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William Friday: Power, Purpose, and American Higher Education by William A. Link (Review)

by Clarence L. Mohr

The University of North Carolina Press, 1997 Throughout much of the present century, the University of North Carolina has been a crown jewel of southern higher learning. Embodying the substance of things hoped for in neighboring states, the North Carolina system eclipsed all regional competitors in the decades surrounding World War II and acquired a »

The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics by George C. Rable (Review)

by Lacy K. Ford Jr.

The University of North Carolina Press, 2007 George Rabie has written a balanced, perceptive, and thoroughly researched history of high politics in the Confederacy. His compelling argument is succinctly summarized by the book’s subtitle, “A Revolution Against Politics.” Rabie maintains that the Confederacy is best understood not as an experiment in southern nationalism but as »

At the Falls: Richmond, Virginia, and Its People by Marie Tyler-McGraw (Review)

by Christopher Silver

University of North Carolina Press, 1994 In the mid-1980s, the Valentine Museum, whose self-appointed role is to chronicle Richmond, Virginia’s rich history, embarked upon an ambitious and controversial enterprise. Through a variety of experimental activities, the Valentine sought to create new museum exhibitions that incorporated recent urban historical scholarship and, at the same time, to »

Living Monuments: Confederate Soldiers’ Homes in the New South by R. B. Rosenburg (Review)

by Karen L. Cox

University of North Carolina Press, 1993 Interest in the South’s Lost Cause celebration is currently enjoying a revival. While Charles R. Wilson’s Baptized in Blood (1980) and Gaines M. Foster’s Ghosts of the Confederacy (1987) still remain the standard works on the subject, there are a number of graduate students whose research on southern women’s »

Good Country People: An Irregular Journal of the Cultures of Eastern North Carolina, Essays by Stanley Knick, Chris Wilson, Alex Albright, Milton Quigless, and Tom Patterson edited by Arthur Mann Kaye and Plankhouse by Shelby Stevenson, with photographs by Roger Manley (Review)

by James Applewhite

North Carolina Wesleyan College Press 1995, 1993 The editor’s introduction to Good Country People suggests that this fascinating volume is to be the first of a series. We should hope that this is so. These authors’ fresh looks at the complex world of Eastern North Carolina are “irregular” only in their avoidance of academic jargon »

Surveying the South: Studies in Regional Sociology (Review)

by John David Smith

University of Missouri Press, 1993. Surveying the South reprints ten articles published by John Shelton Reed between 1978 and 1991. Appropriately, Reed dedicates his collection of essays to distinguished pioneer sociologists Guy B. Johnson, Edgar T. Thompson, and Rupert B. Vance. One of the nation’s foremost regional sociologists, Reed devotes considerable attention to the contributions »

The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past by Jim Cullen (Review)

by David Glassberg

Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995 The Civil War has been history for more than 130 years. In the decades immediately after Appomattox, Americans developed countless narratives of the war’s events. Their versions of the conflict were communicated through soldiers’ stories and local commemorative rituals that varied according to whether they lived in the North or the »

From Congregation Town to Industrial City: Culture and Social Change in a Southern Community by Michael Shirley (Review)

by Tom Hanchett

New York University Press, 1994 In the hundred years since the Industrial Revolution, a market revolution has transformed the American economy and in the process drastically reshaped all aspects of daily life. Once a nation of relatively isolated farmsteads and insular villages where families produced much of what they needed themselves, the United States has »