Southern Town Research Articles

Book Review: Greetings from New Nashville: How a Sleepy Southern Town Became “It” City

Book Review: Greetings from New Nashville: How a Sleepy Southern Town Became “It” City

IsabelWilkersonCaste: The Origins of Our DiscontentsRandom House, 2020. 496 p. $32.00

IsabelWilkersonCaste: The Origins of Our DiscontentsRandom House, 2020. 496 p. $32.00

Digresión y alteridad: una lectura de "Falsa calma" (2005), de María Sonia Cristoff

El presente trabajo se propone analizar las crónicas de Falsa calma. Un recorrido por los pueblos fantasma de la Patagonia (2005), de la escritora argentina María Sonia Cristoff. Víctimas del desmantelamiento del ferrocarril durante la última dictadura militar y las políticas privatistas de los años 90, las localidades del Sur padecen la desintegración territorial. En este artículo, observamos la forma en que Cristoff aborda la relación entre las comunidades locales y la nación como comunidad imaginada (Anderson 2003), la representación de la alteridad desde perspectivas biopolíticas (Giorgi 2014) o poscoloniales (Said 2007) y la disputa por la hegemonía cultural (Williams 2009). En cada uno de esos ejes, analizamos la digresión (Chambers 1994; Echeverría 2005; Oliver 2016; Atkins 2017) como procedimiento que permite la deriva hacia otros textos a partir de los cuales se define la relación entre crónica y alteridad (Todorov 2007). Asimismo, proponemos una analogía entre el movimiento de la desviación y la integración que toda operación digresiva supone y los movimientos de aislamiento e integración territorial que se presentan en el texto como problemática comunitaria.

These Unlucky Stars by Gillian McDunn

Reviewed by: These Unlucky Stars by Gillian McDunn Deborah Stevenson, Editor McDunn, Gillian These Unlucky Stars. Bloomsbury, 2021 [288p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781547605385 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781547605392 $11.89 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 4–6 At eleven, Annie believes firmly that she’s cursed with unluckiness and that she’s the reason why her mother left years go. Further proof of her ill luck comes when an abortive attempt at a ding-dong ditch leads to the injuring of elderly Gloria Crumb, and Annie is now on the hook for helping feisty Gloria around the house and with her big ugly dog until she’s back on her feet. At the same time, Annie is doing her best to assist with their little town’s upcoming festival, but she’s frustrated that her father and older brother don’t seem to take her artistic contributions seriously as they work on a parade float for the family business. As she did in Caterpillar Summer (BCCB 5/19), McDunn capably captures the voice of a preteen while sharply observing her protagonist’s emotional dynamics. The book is stealthily deft at making Annie clearly the author of many of her own troubles, and there’s definitely some tough love involved in pointing out the self-absorption of her viewpoint, but it’s also a sympathetic treatment. While some of the elements (the spirited elderly mentor, the silence about the abandoning mother, the small Southern town) are familiar tropes, they’re used well here, and there’s a gentle point about our self-perception being our biggest obstacle that could make for thoughtful discussion or private pondering. [End Page 305] Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

BYZANTINE GLAZED CERAMICS OF THE 13th CENTURY IN THE CRIMEA (short review)

