{"title":"A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina by Neil Kinghan (review)","authors":"Robert Colby","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932581","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina</em> by Neil Kinghan <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Robert Colby </li> </ul> <em>A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina</em>. By Neil Kinghan. Southern Biography Series. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 255. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-8378-6; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7899-7.) <p><em>A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina</em> aims, in author Neil Kinghan’s words, to “rewrite the history of Reconstruction from the perspective of a highly able and honorable African American political leader whose voice should be heard” (p. 6). Unquestionably, Francis L. Cardozo (the leader in question) merits the study that Kinghan has provided us. As an educator and political leader, Cardozo made remarkable strides to remake the South Carolina slave society into which he had been born and, in doing so, personally embodied the possibilities inherent in the postbellum order. In his political and personal lives, however, those changes proved all too fleeting. As such, he stands as an effective avatar of the promises fulfilled and unfulfilled in the Second American Revolution.</p> <p>Cardozo was born in Charleston in 1837 to a Jewish father and a mother neither fully enslaved nor fully free. She, Francis, and his siblings lived as if they possessed their liberty, though the legal codes governing people of color continuously menaced them. After being educated in the United Kingdom, Cardozo served briefly as a minister in Connecticut. After the Union victory in the Civil War, he returned to South Carolina to teach people emerging from slavery there. His educational work—perhaps by design—offered a springboard into public life, and Cardozo became a prominent Republican at the advent of Radical Reconstruction. In a variety of positions within South Carolina’s government, he advocated for educational and land reforms, and he effectively expanded African Americans’ access to both in the years between 1868 and 1876. He also earned plaudits, meanwhile, for his probity in overseeing the state’s finances.</p> <p>Cardozo’s work as a financial administrator proved pivotal in his career. His push for integrity and accountability sparked conflicts with his fellow Republicans (and made him a useful cudgel for their Democratic critics). It also spurred one of the more controversial political efforts of his career: his work, alongside gubernatorial candidate Daniel H. Chamberlain, to build a broader coalition by appealing to moderate white Democrats in South Carolina. Historians have widely criticized this action for undermining the Republican Party ahead of the critical election of 1876. Kinghan argues instead that it represented a log","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves ed. by Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White (review)","authors":"Boyd R. Harris","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932579","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves</em> ed. by Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Boyd R. Harris </li> </ul> <em>Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves</em>. Edited by Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White. UnCivil Wars. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 358. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6456-8; cloth, $114.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6455-1.) <p>The subject of death is never far from any book about the Civil War, but a book about final resting places provides a clarity about death that resonates beyond the war. The scope of loss during the Civil War is still unparalleled in American history, with 2 percent of the population having died during those four years. COVID-19 has killed over one million Americans, but an event at the scale of the Civil War would have meant over six million dead by 2023. This analogy is perhaps as close as we can get to understanding the cataclysmic cost of the war for that generation of Americans. How they understood that loss and what it means to our present generation are the subjects of <em>Final</em> <strong>[End Page 624]</strong> <em>Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves</em>, edited by Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White. Containing academic scholarship alongside personal reminiscences from nearly thirty historians, <em>Final Resting Places</em> provides a wide-ranging depiction of gravesites, burial pits, and memorials from all around the United States and also in Brazil.</p> <p>Emphasizing the eclectic nature of death during the Civil War is the greatest strength of the book. Readers will learn not only about the resting places of Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant but also about the recovery of sailors from the sunken U.S.S. <em>Monitor</em>, the grave of a Black porter and valet in the Abraham Lincoln White House, and the double tomb-stones on the grave of Albert D. J. Cashier in Illinois. It is commendable to the contributors that more than half the book focuses on the final resting places of common soldiers, Native Americans, enslaved people, and civilians. Enough ink has been spilled writing about the graves and memorials of generals and presidents. Focusing on the common individual is also in keeping with the overall commemoration and memorialization of the war in both the North and the South.</p> <p>Highlighting the common person’s death also conveys the gaping hole that loss creates among families and communities. Throughout the book, the recurring theme of closure emerges as the driving force for both the survivors of the war and the contributing historians themselves. Whether it is Colonel William C. Oates of Alabama spending decades looking for his brother’s body, lost at Gettysburg, or Dr.","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800 by Wayne E. Lee (review)","authors":"David J. Silverman","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932558","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800</em> by Wayne E. Lee <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> David J. Silverman </li> </ul> <em>The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800</em>. By Wayne E. Lee. