South History Research Articles

Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South by Daniel S. Dupre

Reviewed by: Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South by Daniel S. Dupre James Taylor Carson (bio) Keywords Alabama, South, Native Americans, First Peoples, frontier Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South. By Daniel S. Dupre. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. Pp. 310. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $35.00; e-book, $34.99.) Going back a few decades, ethnohistorians have been arguing that a full understanding of the American South's history cannot be gained until scholars grapple with the depth and significance of the region's Indigenous histories and peoples. In Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South, Daniel S. Dupre has done just that. He posits a revision of American frontier history that stands apart from comparable works and models an alternative kind of practice that future scholars will have to confront. By situating his interpretation in a past that begins with the introduction of maize to the region around one thousand years ago, Dupre shifts the focus from Frederick Jackson Turner's westward gaze and enacts fully the promise of Daniel Richter's call for a view from the east.1 Such a pivot entails all sorts of new perspectives, the most salient of which are that the conventional history of the Anglo American settlers who founded the state of Alabama occupy only the book's concluding chapter and that their most enduring edifice, the so-called "Old South," proves to have lasted for only a little more than a generation. What then are we to make of the preceding centuries of the region's human occupation? Or the impact of Spanish incursions that pre-dated the invention of the cotton gin by almost two and a half centuries? Or the fact that for a little more than a century imperial powers jockeyed for pre-eminence among the region's First Nations in ways that left the nations holding both power and initiative? A different approach to the past enables a different South to emerge. Dupre eschews the linearity and progressivism of the classical frontier formulation and instead invokes Richard White's "middle ground."2 Importantly, Dupre [End Page 179] acknowledges that middle grounds existed amongst Alabama's first peoples long before the arrival of Europeans, but, he asserts, Hernando de Soto's violent entrada in the early 1540s caused an abrupt change as slave raids, the pressures of commercial hunting, and the vagaries of imperial diplomacy pulled First Peoples deeply into the emerging Atlantic world. Only when the American republic won its independence from Great Britain did this centuries-old "Older" South begin to crumble. The United States' aggressive race-based social organization backed by overwhelming military, demographic, and bureaucratic power cleansed the state of Alabama of most of its indigenous population and established in the 1830s the conditions under which race-based slavery and cotton monoculture could thrive. If we take into account the significance of the deeper history of Alabama's frontier, Dupre argues, we will have to reconsider how historians contextualize and narrate America's past in relation to three main themes. First, exploring the long span of time going back to the arrival of the Spanish helps us understand why events in the early nineteenth century unfolded as they did. For example, the different historical origins of early Alabama's two rival centers of settler power structured the territory's subsequent history. Second, Americans' repudiation of the myriad societies, cultures, and practices that had characterized life in what became Alabama committed the United States more fully to the paths of race, enslavement, and violence that bedevil us still. Third, scholars have begun to deploy the word métis more and more in southern historiography, and Dupre uses it to such an extent that one of the clearest, though still underplayed, implications of the book is that we need to come to grips with these people in ways that get beyond the anecdotal and episodic treatment they have thus far received. The English language has no commensurate term for such people, which complicates their historical interpretation and historiographical explication, but there is a story here of people who blended families, cultural practices, and politics...

Between Past and Future: The Momentary Present

This photographic essay includes a dozen cultural landscape images from locations in the American South. Cumulatively, they interpret these places as a series of what I call "momentary presents"—instants in which the past and future meet. Everything seen in these photographs is rooted in an accumulated past that is in the process of becoming the future. Much of the South's history is a known quantity; the region's future, however, is uncertain. These photographs question the nature of that future and to what degree the past will continue to inflect it.

Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960 by Kenneth C. Barnes

Reviewed by: Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960 by Kenneth C. Barnes David T. Mitchell Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–196. By Kenneth C. Barnes. ( Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2016. Pp. x, 266. $34.95, ISBN 978–1-68226–016-6.) In the past sixty years, scholars have written a number of good books on Catholic-Protestant relations in the United States, but until recently, cursory attention has been given to anti-Catholicism in the South. In his 1938 biography [End Page 200] of agrarian rebel turned anti-Catholic bigot Tom Watson, C. Vann Woodward created a seminal interpretation. Woodward concludes that while white southerners like Watson fostered religious bigotry, their actions revealed curious but extraneous truths about the South's history. Kenneth C. Barnes's book on anti-Catholicism in Arkansas has attempted to reframe this narrative, shifting the lens to the people and institutions that made religious bigotry their prime concern. The lion's share of Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960 is devoted to an eighteen-year period, beginning in 1910 with the publication of Tom Watson's Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine (an anti-Catholic tour de force) and ending with the anti-Catholic campaign against 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith. The focus is noteworthy. In Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1955), an important study of America's nativist past, John Higham contends that the South's fixation with Catholicism began in 1910, with Watson contributing to paranoia. Barnes credits Strangers in the Land for providing a foundational framework for understanding anti-Catholicism in Arkansas, but he aligns with more recent scholars of anti-Catholicism who argue that anti-Catholicism was not primarily about ethnic identity but rather "essentially about a religion" (p. 4). One glaring omission is Andrew S. Moore's recent work on Catholic-Protestant relations in Georgia and Alabama. Seven chapters are organized chronologically. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to America's and Arkansas's anti-Catholic past, detailing how the anti-Catholic fringe element connected with a rural, religious, and conservative base. Chapter 2, perhaps the best chapter, uncovers the connection between anti-Catholicism and sexualized gender. For a brief time, anti-Catholic leaders created a paranoid, sex-obsessed frenzy, fueled by fictional accounts of convent abuses. Robert Randolph Posey, a notable zealot and Arkansas state representative, sponsored convent inspection bills twice. After it was passed, the Convent Inspection Act of 1915 required "religious institutions such as convents, monasteries, hospitals, orphanages, asylums, seminaries, or schools to submit to an inspection by the county sheriff or a grand jury upon the request of a judge or a petition of twenty citizens" (p. 25). Chapter 3 addresses how liquor issues and World War I influenced religious antipathy. In highlighting the work of Arkansas Baptists, Barnes convincingly links religiously motivated prohibition with anti-Catholic sentiments. The second part of the chapter examines how wartime anti-German sentiments fueled hatred against Catholics as another point when nationalism and ethnic identity trumped religious conviction. Chapter 4, "Catholics and the Ku Klux Klan, 1921–1925," emphasizes how the state's Klan leadership fueled jingoistic fears about immigration, public school control, and political conspiracy. Echoing other recent Klan histories, Barnes finds that these organizations attracted middle-class, urban, and educated leaders who wielded enormous political influence. Chapters 5 and 6 cover how the citizens of Arkansas debated the possibility of a Catholic president of the United States. In 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith picked Arkansas senator Joseph T. Robinson as his running [End Page 201] mate, creating a fissure between culture warriors who were fighting against a pro-alcohol, pro-evolution, and Catholic presidential candidate and those who supported a ticket that included Arkansas's "favorite son" (p. 164). Although anti-Catholicism did not disappear, Barnes sees 1928 as the pivotal year when it began a steady decline. John F. Kennedy's 1960 election marked the end of politically organized anti...

Relief from Relief: The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike of 1937 and the Right to Welfare

In July 1937 Mabel Hagan and her co-workers in a Tampa, Florida, sewing room went on strike. The sit-down was short-lived and unsuccessful. In a week's time, the workers were back at their machines, the leaders had been fired, and the entire event quickly dis appeared from historical memory.1 In Tampa, a city with an impressive history of labor activism, strikes were common events, and this one seemed a minor skirmish. But the event was notable. The women involved were relief workers who made clothing and other items to be distributed to nonprofit organizations; their jobs had been created by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (wpa). Although relief workers had staged other strikes across the country, very few had taken place in the South, and in 1937 Florida had yet to see one. Even rarer was a relief strike conducted by women workers. So the Tampa sit-down was intriguingly unusual. Tampa was itself unusual, one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the South. Its im migrant residents did not easily fit into the region's racial binary system. Cuban, Spanish, Italian, and Bahamian immigrants, along with native-born whites and African Americans, provided the labor to make Tampa premier industrial city. Still largely an agri cultural state, early twentieth-century Florida was beginning to show signs of its future service-sector economy. Already tourism had become a significant industry, and within a very few years the Sunshine State would seem far removed from its Old South history, as it laid the foundations for the post-1940 economic revolution that the historian Gary R. Mormino has called Florida's Big Bang.2 So this was an unusual strike in an unusual city in an increasingly unusual southern state. How then can the strike have any relevance to the larger histories and historiog raphies of labor, race, gender, or region? As Christine Stansell once noted of antebellum

The Human Tradition in the New South (review)

