interference from national political forces. In what follows I hope to clarify several aspects of the relationship between Faulkner and "the work of anti-racism" by reading Requiem through analytical lenses for theorizing...

Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research by Paul D. Escott

Reviewed by: Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research by Paul D. Escott Fay A. Yarbrough Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research. By Paul D. Escott. New Directions in Southern History. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. Pp. xii, 188. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-7535-5.) Given the plethora of work published about the American Civil War, what more can be said? Paul D. Escott's Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for [End Page 171] Research offers some suggestions. Escott also surveys the historiography and concisely sketches out some of the big questions historians have wrestled with in writing about the war. The volume consists of seven chapters. Each offers an evaluation of some aspect of Civil War historiography: the origins of the war; the war and society; the effect of the war on African Americans; military history; new methodological approaches to writing about the war, particularly the use of digital tools; environmental history; and a reimagining of how historians could talk about the consequences of the war. Analyzing the causes of the Civil War is a perennial activity for historians. Rather than think of the sectional divide as turning solely on a north/south axis, Escott urges readers to consider the "middle third," consisting of the border states, as another player in the sectional crisis (p. 13). He also stakes a claim on the question of "who deserves the credit for freeing the slaves," northern white leaders or the enslaved themselves: the actions of both groups were "equally" necessary in Escott's view (p. 15). The growth of social history has produced numerous works on social relations and cultural changes during the Civil War, particularly with regard to gender. Escott asserts in his second chapter, however, that there are topics yet to be plumbed, including patterns of "internal violence" in the Confederacy, the growth and meaning of ideas of nationalism in the North, and northern racism's connection to white identity (p. 22). Escott's research suggestions for the topic of African Americans during the war years relate closely to social history. For instance, he argues for more work on black women, both elite and working-class, in the North. Other lacunae in the field include identifying the characteristics of those African Americans who favored and opposed emigration, understanding black northerners' "commitment … to the United States, despite its history of enslavement and discrimination," and tracing the growth of black ideology (p. 57). Escott acknowledges in chapter 4 his own bias toward political and social history rather than military history and turns to historians such as Gary W. Gallagher and Richard M. McMurray to identify some of the gaps in this literature. Escott explores "what constituted victory in battle"—a very basic question that lacks consensus among Civil War military historians (p. 70). Territory claimed? Fewer casualties? He also urges further study of relationships between generals and presidents and a more critical look at generals in particular. Escott asks other important questions: Did southern society, specifically Charles Roland's idea of "'localism,'" constrain Jefferson Davis's military strategy (p. 73)? How important was the West in the war? Escott encourages scholars to follow the example of Lisa Tendrich Frank and examine the role gender played in motivating particular military strategies (humiliating white southern women by entering homes and destroying property, for instance) and reactions. In his fifth chapter, Escott examines the potential benefits of digital humanities, both in terms of the sources that digitization makes available to scholars and new methodologies such as GIS mapping and data mining. He also offers some principles to guide digital humanities research that focus on cooperation and sharing of materials. Next, Escott suggests new avenues of research if scholars consider the interactions of people and the environment. [End Page 172] Yes, military historians factor geography and topography in studies of battles, but what about weather and climate? Moreover, discussions of disease do not relate just to soldiers in camp or in battle; civilians were also victims. Masses of moving troops took livestock, as well as diseases that affected livestock, with them, as did refugees. What effect did this movement have on the environment? Finally, Escott leans on the...