Despite political and military upheaval in Byzantium in the 13th century, the most important of which were the conquest of Constantinople and the central territories of the empire by the Latins in 1204, and then the restoration of the state and the return of the capital by Michael VIII Palaeologus in 1261, the manufacture of marketable glazed tableware on its historical territory had not stopped. Moreover, delivery of this ceramic into the territory of the Crimea also continued. This was largely due to the new owners of the maritime market — Italian merchants, first Venetians, and then Genoese, who were active participants of the political and military conflicts in the Eastern Mediterranean and Byzantium. At the same time, the composition of the imported ceramic was not stable. Finds from well-dated archaeological deposits known from the excavations of archaeological sites in the Crimea, as well as the surrounding area, provide the information as for the volume of the Byzantine import and changes in the imported pottery assemblage during the 13th century. First of all, these are the cultural remains with the layers of fire and destruction on the territory of the medieval towns in southern and south-western Crimea with the coins of 1250—1260s; shipwreck near the Novy Svet village south-west to Sudak, which wrecked not earlier than 1260—1270s; two pits in the harbor part of Soldaia / Sudak with coins of the 1266 and 1270s, which, according to stratigraphy, were filled after the mentioned catastrophe; sites in south-eastern Crimea with coins of the last quarter of the 13th — early 14th century, so on. Correlation of data from these contexts leads to the following conclusions. 1. Quantity of Byzantine ceramics imported into Crimea during the 13th century was quite significant. It accounts for up to 70 % and more of the ceramics assemblages. 2. The range of glazed ware remained approximately the same from the beginning until the middle — third quarter of the 13th century. The MBP (mainly «Incised Sgraffito Ware», less often «Champlevй» and others); GWW with monochrome green glaze as well as green and brown painted variants; «Zeuxippus Ware» (class IА&II) prevailed. 3. Since the last third of the 13th century less elegant and cheaper vessels («Sgraffito with Concentric Circles», jugs with stripes of white engobe) from different workshops, which in large quantities arise on the Byzantine and surrounding lands, start to come to the Crimea and Northern Black Sea Region. Their activities were stimulated by the intensification of maritime trade and the growing demand for cheap glazed pottery. 4. Cessation of some groups of import, especially MBP from Chalcis, may be due to the ousting of the Venetians from the Crimean market and their temporary difficulties with novation in the Black Sea after 1261. At the same time, the sales crisis could lead to the decline of some large pottery centers and to the emergence of new focused on more promising trading intermediaries, which the Genoese became.

Charles Berry: NASA physician who helped select the USA’s first astronauts

Photo: Charles Berry with Deke Slayton In the 1960s, Americans followed every move made by the astronauts braving the unknowns of space travel. Their faces were splashed on magazine covers: people crowded into theatres to see them on speaking tours, knew the names of the astronauts’ wives and children, how many test flights they’d flown, and what their hobbies were. Charles Berry, who has died at the age of 96, was tasked with helping to select the members of the elite corps, and their medical care. Neither job was easy. The men were test pilots in the military—stoic, brave, and eager to fly into space. They did not want to admit to any medical or psychological condition that might prove to be a problem. It was a matter of “super-selecting the super-selected,” Berry said later, and required both diplomacy and medical skill. That Berry had the high profile job at all was something of an accident. He’d grown up in California, the son of a butcher, and in eighth grade met the woman who would become his wife of 62 years. After his medical training at the University of California at San Francisco, he went into general practice in a desert town in southern …

Spatial planning of fire-agency stations as a function of wildfire likelihood in Thasos, Greece

Even though wildfires constitute a natural phenomenon, they may have severe implications with respect to the socioeconomic structure of the affected population and the ecological wealth of a territory, especially when they burn under high intensities. Timing of the initial attack is thus crucial to fire control in areas that fires are considered to be under high threat of burning. The aim of this paper is to investigate the combined use of simulation modeling and spatial optimization to assess the pre-positioning of fire-management resources on a small Greek island, Thasos, based on the current and desired fire agency capabilities, maximization of environmental protection, and rationalization of financial resources. The estimation of burn probability (BP) depicted specific areas of high fire hazard in the southern, central, and western part of the island, where essential preventive measures should be undertaken. Based on this result, BP was then used as a primary input for the assessment of optimal locations of fire operation agencies in order to achieve the maximal coverage under certain (already available) and minimum number of fire-fighting vehicles in different time windows. The results generated three differentiated optimal location schemes [8 available vehicles within either 10 (immediate response time) or 31 min (average response time) with the current fire resources; 19 and 2 required vehicles within 10 and 31 min, respectively, based on a minimum number of fire resources]. This type of information enables us to propose a relocation of the current fire agency in a southern town of the island. The flexibility and interaction of the models provide a framework for appropriate decision making under a set of political and financial constraints.