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 287. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7378-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7377-6.) <p>The title of Wayne E. Lee’s excellent <em>The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800</em> comes from his argument that the primary goal of Indian warfare in colonial-era eastern North America was “to cut off” individuals, small bands, and even entire villages (p. 3). The attacking party would usually retreat if it lost the element of surprise or sustained too many casualties, or if defensive reinforcements arrived. Native people’s reasons for war were various. They included quests for captives and plunder, the negotiation of tributary relationships, fights for control of territory or trade routes, blood revenge, and more. Lee argues convincingly that understanding these patterns must begin with deep ethnography, addressing Indigenous forms of subsistence, social organization, labor, governance, and cultural beliefs about war. He contends that a combination of decentralized polities, economies that required men to hunt and that produced meager horticultural margins, and limited means of transportation and storage did not permit Indians to form large armies that could conquer and hold territory in concentrated campaigns. Instead, wars involved hounding the enemy with usually small-scale seasonal strikes, sometimes for years. War was endemic. Sometimes, but only rarely, was it catastrophic.</p> <p>This book is remarkable in its depth and breadth. Chronologically, it ranges from first contact through the Revolutionary era, addressing practically every significant intertribal and Indian-colonial conflict east of the Mississippi River on record. Lee has a firm command of every major published primary and secondary source on the subject. He also draws on archaeology, environmental history, gender history, geography, material culture, political theory, and demographic history. This is old-fashioned ethnohistory in the best sense of the phrase.</p> <p><em>The Cutting-Off Way</em> is written and designed for a wide audience. Lee’s prose is crystal clear and refreshingly jargon-free. The University of North Carolina Press deserves praise for the book’s numerous carefully designed and placed maps. Though Lee engages in several historiographical debates <strong>[End Page 598]</strong> (including with this reviewer), he is never too technical. One of Lee’s interventions is his criticism of the longtime standard in the field, Patrick M. Malone’s <em>The Skulking Way of War","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"159 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.-Mexican War ed. by Michael A. Blaakman, Emily Conroy-Krutz and Noelani Arista (review)","authors":"Kevin Kokomoor","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932566","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.-Mexican War</em> ed. by Michael A. Blaakman, Emily Conroy-Krutz and Noelani Arista <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Kevin Kokomoor </li> </ul> <em>The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.-Mexican War</em>. Edited by Michael A. Blaakman, Emily Conroy-Krutz, and Noelani Arista. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. vi, 339. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-5278-1.) <p>There are several reasons, according to Michael A. Blaakman and Emily Conroy-Krutz, that when one thinks of “empire,” or “imperialism,” one does not necessarily think of the earliest years of the United States of America. The connection might be there by the late nineteenth century, but not the late eighteenth. There are several ideological and historiographical reasons for such scholarly hesitation, obfuscation, or downright exclusion, as the editors draw out in the very important introduction to <em>The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the U.S.-Mexican War</em>. The early republic was a place of exceptionalism and triumphalism. It was also weak, and the idea of an empire did not mesh well with the idea of a republic. Lastly, each possible vector of American imperialism is usually pigeonholed in specific historical subfields that make rendering a larger narrative difficult. It is for these combined reasons that the early republic has escaped most recent debates on the nature of empire.</p> <p><em>The Early Imperial Republic</em> offers to connect the dots: to chart American imperial ambitions from the earliest years of the country’s history to better understand chapters in the Civil War era and to “reframe scholarly understandings of the new republic” (p. 13). To do so, this collection’s impressively varied essays are divided into three categories. The first is largely continental, and focuses on sovereignty. Here the contributors grapple with the ways the <strong>[End Page 608]</strong> federal government sought an orderly expansion of the nation’s borders, how interested local and Native groups either enabled or contested those efforts, and how both the problems and the solutions look a lot like “familiar imperial forms and practices” consistent with traditional European-style empires (p. 18). The second section expands in a noncontiguous way, to Mexico as well as to Hawaii and Africa, in an effort to highlight the global nature of American imperial ambitions. The third section transitions to a more intellectual look at how various American groups, from the Seminole Wars to the Mexican- American War, conceived of, reacted to, and even resisted the United States’ imperial ambitions, as the final three essays suggest.