Reviewed by: The Human Tradition in the New South Gene B. Preuss The Human Tradition in the New South. Edited by James C. Klotter. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Pp 224. Acknowledgments, illustrations, notes, suggested readings, index. ISBN 0742544753. $70.00, cloth. ISBN 0742544761. $24.95, paper.) Editor James C. Klotter, professor of history at Kentucky's Georgetown College and Kentucky state historian, has assembled in The Human Tradition in the New South a remarkable collection of short biographical essays that help readers understand the complexities of the New South. As Klotter points out in the introduction, an easy definition of the South is elusive. Like other regional historians, Southern historians realize that different perspectives and definitions exist. Defining the New South is likewise subject to debate. When does the period begin? When does it end? Where is the South? Klotter states, "To understand the South since 1865 means understanding the long influence the Civil War had on southerners, in fact and memory" (p. xii). Indeed, the book will help readers appreciate the nuances of what it means to be a Southerner in the New South. While the book includes chapters on both well-known and ordinary Southerners, the real strength is in the essays on typical people who lived in the New South. Rebecca Sharpless's chapter, "Hester Calvert: Farm Wife," is an example of the collection's focus on typical southerners, and among the best in the collection. Paul Conkin's personal essay on the influence of two average, yet memorable, African American men in a predominately Southern town is a moving piece of historical writing. Christopher Waldrep's article exemplifies the daily civil rights battle in the hearts and minds of common Southerners in the 1950s and 1960s. At the beginning of the article, he identifies a major theme of New South history that echoes throughout the edition, "One great irony . . . is that no region of the nation changed as much as the white South, the same part of the country most determined not to change at all" (p. 158). Readers will also appreciate the biographies of more recognizable citizens of the New South. Cita Cooks's chapter on Winnie Davis, Jefferson Davis's daughter, illustrates the enduring power of the Lost Cause on the mind of the New South. S. Spencer Davis contrasts the public success of blues singer Ma Rainey with her personal struggles, and Kathryn Kemp illustrates how the idea of the New South combined with traditional values in the life of Coca-Cola inventor, Asa Candler. William J. Marshall's essay on baseball legend Dizzy Dean provides one of the most detailed biographies in the edition but also the most unsatisfying as the author leaves some loose ends in a rather abrupt conclusion to the story, and fails to demonstrate how Dean's life fits into the New South. On the other hand, in the familiar story of perhaps the most well-known Kentuckian, Kentucky Fried Chicken icon Harlan "Colonel" Sanders, the author explains how Sanders's diligence and hard work finally paid off in his later years through an appeal to the Lost Cause. [End Page 570] For those familiar with the series, some chapters are culled from previous titles in the series, including Rebecca Sharpless's essay, which appeared in The Human Tradition in Texas History edited by Ty Cashion and Jesús F. de la Teja (Scholarly Resources Books, 2001). Texas historians will also note the parallels between the controversy over the internment of African American soldier Bill Henry Terry Jr. and the Felix Longoria story. James C. Klotter's The Human Tradition in the New South is a wonderful resource aimed at college students taking southern history courses, but anyone who picks up this book will find it enjoyable. Gene B. Preuss University of Houston—Downtown Copyright © 2007 The Texas State Historical Association

Boundary-Breaking Courage

South History Across the Color Line. By Nell Irvin Painter. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. 256 pp. $37.00 cloth; $17.95 paper. South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature. By Trudier Harris-Lopez. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002. xii + 230 pp. $24.95. Nell Painter's Southern History Across the Color Line and Trudier Harris-Lopez's South of Tradition: Essays on African American Literature highlight scholarly careers of originality and complex vision. These texts move beyond traditions of historiography and literary criticism, which often forestall critical wholeness and "down-home" fun, to demonstrate excellence marked by the transgressive verve of two innovative and progressive scholars. In these texts, Painter and Harris-Lopez offer insights beyond the borders of popular critical models. They demonstrate boundary-breaking courage that distinguishes their work from the volumes of often "ordinary" and sometimes-redundant essay collections available today. This two-part review looks at both books, highlighting moments that reveal why the courage and vision found in the best-of-the-best in African American studies shines through most dynamically in these scholars' work. I. Standing in the Breach Nell Painter's journey towards intellectual distinctiveness frames and structures her collection while encouraging a decompartmentalized articulation of American history. Each essay here bypasses tightly defined race, class, and gender categories of exploration, which Painter describes as the "blunt tools of analysis." They bridge "the old habit of writing only [End Page 145] about white people or writing only about black people" with a conscious exploration of "individual subjectivity" and the inter-subjective arrangements of time and place as defined by various patterns of personal and communal growth. Painter investigates class, the body, cultural symbolism, and sexuality from a materialist perspective with many of her interpretations and insights illuminated by what she characterizes as her interdisciplinary "auto-education." "I had to learn a great deal more than what my graduate education had provided," she explains. The thoroughness and thoughtfulness of the essays that result from her self-taught interdisciplinarity inspire and open a conversation about scholarly possibilities and exchange that ultimately reject traditional academic paradigms, particularity those that are "locked-down" by the notion of area specializations. The value of engaging in a versatile and trangressive intellectual exchange among disciplines and among a variety of analytical tools is evident in the opening chapter. "Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting" is one of Painter's best essays. In it she asks readers to sojourn with her into the painful psychology and body politics of slavery. It is an extremely successful attempt to move with intellectual rigor and consistency toward a meaningful interpretation of a world mapped in blood by cruelty and violence. While crossing analytical racial boundaries as well as violating class and gender sectioning, Painter engages feminist and "social science scholarship on child abuse and other forms of torture," psychology, and African American literary studies in her broad, interpersonal view of the wounds and perpetual assaults of slavery and its legacies. Painter's methodological chronicle and challenge continues in essays focusing on the life, individual development and "auto-education" of two southern activists whose personal identities and psyches were affected deeply by the race and gender politics of their time, Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas and Hosea Hudson. Painter reveals how each adjusted to personal realities couched within worlds and ideologies that molded their lives broadly and, sometimes, in unexpected and dramatic ways. For Hosea Hudson struggling for the civil rights of slave descendents and other minorities during the mid-twentieth century carried him from sharecropper to popularity as an organic intellectual (one who "educated himself out of the thrall of conventional thinking"). On the other hand, Painter's discussion of Gertrude Thomas reveals how this southern lady's [End Page 146] formal education fell short of providing what she needed to survive a change in circumstances brought about by the end of the Civil War. Painter's collection is consistent in its concern for...

Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South

The South has long played a central role in America's national imagination - the site of the trauma of slavery and of a vast nostalgia industry, alternatively the nation's moral other and its moral center. Reconstructing Dixie explores how ideas about the South function within American culture. Narratives of the region often cohere around such tropes as Southern hospitality and the Southern (white) lady. Tara McPherson argues that these discursive constructions tend to conceal and disavow hard historical truths, particularly regarding race relations and the ways racial inequities underwrite Southern femininity. Advocating conceptions of the South less mythologized and more tethered to complex realities, McPherson seeks to bring into view that which is repeatedly obscured - including the South's history of both racial injustice and cross-racial alliance. Illuminating crucial connections between understandings of race, gender and place on the one hand and narrative and images on the other, McPherson reads a number of representations of the South produced from the 1930s to the present. These are drawn from fiction, film, television, southern studies scholarship, popular journalism, music, tourist sites, the internet, and autobiography. She examines modes of affect or ways of feeling revealing how these feelings, along with the narratives and images she discusses, sanction particular racial logics. A wide-ranging cultural studies critique, Reconstructing Dixie calls for vibrant new ways of thinking about the South and for a revamped and reinvigorated southern studies. Reconstructing Dixie will appeal to scholars in American, southern, and cultural studies, and to those in African American, media, and women's studies.

Forever Juliet: The Life and Letters of Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies 1891-1992 (review)

428Comparative Drama (1986); Cambridge, ed. Alan Nelson (1989); Herefordshire/Worcestershire, ed. David Klausner (1990); Lancashire, ed. David George (1991); Shropshire, ed. J. Alan B. Somerset (1994); Somerset includingBath, ed. James Stokes with Robert J. Alexander (1996); Bristol, ed. Mark C. Pilkinton (1997); Dorset/Cornwall, ed. Rosalind C. Hays and CE. McGee, Sally Joyce and Evelyn S. Newlyn (1999); Sussex, ed. Cameron Lewis (2000); Kent: Diocese of Canterbury, ed. James M, Gibson (2002). MartialRose.ForeverJuliet: TheLifeandLettersofGwenFfrangconDavies 1891-1992. Dereham (UK): LarksPress,2003.Pp.202 + illustrations. £9.50. Outside anglophile dieatrical circles die actress Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies is not well known in the United States. She acted in America only in 1962-1963 as Mrs. Candour in a touringproduction ofSchoolforScandal. She is better known to die British public because of her long and distinguished career and also because of a series of retrospective programs in 1988, the first of which was entided "Forever Juliet," die source for the tide for this engaging book. Martial Rose, recognized for his work on medieval drama and iconography, has chosen to write for a broad audience. The book is not a traditional biography, aldiough Rose traces Ffrangcon-Davies's life and career from its inception (at fourteen she was given Ellen Terry's blessing) until her death. Radier, as he says in the introduction,he has represented"the actress's life dirough die letters and memorabilia ." Neither is die book a mere epistolary collection, but rather a judicious selection from her letters and from the thousands ofletters and notes written to her. The letters not only create a vivid portrait of the actress, but also provide a broad panorama ofthe English theater in die central halfof the twentiedi century . Long quotations from reviews, often from reviewers long forgotten but also from well-known critics like Kenneth Tynan and James Agate, provide a sense ofthetaste ofthe times. Ifmost are congratulatory, Rose cannot be blamed for bias,for he notes that criticisms were fewand sometimes idiosyncratic. James Agate, for example, who generally praised, was acerbic about her "wistful" Lady Macbedi. Aldiough not ascholarly book,ForeverJulietwas clearlywritten bya scholar faced widi die task of reading and organizing material in over 2,000 letters written between die 1880s and 1992, not to mention scrapbooks, programs, photos, and tapes. (Anyone who has visited Ellen Terry's house at Small Hythe will appreciate the collecting proclivity of actresses.) The minimal footnotes carry just die right amount of information for a general audience, and Rose provides plot summaries, particularly helpful for drama now largely forgotten. Thechronologicaltables ofFfrangcon-Davies's stage roles as wellasperformances Reviews429 in film, television, and radio are particularly useful, testifying to the range of her acting ability. She starred in work by Shaw, Wilde, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Coward, Rattigan, O'Neill, and above all Shakespeare. She repeatedly played opposite John Gielgud, in Richard ofBordeaux (1922),Romeo andJuliet (1924), The Importance of Being Ernest (1939), and Macbeth (1942). She also played opposite Dirk Bogarde (Summertime, 1955), Anthony Quayle (Long Day's Journey into Night, 1958), and Paul Scofield (Uncle Vanya, 1970). Her career began, however,with what became a signature role in the twenties,when she sang the part ofEtain in the opera The ImmortalHourbyRudand Boughton, first at the Glastonbury Festival in 1919-1920, and in five later productions at Birmingham and London. During World War II she assumed a significant role in the history ofSouth African theater. Together with her friend and long-time companion, Marda Vanne, she laid the groundwork for a South African national theater, culminating in her direction ofMacbeth in Afrikaans in 1950. In an age of e-mail and text messaging, it is heartwarming to read bits of such charming letters. PeggyAshcroft addresses her as"darlingest Gwen, sister, and room mate"; Gielgud closes with "Fondest love from your once skinny Romeo." After seeing her at Stratford, Robert Donat writes that her Beatrice was "absolutely enchanting and completely real." Congratulatory letters also merited gracious replies. On receiving one from Gwen, Glenda Jackson replied, "To know someone you admire likes your work is the greatest of all tributes." Gwen's perspicacity shines through her prose. Gielgud as Benedict looked like Danny Kaye in a ginger wig; Mrs. Smuts...