The Central Town Square in Medieval Towns in the (Southern) Low Countries: Urban Life, Form, and Identity between Social Practice and Iconographic Identity

The central town squares of the medieval towns in the Low Countries are considered to be the theatres of late medieval urban identity and are not rarely associated with the origin of the towns, or at least their glory as merchant towns in the past. In reality, these emblematic places have often complex biographies, in which selected memories were attributed to them in different historical contexts. In this paper, we will explore how these changing townscapes interacted with the social agents at their medieval origins. We will use both archaeological data as well as historical writings in order to reconstruct their biographies and show how their development was not path-dependent but followed deliberate strategies and aims by different actors that used this space.

Eudora Welty Society

Eudora Welty Society Harriet Pollack, President Since our last report in EWR, Spring 2019, the Welty Society has run and is planning the next dynamic series of events. 2019 Mississippi Book Festival The August 2019 MBF hosted the session Eudora Welty and Race which was planned to preview the December publication of New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race, the first volume in the new University Press of Mississippi series, Critical Perspectives on Eudora Welty. Panelists were Harriet Pollack (moderator), Ebony Lumumba, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Christin Taylor, and Rebecca Mark. Christin Taylor also signed copies of her 2019 book, Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work, and Sex in the South, which provocatively considers Welty's The Golden Apples in the contexts of Popular-Front era protest fiction by African-American writers. [End Page 220] EWS at the Society for the Study of the American Short Story Symposium The September 2019 SSASS symposium, held in New Orleans, featured Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake" Revisited on the 70th Anniversary of Publication. A result of having had 17 Welty scholars perform a staged reading of Welty's "Moon Lake" at our 2019 Charleston Welty Society Conference was that all of us in Welty studies began thinking again, at the same time, about this central story in Welty's masterwork The Golden Apples. Society member and OBIE Award-winning actress Brenda Currin's adaptation put lines of the story in our mouths and ears in a different way from meeting them on the page—giving us a chance to hear what we'd missed or never wondered about before. This SSASS panel gave a few of us a chance to work again on the story that we had all thought hard about before while offering an opportunity to talk to each other about our new perceptions. There, the following papers were presented: 1. "On Class and Comedy in 'Moon Lake' Modernism," Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston 2. "The Vibrant Matter of Eudora Welty's 'Moon Lake,'" Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Baylor University 3. "'Moon Lake' Revisited 25 Years After Publishing The Dragon's Blood: Feminist Intertextuality in Welty's The Golden Apples," Rebecca Mark, Tulane University Plans for EWS Panels and a Staged Reading at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature 2020 Conference, April 2–4, 2020, were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We look forward to seeing some of this research in future issues of EWR and have included the planned panel information below. In spring 2020, we had planned to bring a panel, a roundtable, and a staged reading to the biannual SSSL meeting, to be held in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The panel Welty and the New Southern Renaissance was to feature four papers: 1. "Eudora Welty and the New Mississippi Renaissance," Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston 2. "The Post Office and the Displaced Pedestal: Fictions by Eudora Welty and Alice Walker," Donnie McMahand and Kevin Murphy, Towson University 3. "Nick White and Eudora Welty: Doubleness, Queerness, and the Small Southern Town," Caroline Brandon, Mississippi State University [End Page 221] 4. "'Memory as a 'living thing': Specters in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing and Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter," Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Baylor University The roundtable Radical Welty was to introduce nine short presentations: 1. "On Radical Welty: Intersectionality," Rebecca Mark, Director of the Institute for Women's Leadership, Rutgers University 2. "Radical Reflections on Welty, Whiteness, and Race," Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston 3. "Welty and Popular Front-era Black Radicalism," Christin Taylor, Shenandoah University 4. "On Welty's Radical Photography of Black Women," Alex Werrell, Hopkins School 5. "Welty's Radical Assault: Masculine Discourse in The Bride of the Innisfallen," Carol Ann Johnston, Dickinson College 6. "'Change Me': Radical Sexuality in Welty's Fiction," David McWhirter, Texas A&M 7. "Welty's Radical Reimagining of Beauty Culture," Katherine Howell, University of Mississippi 8. "Welty's Radical Feminism: Personal and Global Violence in "At the Landing,'" Allison M. Nick, University of Mississippi 9. "Welty's Radical Scopic Regimes," Annette Trefzer, University of Mississippi In addition, EWS had planned, for the general SSSL audience, to reprise our staged reading of Welty's "Moon...

