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The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 by Nina Silber (Review)

by James L. Peacock

University of North Carolina Press, 1993 “The South is feminine,” a northern Jungian psychologist remarked to me recently, endowing her statement with the authority of a discipline that defines archetypes. What Silber’s chronicle would inform her, and many of us, is that this sort of categorization is the product of decades of cultural construction fueled »

Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge by Charles B. Dew (review)

by Winthrop D. Jordan

W. W. Norton and Co., 1994 Having previously written a fine study of the Tredegar Iron Works, Charles Dew now takes up a topic that is both narrower and broader. Bond of Iron deals with a group of slaves and masters involved in a successful and long-term enterprise in the iron industry in the Shenandoah »

The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama by E. Culpepper Clark (Review)

by Tinsley E. Yarbrough

Oxford University Press, 1992 In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954-55 decisions striking down state-enforced segregation in the public schools, two young black women embarked upon a courageous mission to challenge racial barriers in Alabama, one of the most unreconstructed of southern states. In 1956 frantic University of Alabama officials found “moral” grounds for »

Kenneth and John B. Rayner and the Limits of Southern Dissent by Gregg Cantrell (Review)

by Paul D. Escott

University of Illinois Press, 1993 The content of this well-researched book is not exactly what many readers will expect. Kenneth Rayner, a prominent and well-connected North Carolina politician in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, fathered an illegitimate son by one of his slaves in 1850. That child, John B. Rayner, became prominent among »

Erskine Caldwell: A Biography by Harvey L. Klevar (Review)

by Fred Hobson

University of Tennessee Press, 1993 Erskine Caldwell, long a subject ignored or nearly so by scholars of the first rank, is finally getting a measure of what he long said he didn’t care about anyway—literary respectability. Sylvia Cook, a fine student of the fiction of the southern white lower classes, produced Erskine Caldwell and the »

A Southern Collection: Select Works from a Permanent Collection of Painting in the South Prepared for the Opening of the Morris Museum (Review)

by Caroline Mesrobian Hickman

Morris Communications Corporation, 1992. 246 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $24.95. Augusta, Georgia, is home now to not only the most venerable of southern institutions, the Masters Pro golf championship but also to the Morris Museum of Art, which is devoted solely to southern painting. Communications magnate and sixth generation Augustan William S. Morris III established »

Pass the Grits

by John Shelton Reed

“Do you ever eat grits? (If yes) How often do you eat them?” The national food of the South is celebrated in a Roy Blount poem and a Stan Woodward film—but who eats it? (Or is it “them”?) A 1991 Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll of 1,171 southerners found that roughly one in four eats grits “frequently,” »

From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880 by Joseph P. Reidy (Review)

by Mitchell Snay

University of North Carolina Press, 1992 Over the last few decades, historians have set forth a compelling interpretation of the nineteenth-century American South centered around the power and persistence of white planters and the oppression and subordination of African Americans. Joseph P. Reidy, in this compactly and convincingly argued book, examines the rise, fall, and »

Images of the South: Constructing a Regional Culture on Film and Video edited by Karl G. Heider (Review)

by Ruth A. Banes

University of Georgia Press, 1993 In his autobiographical Tristes Tropique ([1955] 1973) structural anthropologist Claude LéviStrauss lamented that societies appropriate for anthropological study were rapidly disappearing, partially because of contacts with outsiders, including anthropologists. This may have been true, but as Heider’s book shows, anthropologists have vastly expanded their approaches and are substantially redefining their »