Women Writers, the "Southern Front," and the Dialectical Imagination

for me, the intellectual present in which I came of age, was the peak and crest of the Southern Literary Renaissance. No Southern youth of any sensitivity could help being excited by the explosion of creativity taking place during the early 1930s--in fiction, in poetry, in drama. Nor could I help seeing that the novelists, poets, and playwrights were in the main writing about the same South historians were writing about and making the whole world of letters at home and abroad read what they wrote and ring with their praise. With this awareness and the expectations it aroused, I arrived as a young apprentice at the doors of the history guild for training--and what a striking contrast, what a letdown, what a falling off! No renaissance here, no surge of innovation and creativity, no rebirth of energy, no compelling new vision. This was a craft devoted primarily at the time, or so it seemed to me, to summing up, confirming, illustrating, and consolidating the received wisdom, the regional consensus that prevailed uniquely in the South of the 1930s and--though I could not then have known it--was to continue through the 1940s. That consensus proclaimed the enduring and fundamentally unbroken unity, solidarity, and continuity of Southern history. C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back (1986) It is our inward journey that leads us through time--forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling.... As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (1984) IN THE FALL OF 1924, AS THE SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE GATHERED FORCE, Grace Lumpkin wrenched herself out of South Carolina with a plan. She had dreamed of writing during peaceful Sunday afternoons spent listening to her mother read aloud. As a Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) emissary in France during World War I, she had sent home dispatches from the front. Now, like so many southerners before her, she was convinced that only New York could give her the cultural wherewithal (the skills, the self-confidence, the fund of experience) for a project of self-invention. She wanted to become a writer. She also wanted romance and politics, preferably packaged together. (1) Within weeks of arriving in the city, Lumpkin found a job at the World Tomorrow, one of the best little magazines in New York. Two years later she broke into print, with a prescient intervention in the Harlem Renaissance debates. In The Artist in a Hostile Environment, co-authored with her roommate Esther Shemitz, Grace argued that black writers should not be limited to social protest, but neither should they be condemned for combating the insults and humiliations that assailed them at every turn. (2) Together, Grace and Esther did what they recommended: they used their art to join the political fray. Walking the picket line at the Passaic, New Jersey, strike of 1926-27, they found themselves beaten back toward a soup kitchen, screamed at by a sheriff, and dodging great blue arms swinging clubs against human, quivering flesh. Lumpkin captured the experience in a brief but vivid snapshot, published in the New Masses along with articles by some of the country's leading literary lights. (3) In 1927 she went to jail during the demonstrations in behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti and wrote her first published work of fiction, taking as her subject not this cause celebre but a simultaneous disaster, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. White Man--A Story is a tale of race and sex in which, like an extraordinary number of such characters in southern women's interwar novels, a black woman disappears into the landscape without proper burial; her body becomes part of a perverse political economy--a melancholic detritus in a traumatized land. (4) With this story, Grace Lumpkin turned decisively toward home, taking up a subject to which she would often return: the lives of southern women who were shaped and damaged by the sexual economies in which they circulated as well as by the terms of their labor. …