</p> <p>In the collection’s introduction, Blaakman and Conroy-K","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"77 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141722333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ain't I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall (review)","authors":"Steven P. Garabedian","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932595","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon</em> by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Steven P. Garabedian </li> </ul> <em>Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon</em>. By Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall. The New Black Studies Series. (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 252. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-252-08710-3; cloth, $110.00, ISBN 978-0-252- 04496-0.) <p>Zora Neale Hurston was lost and then found in the U.S. literary canon. This valuable monograph by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall, <em>Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon</em>, expands that process <strong>[End Page 645]</strong> of corrective finding to the realm of the social sciences. Freeman Marshall is an associate professor of English at Purdue University, with degrees and affiliations in women’s studies, anthropology, African American studies, and American studies. She brings the full range of her expertise to bear on this reframing of Hurston beyond the lauded, yet ultimately narrowing, status of literary icon and celebrity. Hurston’s intellect inspired inventive scholarship, not just accomplished fiction. Yet the same spirit and dynamism that was celebrated in a canonical work like <em>Their Eyes Were Watching God</em> (1937) occasioned marginalization when it came to major ethnographies from the same period, such as <em>Mules and Men</em> (1935) and <em>Tell My Horse</em> (1938). In the world of literature, Zora Neale Hurston is championed as authoritative, but in the world of anthropology (and its related field of folklore studies), Hurston has been dismissed as non-authoritative. Freeman Marshall highlights how Hurston, the novelist, is revered, and Hurston, the anthropologist, is relegated to novelty.</p> <p>Hurston was a sensation in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. She was prolific, publishing fiction and nonfiction to wide critical and popular attention. Her achievement was rewarded with private patronage (such as by the white philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason) and formal academic support, degrees, and mentorship (Franz Boas at Columbia University). Nevertheless, Hurston remained her own person and took her own intellectual and creative counsel. Freeman Marshall opens with Hurston’s prophetic statement in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” from 1928: “It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame” (p. 1). Indeed, by the time of her death in 1960, Hurston was living in the South in public obscurity and dire financial straits.</p> <p>There are elements beyond strictly disciplinary conservatism that account for Hurston’s recovery in literature and sidelining in anthropology. Freeman Marshall ex","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance by Nikki M. Taylor (review)","authors":"Oran Patrick Kennedy","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932565","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance</em> by Nikki M. Taylor <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Oran Patrick Kennedy </li> </ul> <em>Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance</em>. By Nikki M. Taylor. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. [viii], 247. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-009-27684-9.) <p>In her latest monograph, Nikki M. Taylor delves into the history of enslaved women’s lethal resistance in the United States. Through an in-depth analysis of newspaper records, trial and court records, and other primary sources, Taylor demonstrates that countless enslaved women, in response to inhumane treatment, conspired to murder their enslavers. In doing so, they conceptualized an alternative framework for justice.</p> <p>Spanning from the colonial era to the antebellum period, the book follows a broadly chronological structure. Each chapter is oriented around a specific case study. Chapter 1, for instance, focuses on Philis and Phoebe, two enslaved women in Massachusetts who, in 1755, were convicted of poisoning their enslaver, Captain John Codman. Meanwhile, chapter 7 examines the case of Lucy, an enslaved woman in Galveston, Texas, who murdered her enslaver’s wife in 1858. Other chapters explore cases of lethal resistance in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. The chapters themselves vary in length, which, as Taylor notes, reflects “the fullness or scarcity of the archive across space and time” (p. 20). Nevertheless, Taylor’s analysis is undoubtedly impressive in scope.</p> <p>Across nine chapters, <em>Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance</em> vividly details how enslaved women planned and carried out the murder of their enslavers. Their methods included poisoning, drowning, arson, and physical assault. Each case study examines a method of lethal resistance. At the end of each chapter, Taylor discusses similar documented examples of lethal resistance that were recorded elsewhere. However, <em>Brooding over Bloody Revenge</em> is not an exhaustive study of enslaved women’s lethal resistance. Taylor acknowledges that “it is hard to know with certainty how many enslaved women murdered their enslavers in the United States before 1865” (p. 2). Regardless, the structure and organization of the book enable readers to become more invested in each case study.</p> <p>Taylor’s most compelling and original argument is that enslaved women constructed a “framework of a Black feminist practice of justice,” which, at its core, “boiled down to a sense of fairness, decency, justness, and humane treatment” (p. 9). They were motivated to kill their enslavers by an overriding sense of injustice, usually brought about by cruelty and inhumane treatment. In this sense, they did not set out to dismantle the instit","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons by Jill L. Newmark (review)","authors":"Edward Valentin Jr.","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932573","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons</em> by Jill L. Newmark <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Edward Valentin Jr. </li> </ul> <em>Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons</em>. By Jill L. Newmark. Engaging the Civil War. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2023. Pp. xxiv, 283. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8093-3904-4.) <p>In <em>Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons</em>, Jill L. Newmark chronicles the lives of fourteen Black men known to have served as surgeons with the United States military during the American Civil War. Newmark’s argument that the “presence and accomplishments” of Black soldiers “contributed to the U.S. Army’s success, influenced change, and forged new pathways for African Americans in society” is a familiar theme across other studies of the Civil War era (p. 7). Newmark brings a fresh perspective to this argument by highlighting an understudied dimension of Black military experiences. <em>Without Concealment, Without Compromise</em> should be read alongside other scholarship that is more representative of the average wartime experiences of the 200,000 rank-and-file soldiers and sailors who served in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy during the Civil War.</p> <p>From individual pension files and other military records to historical newspapers and manuscript collections from across the country, Newmark relies on a wide range of sources to craft an intimate portrait of each surgeon. Nine of the twelve chapters in this study function as biographies of individual surgeons, and the remaining three chapters address the barriers that Black physicians faced in obtaining their medical educations at Keokuk Medical College <strong>[End Page 617]</strong> in Iowa, Yale University, and other institutions. This structure allows Newmark to expand her scope of analysis beyond Black surgeons’ experiences during the immediate war years. The author provides insight into Black life in the northern United States and Canada during the antebellum era, the role of Black Americans in antislavery movements, Black students’ quests for higher educations at white collegiate institutions, Black membership in medical associations, the struggle of Black veterans to secure pensions in the post–Civil War era, and a host of other topics. In the classroom, educators could easily assign a chapter or two of Newmark’s book to students, offering some unique perspectives into what it meant to be a Black person in the United States during the nineteenth century.</p> <p>The strength of this biographical approach can also be a hindrance. While this deeply researched monograph contains rich details about the lives of each Black physician, the sheer volume of info","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment by Daniel Spoth (review)","authors":"Weston Twardowski","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932585","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932585","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment</em> by Daniel Spoth <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Weston Twardowski </li> </ul> <em>Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment</em>. By Daniel Spoth. Southern Literary Studies. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 202. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7936-9.) <p>It is to our detriment, Daniel Spoth persuasively argues, that the South remains something of a conceptual afterthought in environmental imaginations. Spoth’s contention is that directing our attention to the South challenges ecocriticism to think more broadly about the kind of spaces (and the people who inhabit those spaces) we imagine and theorize about in our study of the environment. By approaching the South as a landscape of natural and man-made ruins, Spoth challenges romantic notions of ruination and instead asks us to consider why and how this framing exists. Throughout <em>Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment</em>, Spoth reveals the ways that southerners resist ruination through strategies of resilience. In marrying ruin and resilience, Spoth pushes us to see the South not as a space of ruin, but as a living, ongoing place where resilient people continue to invent stories and means of survival.</p> <p>Across five chapters, Spoth moves through case studies from literature and film ranging across the nineteenth century to the present. In mixing authors and eras, the argument demonstrates patterns of ruination in southern culture with accompanying resilience narratives and how these ideas define our conception of southern environmentalism. The first chapter takes examples by John Muir, William Faulkner, and Natasha Trethewey to establish the larger concept of southern ruination. The subsequent chapters establish patterns of resilience across different places and times, in each case exploring both ruin and how groups resist the ruination through resilience. In the second chapter, highways and infrastructures that cut across the region are directly connected to urban sprawl and the collapse of traditional cultural lifeways, offering a much-needed addition to ecocritical understanding of southern environments and highlighting an attention to environmental justice that Spoth develops across the book. The third chapter powerfully critiques the romanticization of southern foodways, noting the deep relationship between class and poverty, race, and food culture.</p> <p>The fourth and fifth chapters investigate disasters and climate change, respectively. These chapters mark a change in the book, which moves to a more expansive and largely contemporary reading of environmental violence that points to the unequal distribution of harm left by disasters. The final chapter moves beyond the present and into the postapocalyptic","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"324 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana by Stephen Small (review)","authors":"Tanya L. Shields","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932586","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932586","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana</em> by Stephen Small <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Tanya L. Shields </li> </ul> <em>In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana</em>. By Stephen Small. Atlantic Migrations and the African Diaspora. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023. Pp. xiv, 254. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4556-6; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4555-9.) <p>Stephen Small’s <em>In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana</em> explores the lives of the enslaved by looking at the physical spaces they occupied: their cabins. Small focuses on “how power and access to resources lead to certain types of social remembering and social forgetting” in the remnants of slave cabins on three plantations in Natchitoches, Louisiana (p. 178).</p> <p>The core chapters showcase Small’s main claims about the discursive and ideological framing of tour narratives. Small asserts that integrating the enslaved quarters would undermine plantation sites’ “grand narrative,” which emphasizes elite white southerners’ gentility, romance, and paternalism, while leaning heavily on visitors’ expectations to maintain the status quo (p. vii). Countering this ubiquitous heritage tourism script, he argues that cabins were “places of community, shared experiences, and family . . . [and] places of relative independence, autonomy, and decision-making free from the wretched surveillance and unrestricted violence of white racism” (pp. 195–96). Alongside paying scrupulous attention to the materiality of the dwellings, he pieces together information on the people, known and unknown, who lived in them, on the respite cabins provided to their enslaved residents, and on their use in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, phrases like “no definitive proof,” “little documentary evidence,” and other mitigating language stifle Small’s claims, highlighting that the archive of documentary evidence about enslaved people relies on reading contextually (pp. 96, 131). Small suggests methods of historically grounded speculation as we await an ever- growing body of archaeological research. <strong>[End Page 633]</strong></p> <p>Small explains that heritage tourism in Natchitoches was framed by the commemorative work of white women in the postbellum period. Women of all races, ethnicities, and classes commemorated the dead, but “White women of all classes had primary responsibility for commemorating their dead husbands, brothers, and sons. Elite white women took the lead” (p. 47). He juxtaposes how competing interests reflect current concerns. Melrose plantation, originally called Yucca plantation and owned by Louis","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South by By Sarah McNamara (review)","authors":"Jennifer E. Brooks","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932584","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932584","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South</em> by By Sarah McNamara <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jennifer E. Brooks </li> </ul> <em>Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South</em>. By Sarah McNamara. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 251. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6816-1; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6817-8.) <p>In <em>Ybor City</em>: <em>Crucible of the Latina South</em>, Sarah McNamara restores the history of cigar workers, their radical politics, and their dynamic community <strong>[End Page 630]</strong> to the history of Florida and the New South. McNamara neatly threads the needle of multiple historiographies, including southern history, immigration history, and labor history. Inspired by her family’s history in Ybor City and in Tampa, the author crafts a nuanced account of the Cubana/o cigar workers who fashioned a vibrant community along with their top-notch cigars, remaking Tampa and themselves in the process. The first generation arrived around the turn of the twentieth century and set to work crafting cigars, their community, and a radical progressive politics that “battled for just employment, supported Cuban independence, organized against fascism, and wrestled with Jim Crow” (p. 10). The accelerating collapse of the American cigar-making industry in the 1930s, followed by the expanded economic opportunities brought by war mobilization and the stifling anticommunism of the Cold War, prompted relocation away from Ybor City and the remaking of ethnic and political identities by later generations. Ultimately, U.S.-born Latinas/os birthed “a new ethnic, non-Black identity” to transform themselves from “foreign subversives to acceptable U.S. citizens” (p. 10).</p> <p>McNamara organizes this rather complicated narrative through a nicely straightforward structure of chapters, titled “Searching,” “Building,” “Resisting,” “Surviving,” “Remaking,” and “Finding.” The author also packs a lot into this concise monograph. In “Building,” for example, readers learn how Latina/o cigar workers built Ybor City and transformed Tampa into the industrial heart of Florida and an international hub of labor activism. As Tampa emerged as a New South “borderland” city, Ybor City’s Cuban cigar workers disrupted the stability of Jim Crow “because the economy of this one-industry town depended on their labor and their presence” (p. 21). Cuban cigar workers thus made Ybor City their own community, and Ybor City made Tampa more than it had been.</p> <p>McNamara finds, however, that de facto segregation still shaped Ybor City, with white Cubans living separately from Black Cubans who experienced lower wages, discrimination, and violence. Not being Black, nonetheless, did not protect white Cubans from Anglo violence directed against foreign-born residen","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720084","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}