JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY最新文献

{"title":"Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement by Stephen A. King and Roger Davis Gatchet (review)","authors":"Torren L. Gatson","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932601","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932601","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>Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement</em> by Stephen A. King and Roger Davis Gatchet <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Torren L. Gatson </li> </ul> <em>Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement</em>. By Stephen A. King and Roger Davis Gatchet. Race, Rhetoric, and Media. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023. Pp. xviii, 273. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4654-9; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4653-2.) <p><em>Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement</em>’s seemingly ominous yet agreeably impactful topic unearths a need to center attention on the framing of memory. Authors Stephen A. King and Roger Davis Gatchet write, “This is not a book about the civil rights movement. Rather, it is about the <em>memory</em> of the civil rights movement” (p. xv). Mississippians will feel a sense of investment and empowerment from reading this book. It joins the list of studies framing the monumental importance of memory in shaping public identity and historical discourse on the topic of the civil rights movement and cultural heritage tourism. King and Gatchet make a convincing argument that understanding the lasting memory of the civil rights movement and, more important, crystallizing that memory are the tenets of cultural heritage tourism. Steeped in captivating evidence, this place-based study hinges on in-depth fieldwork and oral history, two hallmarks of the historical enterprise, of public history, and of community-based research.</p> <p>Overflowing with descriptive analysis of the numerous methods of racial violence, this book paints a vivid depiction of how the Magnolia State struggled to embrace a cohesive narrative of the legacies of the civil rights movement. After a thorough introduction cementing the need and purpose for such a study, the first chapter traces the origins of Mississippi’s civil rights heritage tourism. This “synoptic history” is a significant intervention in scholarship as it “is the first systematic effort to narrate the history of Mississippi’s civil rights tourism industry” (p. 32).</p> <p>The study describes Mississippi’s first attempts at civil rights heritage tourism, which were rooted in grassroots efforts that predated any formal commitment or involvement from the state. The authors brilliantly display local Mississippians’ commitment to principles of community, highlighting their creation of small museums like the Canton Freedom House Civil Rights Museum, public performances, and local support for such projects. All of those factors worked to ensure that the memory of the brutal legacy of the civil rights movement did not erode from the landscape.</p> <p>An entire chapter is dedicated to framing the impact of the tragic murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. Till’s murder","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720096","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":"Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment by Christina Greene (review)","authors":"Debra L. Schultz","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932604","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>Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment</em> by Christina Greene <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Debra L. Schultz </li> </ul> <em>Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment</em>. By Christina Greene. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 348. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7131-4; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7130-7.) <p>In 1976, the National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) drafted a Black Woman’s Bill of Rights. “The NABF’s logo,” as historian Christina Greene tells us in <em>Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment</em>, “was a pair of clenched fists in handcuffs, evoking both enslavement and imprisonment; one cuff was marked ‘sexism,’ the other labeled ‘racism’” (p. 83). This image distills many of the histories invoked and questions raised in this ambitious, groundbreaking work centered on Joan Little’s iconic 1974 sexual self-defense case against her jailer, a sixty-two-year-old white man, Clarence Alligood. The twenty-year-old African American woman fled her rural North Carolina jail cell, leaving Alligood naked from the waist down with multiple (and fatal) stab wounds. She escaped the death penalty through an international support campaign and a successful claim of self-defense against sexual assault, catalyzing important debates about such rights.</p> <p>Greene writes engagingly, using the Joan Little case to make incisive intersectional contributions in several historiographies. She states, for example, “By the 1970s, female activists on both sides of the prison walls drew on the women’s liberation, civil rights, and Black Power movements to fashion a politics that included incarcerated women” (p. 83). By making visible southern Black women’s prison and anti-rape organizing, she challenges the declension theory of the Black freedom movement after the late 1960s, writes Black women’s leadership into second-wave feminism—particularly the antiviolence movement—and honors Black women’s contributions to critiquing state violence as embodied by the growing prison industrial complex.</p> <p>The book is organized into three sections. The first demythologizes Joan Little (in the spirit of recent scholarship on Rosa Parks), illuminating how her case inspired alliances among many 1970s movements. The second sketches the foundations of a women’s tradition of prison organizing at the nexus of civil rights and Black Power. The third chronicles how a robust, multi-issue Black feminist movement led the way on organizing against sexual violence targeting women of color, part of a long tradition of Black women’s resistance to racialized and sexualized violence, including lynching. An epilogue on the 1994 Crime Bill and the Violence Against Women Act","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720110","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":"Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant (review)","authors":"Christopher S. DeRosa","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932572","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932572","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>Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era</em> by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Christopher S. DeRosa </li> </ul> <em>Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era</em>. By Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 434. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-19-760104-4.) <p>If what we call childhood makes up half of a person’s felt history, then the growing field of the history of youth should command our attention. Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant’s new work, <em>Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era</em>, is an illuminating addition to this literature. The authors are not primarily concerned with trying to see through the eyes of the boys who served in Civil War armies (although the book contributes on this level nevertheless). Rather, their goal is to explain how nineteenth-century American society weighed private and public demands on young males, navigated those boys’ own aspirations, and differed on these issues sectionally.