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Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions (Review)

by Gavin James Campbell

Smithsonian Folkways, 1996 Fans of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s award-winning radio series “Wade in the Water” will be delighted to see this four-CD set. Taking a historical approach, each CD spotlights one tradition and traces its development and influence. Volume one contains spirituals arranged for the concert stage; volume two examines the nineteenth-century roots of congregational »

Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II by Richard Pells (Review)

by Richard H. King

Oxford University Press, 1997 For much of American history, Americans and Europeans (particularly Western Europeans) have been locked in an elaborate love-hate relationship. Though Richard Pells surveys the whole of American history, his focus in Not Like Us, as the subtitle indicates, is the post-1945 interaction of European and American culture. It has been, of course, in »

Children of the Heav’nly King: Religious Expression in the Central Blue Ridge (Review)

by Gavin James Campbell

Rounder, 1998 Between 1978 and 1979 the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project systematically documented the expressive culture of an eight-county area straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border. From this study comes the material for two CDs containing visions, singing, prophesies, prayers, and sermons. Sampling both white and black congregations, and roaming from churches to the baptismal »

An Island in the Lake of Fire: Bob Jones University, Fundamentalism & the Separatist Movement by Mark Taylor Dalhouse (Review)

by Charles W. Dunn

University of Georgia Press, 1996 Sometimes baffling its antagonists, other times perplexing its advocates, Bob Jones University (BJU) proclaims itself “the world’s most unusual university.” Perhaps it is also the world’s most misunderstood university. In his book, Mark Taylor Dalhouse has appropriately labeled BJU “an island in the lake of fire.” He could just as »

Carved in Stone: The History of Stone Mountain by David B. Freeman (Review)

by John M. Coski

Mercer University Press, 1997 A heroic monument to the Confederacy first envisioned in 1914 and finally dedicated in 1970 presents an ideal opportunity to explore the Lost Cause in twentieth-century America. Inexplicably, freelance historian David B. Freeman fails to seize this opportunity in his history of Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875-1920 by Henry M. McKiven Jr. (Review)

by Timothy J. Minchin

University of North Carolina Press, 1995 For many years, historians have argued that southern employers used the ideology of white supremacy to divide their workforce. Realizing that effective worker protest depended on whites and blacks forging a unified labor movement, employers maintained racial divisions among employees as a means to control the entire working class. »

“What Nature Suffers to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 by Mart A. Stewart (Review)

by Albert E. Cowdrey

University of Georgia Press, 1996 If environmental history has one pervading characteristic, it is discontinuity. Climatic and geographic determinism are long dead, and generalizations to replace them are hard to come by, especially as the science of ecology grows increasingly relativistic. With a few notable exceptions- Alfred W. Crosby’s work on the consequences of European »

Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century edited by Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller (Review)

by David E. Whisnant

University of North Carolina Press, 1995 Since the early 1960s a great deal of excellent scholarly work has emerged on Appalachia. Much of that work is the product of a conscious effort by younger scholars- a number of them represented in this volume- to correct unfounded misconceptions that had long flourished not only in popular »

Diversity and Accommodation: Essays on the Cultural Composition of the Virginia Frontier edited by Michael J. Puglisi (Review)

by John C. Willias

University of Tennessee Press, 1997 Emory, Virginia, played host to a polyglot gathering of locally focused intellectuals in October 1992. Over a span of two days, scholars interested in frontier Virginia met there to consider, debate, and reevaluate settlement of the Old Dominion’s early westward fringes. From this ferment, editor Michael J. Puglisi of Marian »

Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, The Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South by Kenneth S. Greenberg (Review)

by Catherine Clinton

Princeton University Press, 1996 “Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, The Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South”: What’s not to love about a subtitle like this? But even if we love it, what in the world is the author trying to do? Reviews »