Dirty Fighter

Dirty Fighter William Householder (bio) Staff Picks George Singleton LSU Press www.lsupress.org/books/detail/staff-picks/ 208 Pages; Print, $22.50 Here are a few things you may not know about George Singleton, Southern fiction writer, purveyor of "grit lit," and one of the funniest short story writers this benighted country has produced: George and his opossum buddy have time-traveling adventures as the superheroes Manna Man and Thanatosis Girl, righting wrongs throughout history. George likes to put his good friend, the acclaimed novelist and poet Ron Rash, into his stories in a most unseemly and grotesquely funny fashion. (It's not hard. "Rash" lends itself to abuse in so many ways). George likes flea markets. Fact or fiction? You decide. George Singleton is not just a funny Southern fiction writer in the grand tradition, which includes Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Donald Barthelme and Roy Blount, Jr. But he is also a first-class travel agent. How's that, you ask? I thought he worked for Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina? Rest assured, he still does, but his passion has always been travel. If you've ever read any of George's stories, you know he likes to send you to the most interesting places this side of the Mason-Dixon Line. Have you ever visited a town called Gruel? Or Poke? Or Forty-Five? Sure, there are towns with such odd names all over the South, and yes, the populations of such towns exist, but not in the same state! The Carolinas of George Singleton are familiar, but slightly skewed.The big problem with reading Singleton is after a while you start to talk and think like one his characters or worse yet, if you're a writer, you start to write like Singleton and nobody else can do that but him. For example, take a look at the opening of "Rinse Cycle": Tyler Fort would still be alive these thirty-plus years later had my father not thrown away the cheap Zebco rod and reel, if my best friend Arlie Capps's father hadn't beaten him after we got caught, if Mr. Fort had learned how to read and been able to get another job after the mill closed, if new owner, Mr. Patel, had drained the swimming pool after Labor Day behind the twelve-room Hilltop Motel like old owner, Mr. Liner, always did ... if Raj Patel had installed a higher fence or security cameras to let him know when two fourteen-year-old boys jumped a split rail in order to harass a boy pummeled by an unhinged father, if the town of Poke could still afford a single cop to work third shift driving around with a spotlight, and—to be honest—if Tyler Fort possessed the ability to say, "I don't want to wear dresses every Sunday night." But he's long dead. That story's opening paragraph has so much energy in its prose and momentum in the exposition it supplies, only to slam on the brakes in the last sentence: you have to read it twice just to be sure of what's happened. I read that opening and said, "Damn!" Further evidence that the writing of George Singleton will make you forget a good Baptist upbringing. The men in the fourteen stories comprising Staff Picks are middle-class, middle-aged, white guys from small Southern towns. They are hapless. They are suckers. They are schmucks trying to get by. The women are long-suffering or no-longer [End Page 32] suffering as they've wised up and left these pathetic men. Some good examples of these men are in "One More," "Gloryland," and "Resisting Separation." George Singleton is also a dirty fighter. You think you're getting a funny story about a couple's marital foibles and then out of nowhere he'll punch you in the gut with enough force that the air coming out of you sounds like a sob, then he'll throw dust into your eyes to make you tear up. His coup de grâce is his signature wrestling move, illegal in thirty of the continental United States...