Southern Distinctiveness, Yet Again, or, Why America Still Needs the South

In 1976 Democratic Party nominated a true blue son of South--Jimmy Carter--to be its presidential candidate. During that campaign, and especially after Carter's election, things southern--from rednecks and born-again Protestantism to potlikker and red-eye gravy--were journalistic rage. Southerners did things differentially, they--we--spoke differently, we ate different kinds of food, we believed and acted differently, and, during those early Carter years, national media seemed entranced by southernness of it all, believing themselves, I suppose, called first to understand South and then to help American people--or at least non-southerners among us--understand it too. I was finishing graduate school in Baltimore at time, and I remember my Yankee friends asking me an inordinate number of questions about South, about being southern. Of course, I was neither first nor last southerner to have enjoyed that particular pleasure: southerners have been explaining, telling about, South for generations.(1) We saw some of same curiosity--this attention to southernness--in 1992 presidential election, but by then novelty of a southerner sitting in White House had worn off, and, anyway, Arkansan Bill Clinton gave country other things to talk about. And if sometimes-southerner Al Gore wins 2000 election, I doubt very much that region will again be scrutinized and stared at as it was in late 1970s. Still, Gore's real but delicate Tennessee roots, as Los Angeles Times puts it, have motivated some media attention already, and I suspect more is to come. past is never dead. It's not even William Faulkner once said, and I think he's right.(2) In South, to be sure, past is not past, but even in America, past is not even past, if topic is South. The reasons for this are easy enough to understand. All know that until quite recently--say, 1970s--the relationship between South and America was strained, to say very least, and it had been so for two centuries or more: from antebellum slavery debates through Civil War and Reconstruction to modern Civil Rights movement of 1950s and 1960s, region and nation were at odds. Indeed, South and America fought--politically, legally, culturally, and even militarily--and that conflicted, sorrowful past is not easily forgotten. As title of a 1998 New York Times article has it, South's History Rises, Again and Again. No culture, of course, exists only in present: all draw on, hark back to, a past significant precisely because of its continued moral, identity, and emotional utility. In this South is no different, but what is unusual is how explicitly, how routinely, and how pervasively region's history, that very particular southern past, is evoked in present: South of then is recreated and oddly memorialized, concretized in a sense, in South of now.(3) Images abound of South's past continuing to rise again and again, and some of those most sharply etched--in particular, those that portray in one way or another conflict between nation and region, or South's outcast nature--are found in today's newspaper. A special section of very first issue of New York Times to appear in new century, titled Reflections on Century Past and Decades Ahead, included interviews with individuals for whom twentieth century's signal moments remain vivid memories and with those who, according to Times, inherit this history. Not surprisingly, people interviewed were from places with histories heavy with drama and death, shame and struggle, pain and possibility: India, Cambodia, and Germany, Russia and China, South Africa and Middle East, and Detroit and American South. Two southerners were interviewed about past and future of race and rights in region, and, perhaps paradoxically suggesting continuity amidst change, were from localities about as opposite in cultural trajectory as one could imagine, that New South symbol (or perhaps No-South symbol), Atlanta, and what historian James Cobb has called the most Southern place on earth, Mississippi Delta. …

History and memory in the two souths: recent Southern and Spanish American fiction

It is commonplace among literary critics to refer to William Faulkner's influence on Spanish American literature. Yet few studies have delved seriously into why attraction of writings of this southerner has been so powerful. In this bold new study, Deborah N. Cohn addresses this question squarely, from two perspectives.First, Cohn proposes that Faulkner's appeal derives from Spanish American authors' perception of similarities between South's history and experiences of their own respective nations. She delineates historical experiences common to South and Spanish America, including civil wars, defeat and dispossession, regional marginalization, and socio-economic hardship. She also suggests that Spanish American authors found in Faulkner a set of concerns with which they could identify and that, as a result, they were inspired to take up stylistic innovations characteristic of his writing. The resulting assimilation and adaptation of Euro-American modernism through Faulkner has been an indispensable part of what is known as la nueva narrativa, the new narrative, as well as of successive movements in Spanish American literature.From another perspective, Cohn's book shows points of contact between works by other southern and Spanish American novelists without positing relations of influence. Specifically, after identifying common, recurrent themes in modern southern and Spanish American literature in general, Cohn reveals levels of a shared understanding of regional history in Faulkner and Mario Vargas Llosa, in Ralph Ellison and Isabel Allende, as well as in Katherine Anne Porter and Juan Rulfo. Her analyses compare and contrast these authors' shared attempts to provide correctives to official, mainstream historical discourse through alternate, parallel strategies for reconstructing, recording, and reclaiming past.In yoking together South and Spanish America as neighboring spaces with similar personalities, Cohn advances a daring and controversial thesis that both narrows and enhances frame of comparison between literatures of South and Spanish America.

Location in History: Argentina and South Africa in the Nineteenth Century

This essay points to residential location as an important source of group interest, alongside the more familiar factors of race, class, and gender. This group interest is especially strong among people living in or dependent upon a particular city. This phenomenon is illustrated here through a variant of central-place theory applied to the history of South Africa and the Argentine pampa from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, with particular attention to the play of rivalries between cities and conflict between cities and their hinterlands.