MONITORING VEGETATION COVER CHANGE USING VEGETATION INDICES IN TANGBO RIVER, BARANGAY TANGBO, SAMBOAN

Abstract. Tangbo River is an important resource in Cebu’s southern town of Samboan for being the site of Aguinid Falls, a known tourist destination. Monitoring the changes in the river’s riparian vegetation is important since it has impacts on its ecological role of helping maintain biodiversity and river water quality. This study aims to detect vegetation index changes along the Tangbo River corridor using three vegetation indices: NDVI, EVI, NDMI, and Tasseled Cap indices, specifically for the years 1998, 2004, 2009, 2016, and 2019. It also aims to monitor the changes in NDVI and EVI values alongside tourism arrivals in Aguinid in 2018.Cloudless Landsat 5 (1998, 2004, 2009, and 2016) and Landsat 8 (2019) imagery were selected. Thirty reference points were plotted along the river with a 30-m distance between each point. Vegetation Indices (VI) and Tasseled Cap values were generated using data from these points and were compared for each selected year. NDVI and EVI values from the same reference points used in Landsat were generated from selected cloudless months of 2018 Planetscope imagery. Inbound tourist records were acquired from the tourism office of Samboan and the tourism arrivals for the year 2018 was then graphed with the Planetscope VI values for better visualization.Landsat imagery showed that there was a general upward trend in the vegetation indices from 1998 to 2019. Tasseled Cap Greenness and Wetness showed an increase in values from 1998–2019 while Tasseled Cap Brightness showed the opposite. Results from Planetscope data for the year 2018 showed that there was an inverse pattern between NDVI and tourism arrivals. Tourism arrivals peaked during the months of April and May based on annual records, while VI values dropped. On the other hand, both VI values peaked towards the last quarter of the year while tourist numbers dropped. This suggests that the pattern of VI values and tourism arrivals seemed to be influenced by seasonal changes rather than with each other. Findings from the study shows that further data collection is required to be able to establish a relationship between tourism and vegetation index values.

Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk

Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk

Unconstitutionality of the Government Emergency Ordinance no. 62/2019. Citizens' Rights, Liberties of all Buyers of Prepaid Phone Cards

The Romanian Ombudsman has notified the Constitutional Court over a recent emergency ordinance of the government (Government Emergency Ordinance no. 62/2019) which changed the legislation emergency calls and electronic communications, the institution announced on Thursday. The executive order forced all buyers of prepaid phone cards to present their IDs upon acquisition. The Ombdusman said it found that the ordinance was breaching citizens' rights, liberties and duties and the initiator had to provide better motivation, proof of extraordinary circumstances that would match the restraining of rights. The ordinance was published last week. It says prepaid cards would not be sold unless ID is provided when purchased starting January 1, 2020, while those who already hold such phone cards would no longer benefit of services starting September 1, 2020 unless they provide their personal data. The data would be stored by the state's special telecoms service STS for 5 years. The ordinance also introduces much bigger fines for false alarm to emergency phone number 112 starting next month. The changes were hastened in the wake of a major criminal case in which a kidnapped teenager was murdered in the southern town of Caracal this summer, despite her calling to the emergency number repeatedly to call for help. The case was mostly blamed on the incapacity of authorities to react in due time and efficient manner.

Sleeping Problems Partly Mediate the Association between Victimization and Depression among Youth

Being bullied by peers at school is associated with numerous intrapersonal, interpersonal, and health problems. Depression is one of the strongest correlates of victimization and, although it may precede victimization, there is convincing evidence of victimization leading to later depression. Victimization has also been found to be related to sleeping problems, both concurrently and longitudinally. Using structural equation modeling, we tested the hypothesis that the effect of victimization on depression is partly mediated by sleeping difficulties. The mean age of the participants (N = 1717) was 16 years, and they were from 20 schools in seven towns in Southern and South-West Finland. We focused on two types of sleeping problems—insomnia and nightmares—among students who had recently made the transition to secondary education in Finland. We controlled for the effects of sex (girls and others in relation to boys) and school type (high school/vocational school). Besides a significant direct effect of victimization on depression (β = .21, p < .001), there were significant indirect effects via both insomnia (β = .04, p = .008) and nightmares (β = .03, p = .002). The findings suggest that sleeping problems may be indicative of peer victimization, and they are one possible mechanisms via which the effects of victimization on depression unfold.

Heavy Metal Content of Rural Living Solid Waste and Related Source and Distribution Analysis

Living solid waste of 72 typical villages and towns in 12 provinces was investigated, and related heavy metal pollution characteristics, source, and distribution were analyzed. Results showed that heavy metal content of As, Hg, Pb, Cd, Cr, Cu, Zn, and Ni in living solid waste of typical northern villages of China was (7.51±8.89), (0.64±0.42), (21.91±12.29), (4.82±8.37), (86.36±59.99), (36.43±15.98), (62.19±36.61), and (46.07±25.22) mg·kg-1, respectively. Content of As, Hg, Pb, Cd, Cr, Cu, Zn, and Ni in living solid waste of typical southern towns was (7.43±8.82), (0.83±0.74), (21.62±13.76), (1.84±4.55), (131.06±74.96), (37.20±16.80), (98.04±63.71), and (46.75±25.75) mg·kg-1, respectively. Cd and Hg exceeded the standards for urban garbage agricultural control and soil environmental quality. Sources of heavy metals in domestic waste were explored by Pearson correlation analysis, cluster analysis, and principal component analysis. Results showed that Pb and Cd were mainly derived from kitchen waste, dust, paper, rubber, and plastic. Hg was mainly from kitchen waste and dust. Zn and Cr were mainly from dust. Cu was mainly from dust, paper, rubber, plastic, battery, and electronic waste. Ni was mainly from battery and electronic wastes. As was mainly derived from pesticides and fertilizers.

Working-class ecology and union politics: a conceptual topology

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that Environmental Labour Studies may benefit from incorporating the perspective of environmental justice. We offer a theorization of working-class ecology as the place where working-class communities live and work, being typically affected by environmental injustice, and of working-class environmentalism as those forms of activism that link labour and environmental struggles around the primacy of reproduction. The paper’s theoretical section draws on a social ethnography of working-class ecology in the case of Taranto, a mono-industrial town in southern Italy, which is experiencing a severe environmental and public-health crisis. We show how environmental justice activism since the early 2000s has allowed the re-framing of union politics along new ways of politicizing the local economy. We conclude by offering a conceptual topology of working-class ecology, which situates different labour organizations (confederal, social/community, and rank-and-file unions) according to their positioning in respect to environmental justice.

Joan Quigley, Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 358. $29.95 (cloth).

Joan Quigley, <i>Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation’s Capital</i>. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 358. $29.95 (cloth).

Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation's Capitol by Joan Quigley

Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation's Capitol by Joan Quigley

«НЕТИПОВИЙ КИЇВ»: ЗРАЗКИ «ПІВНІЧНОГО МОДЕРНУ» У МІСЬКІЙ ЗАБУДОВІ ПОЧАТКУ ХХ СТ.