The History and Historians of Civil War Arkansas

THE APPROACH OF A NEW CENTURY is reason enough to take stock of any historical field, but such an assessment seems especially appropriate for the Civil War. To the casual observer, the Civil War years remain one of the constants in American life. Everyone knows Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, Vicksburg and Gettysburg. The war in Arkansas had its own players and events, but the names are equally recognizable to many Arkansans: Isaac Murphy and Henry Rector, Frederick Steele and Sterling Price, Pea Ridge and Jenkins' Ferry. Yet there is more, much more, to the Arkansas story than those familiar battles and leaders. Modern historians view nearly every aspect of the war quite differently than did scholars of a century ago. Social and economic issues now challenge traditional military and political themes for dominance, and the best work offers a smoothly blended interdisciplinary perspective on the causes and progress of the Early histories of the conflict have given way to less ideological interpretations. Indeed, the historiography of Civil War Arkansas has become complicated enough to merit some sorting out and to invite speculation about the direction of future scholarship.1 It all began a hundred years ago, when John M. Harrell published the first significant work about the war in Arkansas. Entitled simply Arkansas, Harrell's book appeared as part of the landmark Confederate Military History, edited by Clement A. Evans. Like most contributors to this multivolume set, which included a military/political narrative of the war for each Confederate state, Harrell had served in the conflict and become active in the United Confederate Veterans. Born in North Carolina, he had emigrated to Arkansas in 1849, at age twenty-one, to practice law. He rose to the grade of colonel during the war and saw action in Virginia, Mississippi, and Arkansas. His history of the war, like those of most nineteenth-century chroniclers-northem and southern-was notably partisan. Yet, for all that, Harrell managed a surprisingly balanced tone. He certainly produced something more than a personal reminiscence, and while we have no evidence to show what sources he used in his research, he more than likely consulted Century Magazine's Battles and Leaders series and the government's recently published War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.2 Harrell's work stood unchallenged until the 1920s, when Thomas S. Staples and David Y. Thomas produced the first scholarly accounts of the Staples, a professor at Hendrix College and former student of William A. at Columbia University, expressed more interest in Reconstruction than the Yet the fact that Arkansas had early on been occupied by the Union army, thus allowing Abraham Lincoln to experiment with reconstruction policies in the state, made the prelude to that postwar political struggle an important part of the state's wartime experience. Staples devoted nearly a fifth of his 1923 book, Reconstruction in Arkansas, to the war years. Reflecting the beliefs of his mentor and the so-called Dunning school of historiography, he characterized the state's unionist government as inept and interpreted the postwar era as a dark period in the South's history. Scalawags, northern carpetbaggers, and southern blacks conspired, he said, to strip former rebels of their rights and to establish corrupt state governments that mirrored the Gilded Age cesspool of Washington, DC.3 Three years later, David Thomas, formerly a professor at Hendrix but by then teaching at the University of Arkansas, filled in the rest of the picture with his tremendously influential Arkansas in War and Reconstruction, 1861-1874. Interestingly, Thomas had been reluctant to write the book. The son of a Confederate veteran, the Kentucky-born Thomas was, nonetheless, very much adverse to war. His pacifism nearly led him to reject the project, and he became downright apprehensive upon learning that the Arkansas division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy would assist with his research. …

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Two Months in the Confederate States An Englishman's Travels Through the South (review)

(Do they in the United States either?) Turn it around: are Americans working in British history really just obliquely learning about the United States? If not, how does that case differ from European Americanists (not)studying America? Certainly the study ofAmerican cultural influence upon Europe is important, ifit can avoid being mesmerized by popular culture and doesn't deteriorate into humorless griping about American cultural hegemony. But I don't believe for a second that that's all Europeans can do, or should be doing, when diey engage with American culture. Overall, I can't help concluding diat part of the problem with Not Like Us is that the America-Europe opposition, for so long a staple in the American cultural consciousness and in American studies, is no longer what worries us or them most. Or at least Pells fails to convince me that it does. Since the 1960s, the question about who or what America is has demanded diat Americans look within— to the cultural divisions within the society rather than to how American culture relates to its parent culture in Europe. Race and ethnicity—not nationality—have become the central terms in the debate, and for many Americans European culture no longer is the parent culture. A global perspective suggests that the central cultural issue is really "the West" versus "the Rest." The differences between American and European cultures are not all that great now, merely interesting rather than existential, a prime example of what Freud referred to (in another context) as "the narcissism of small differences." Two Months in the Confederate States An Englishman's Travels Through the South By W C. Corsan, edited by Benjamin H. Trask Louisiana State University Press, 1996 216 pp. Cloth, $26.95 Reviewed by Susan H. Irons, a doctoral candidate at the Univeristy of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her dissertation is in the area of southern literary historiography. In conclusion, Ihave only to express a hope that theprecedingpages, exhibiting, asIhave wishedthem to do, withoutprejudice, the true state ofaffairs in the Confederate States, may cause reflecting men to ask themselves, whether it is not time that an attemptso hopeless as that ofsubjugating the South should be abandoned? Reviews 83 Benjamin H. Trask has recovered a lively voice from the past, a voice heavy with the accents of time and place. Trask's recent republication of the neglected 1863 Two Months in the Confederate States by "an English Merchant" brings to light an interesting , informative, and enjoyably readable account ofa British citizen's southern travels from October to December of 1 862. The work is valuable both as a source of firsthand information about the social and economic conditions of a defining period in die South's history and as a text diat engages late-twentiethcentury readers in the retrospective exercise of measuring the narrator's impressions and predictions against the evolution of historical events. Trask does an admirable job ofdispensing his responsibilities as editor. He has increased the value of die work tenfold through his background research and extensive footnoting of the material. The editorial decision to divide die original unbroken text into twelve chapters as well as into paragraphs increases the work's readability witiiout violating the narrator's voice. Trask respects the integrity of the work while making it more inviting to a wider range of readers. High on Trask's agenda is ascertaining the identity behind the vocational pseudonym , "an English Merchant," of the original edition. He credits the narrative to William Carson Corsan, a hardware merchant and manufacturer from Sheffield , England, whom others have also assumed, but not proven, to be the author of the travel account. Through his searching of records on both sides of die Atlantic , Trask makes a convincing argument that Corsan came to the South to check on his company's American representatives behind die northern blockade, to assess the economic health of the Confederacy, and to investigate trade possibilities within the area. When Corsan returned home, he wrote his account of the adventure, which Trask apdy sums up as "die business trip ofa lifetime." This adventurous businessman clearly worked within the traditions of nineteenth -century travel writing, organizing his account by his geographic...