At the turn of the 19 – 20th centuries Kyiv experienced a building boom: once a rural town transformed into a modern city. The widely spread one or two-storied classical-styled houses were replaced with multistoried apartment houses, designed in a new architectural fashion. By that time, various forms of Art Nouveau dominated European architecture. Kyiv also picked up this trend. Buildings in Kyiv of that time represent a motley mixture of the most popular variants of style each having certain peculiarities. The new urban buildings’ constructions followed classical traditions while facades were designed after the latest European patterns. The National Romantic styleis a remarkable and unusual form of the architectural Modern. It emerged in Northern Europe and was inspired by Scandinavian flora and fauna, local folklore and traditional architecture. The National Romantic style followed the motto “Back to nature”: architects designed simple forms and chose building materials of a local origin. Unexpectedly we see the buildings in this Nordic style at the streets of Kyiv. How did they appear in a Southern town? As they were built as apartment houses for lease, the clients asked architects to make houses more attractive for the future tenants. It was the case as of the metropolitan Saint-Petersburg masters (F. Lidval, P. Svatkovskyi) so of the local architects and engineers (V. Peshchanskyi, О. Verbytskyi). In Kyiv, the National Romantic style has its own specific features. It is monumental, laconic in details and abundant in natural textures. Thus, Kyiv version of the Nordic style did not simply copied the original, but rather cited the patterns and creatively reinterpreted Scandinavian architectural forms.

Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt

Reviewed by: Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt Tim Lockley Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South. By Keri Leigh Merritt. Cambridge Studies on the American South. ( New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 361. Paper, $32.99, ISBN 978-1-316-63543-8; cloth, $59.99, ISBN 978-1-107-18424-4.) Keri Leigh Merritt's important new book depicts an antebellum South where life for poor whites was incredibly harsh. Lacking access to capital and unable to sell their labor for a decent price, poor whites were suffocated by a system clearly designed to entrench the power of the slaveholding elite. The themes that run throughout Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South show the wealthy elite consciously controlling and suppressing the white poor in the antebellum South for their own gain and the white poor, who were well aware of this state of affairs, usually unsuccessfully resisting it as best they could. While nailing down exactly who fell into the category "poor whites" has troubled many scholars, Merritt estimates that by 1860 at least one-third of the [End Page 456] white population in the antebellum South were poor, lacking land or any meaningful property. These people could never aspire to reach the status of slaveholders and were "truly, cyclically poor" (p. 16). Merritt's strongest and perhaps most provocative argument is that the elite actively strove to perpetuate this situation. She does not see a herrenvolk democracy operating here. The elite failed to provide an adequate educational system that might have provided the poorest with the skills to improve their lot, and they used the power of the law to harass, corral, and bully the poor. Those without obvious means of support could be arrested for vagrancy and then bound out in a form of unfree labor. Those suspected of property crimes, drunkenness, interracial fraternization, or a whole host of other offenses could be jailed, publicly beaten, and exiled. Propertied whites controlled the machinery of justice, and those caught in the system could do little to escape it. Poor whites were not simple victims in this process. Many did exactly what the courts said they did—including lying, cheating, and stealing—in their efforts to do whatever they could to survive. In this sense, poor whites and the enslaved similarly resisted planter oppression. This was perhaps most noticeable during the Civil War, when those trying to avoid the Confederate draft melted into the swamps, forests, and mountains of the South just as enslaved people had for a long time. My caveats are relatively minor and are more about added nuance than anything else. Sometimes Merritt treats the South as monolithic, seeing the same hierarchies and oppressions almost everywhere. Any person bold enough to look at the entire South will always leave themselves open to this criticism, but it is worth reiterating the sheer variety and complexity of southern environments. For one thing, southern towns and cities clearly operated under slightly different social conventions since poorer whites tended to congregate there and gained some social and political power as a result. For instance, shopkeepers could turn a blind eye to illegal trading between poor whites and the enslaved. Moreover, Merritt downplays what I think were genuine efforts by at least some elite southerners to create a network of private and public benevolence, including a functioning system of public education. While there is an argument that charity is a form of social control, it is hard to always see it in this light and thus overlook those who tried to help poorer whites, particularly the sick, disabled, and orphaned. Provisions for public education were admittedly patchy, indeed some states did very little, but in North Carolina and Alabama most white children had access to at least some public education by the 1850s and enrollment rates matched those of some New England states. Furthermore, those working to create effective public school systems promoted in print the racially cohesive effect of providing education only to whites. Evidently not all members of the slaveholding elite wanted to suppress the poorest whites. None of...