Education of Women in the United States South

Northern, and increasingly national, attitudes toward southern education have typically ranged from condescension to contempt. The South's history of segregation has only reinforced the tendency to dismiss southern education as backward, inadequate, and discrirrtinatory. And, sadly, according to aggregate statistical indicators, many southern states continue to fall to the bottom of the national heap in educational accomplishment. In the same spirit, it has been easy for many to assume that southern women remain caught in the tentacles of traditional ferrvininity, lagging far behind other American women in independence, ambition, and accompUshment. More often than not, responsibUity for both the South's educational fatiures and its subordination of women is charged to the account of etite white southern men, who have arrogantly staved off justice to blacks, poor whites, and women, including the women of their own class and race. Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that the education of southern women has not figured prominently on the research agenda of womens historians. Even as growing numbers of women's historians have begun, however belatedly, to explore seriously the experience of southern women, the neglect of southern women's education has persisted. From one perspective, this neglect seems puzzling. The history of women's education does offer a high road into the fascinating world of women's perceptions of themselves and the world, primarily by providing a preliminary guide to what educated women may be expected to have read. From another, however, the neglect may be seen to foUow naturally from a widespread reluctance to dismiss the inteUectual and educational life of women who did not see education as a vehicle for the advancement of womens independence, which most southern women did not. Education has from the start enjoyed an important place in the history of northeastern women, presumably on the assumption that the development of women's minds and independent intellectual tradition rank high among women's legacy for succeeding generations. During the past 2 decades or so, women's historians have constructed a dense and satisfying account of the lives and careers of pathbreaking women educa

The South Moves into its Future: Studies in the Analysis and Prediction of Social Change.

Presents the writings of a group of scholars who have spent many years working on issues related to Southern history and society. They trace three and a half centuries of the South's history, examine its recent transformation, and make predictions for its future.

Beyond Planters and Industrialists: A New Perspective on the New South

AGRARIAN-INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT HAS BEEN A FAVORITE THEME among scholars from a variety of disciplines who have studied the South's history and attempted to diagnose its problems. In the eyes of some, the antebellum South was a premodern agrarian society bludgeoned to submission by a northern industrial behemoth and reduced thereafter to little more than an agricultural colony for the nation's industrial core. Largely discounting this disadvantageous relationship, still others saw the postbellum South as its own worst enemy, clinging to discredited, plantation-bred traditions that were wholly incompatible with efforts to build a northern-style industrial economy in the region and to bring it into the nation's social and cultural mainstream as well. ' Like other scholars, historians have relied heavily on the agrarianindustrial dynamic in their efforts to measure and to understand continuity and change in the post-Reconstruction South. They have

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Books Reviewed in this article:THE CHRISTIAN MISSION—A TRANSMISSION: The Transmission of the Faith. By Godfrey E. Phillips.ANGLICAN HISTORY IN SOUTH AFRICA: The Harvest of Good Hope. By B. T. Page.ANGLICAN HISTORY IN SOUTH AFRICA: Robert Gray. By Audrey Brooke.THE PROTESTANT CHURCH IN INDONESIA: De Protestantsche Kerk in Nederlandschindie: Haar Ontwirkkeling van 1620–1939. By C. W. Th. Baron van Boetzelaer van Asperen en Dubbledam.AFRICAN YOUTH AND THE CHRISTIAN MISSION: Chitlangou, Fils de Chef. By Chitlangoo Khambane and André‐Daniel Clerc.WOMEN IN THE GOSPELS: Jesus and Woman. By Lady Hosie.A SURVEY OF THE CHURCH: Christianity To‐day. Edited by H. S. Leiper, with a Foreword by the Archbishop of canterbury.ISLAM IN THE MODERN WORLD: Modern Trends in Islam. By H. A. R. Gibb.DADU AND THE COMMUNAL PROBLEM: A Sixteenth Century Indian Mystic: Dadu and His Followers. By W. G. Orr.THE PROBLEM OF EVIL: Evil and the Christian Faith. By Nels F. S. Ferré.THE CLAIM TO THE ABLEST: To be a Teacher. By H. C. Dent.THE SWAZI OF SOUTHERN AFRICA: An African Aristocracy. Rank among the Swazi. By Hilda Kuper.THE PEOPLES OF THE NUBA MOUNTAINS: The Nuba: An Anthropological Study of the Hill Tribes in Kordofan. By S. F. Nadel. With a Foreword by Major‐General Sir Hubert HuddlestonTHE NOSU AND THEIR COUNTRY: Strong Tower. By A. J. Broomhall.IRAN—BACKGROUND AND PROSPECTS: Introduction to Iran. By Elgin Groseclose.

THE TEACHING OF HISTORY IN SOUTH AFRICAN SCHOOLS

HistoryVolume 3, Issue 11 p. 151-158 THE TEACHING OF HISTORY IN SOUTH AFRICAN SCHOOLS Alan F. Hattersley, Search for more papers by this author Alan F. Hattersley, Search for more papers by this author First published: October 1918 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-229X.1918.tb00267.xRead 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 onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume3, Issue11October 1918Pages 151-158 RelatedInformation