</p> <p>By taking an admirably long view of their topic, Clarke and Plant uncover underage enlistment as a major flashpoint of U.S. civil-military relations going back to the War of 1812. Fathers considered themselves the owners of their sons’ labor until the age of majority, twenty-one before the War of 1812, eighteen after. By this age their children were capable of full, able-bodied work: work that could be rented out, realized for profit, or simply needed for family survival. Able-bodied youth went to school with children of all ages and served in the militia under community guidance. All of these things made youths in their late teens—unable to vote or to make contracts for themselves—cognizant of their ability, their worth, and their personal stake in American politics and wars.</p> <p>If militia service was part of a local upbringing, enlisting in the U.S. military was more in the nature of making a contract for oneself. In <em>Of Age</em>, we learn how in the Civil War, the federal government in the Union gradually broke the power of parental ownership of youth labor and further eroded local control of militias. The major blow in this fight was the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Clarke and Plant argue that historians, by interpreting the suspension in light of Copperheads’ antiwar activities, have missed its central importance in squelching parents’ attempts to reclaim their sons from the army. Thwarting parental claims may be considered another part of the radicalizing of the northern war effort. Through a careful comparison of regimental records and nonmilitary records, and corroboration with the <em>Early</em> <strong>[End Page 616]</strong> <em>Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death</em> database, the auth","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720118","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":"Congress of States: Proceedings of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America ed. by R. David Carlson (review)","authors":"Ben H. Severance","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932577","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932577","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>Congress of States: Proceedings of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America</em> ed. by R. David Carlson <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ben H. Severance </li> </ul> <em>Congress of States: Proceedings of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America</em>. Edited by R. David Carlson. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023. Pp. xxii, 354. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-6091-7; cloth, $115.00, ISBN 978-0-8173-2165-9.) <p>Legislative minutes are an invaluable primary source when studying the political life of a country. They often make for monotonous reading, however, even when they pertain to a government just forming at the outset of a war. Such is the case with the <em>Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1895</em> (1904–1905), seven volumes that mostly record various motions, appointments, and roll call votes while leaving out the speeches, debates, and petitions that instill the statistical data with vibrancy and interest. To augment this information, historians have long consulted the “Proceedings of the Confederate Congress,” a supplement of nine volumes compiled by Douglas S. Freeman and published through the <em>Southern Historical Society Papers</em> (1923–1959). This supplement incorporates newspaper coverage that presents the detail missing from the journals themselves. Unfortunately, Freeman produced “Proceedings” only for the first and second congresses of the Confederacy; the Provisional Congress, which presided over the first year of the Civil War, was neglected. Enter R. David Carlson, who rectifies this oversight with <em>Congress of States: Proceedings of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America</em>, a book that both emulates and improves upon Freeman’s approach to the other volumes in the collection.</p> <p><em>Congress of States</em> is essentially a documentary editing project that supplements the <em>Journal</em> minutes for the Provisional Congress in two significant ways. First, like Freeman, Carlson weaves in the reports of newspaper correspondents who daily attended the sessions. But whereas Freeman used only the Richmond, Virginia, press, Carlson draws on newspapers from many of the South’s other big cities, too, particularly Charleston, South Carolina; Montgomery, Alabama; and New Orleans, Louisiana. The result is coverage that better reflects the national outlook of the Confederate Congress as opposed to just what Virginia’s journalists chose to address. Second, unlike Freeman’s “Proceedings,” Carlson has fully annotated his own work. Every person mentioned and every event discussed receives detailed explanations in the endnotes. Combined with its extensive index, <em>Congress of States</em> greatly facilitates research into the subject matter. <strong>[End Page 622]</strong>","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141722323","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 Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism Within the Courts by Virginia L. Summey (review)","authors":"Janet Allured","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932594","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932594","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 Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism Within the Courts</em> by Virginia L. Summey <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Janet Allured </li> </ul> <em>The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism Within the Courts</em>. By Virginia L. Summey. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. [x], 193. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6193-2; cloth, $120.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6192-5.) <p>This book’s dive into the public and private life of Judge Elreta Melton Alexander of Greensboro, North Carolina, reminds us how the politics of respectability sometimes translated into civil rights and feminist activism on the local level. For many well-educated Black women like Alexander, participating in public demonstrations such as pickets and boycotts—with the attendant risk of arrest and imprisonment—was unseemly and not an option. Instead, she and others of her class joined service organizations like the Links, defied segregation customs, and quietly integrated white professional spaces as they sought to uplift their communities. As author Virginia L. Summey explains, “Through performance and everyday acts of resistance, she [Alexander] used her career as a platform to create change for African Americans within the law” (p. 56). This book, then, broadens our understanding of what civil rights activism looked like.</p> <p>It also speaks to the conundrum that domestic violence caused well-educated women of color. For those who practiced the politics of respectability, divorce was not an option (or so they believed). Alexander and her husband, Girardeau “Tony” Alexander, a successful Black doctor, discussed divorce. But the judge stayed in her marriage to avoid damaging both her and her family’s reputation, though on more than one occasion she barely escaped with her life. <strong>[End Page 644]</strong></p> <p>Summey resurrects this unsung heroine through masterful research into campus newspapers, local newspapers, trial transcripts, Judge Alexander’s files at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Alexander’s unpublished book of poetry, interviews conducted by others, and Summey’s own interviews with those who knew the judge. Born in 1919 to a family lacking material wealth but possessing strong values of education and racial uplift, Alexander went on to achieve several significant firsts. She became, in 1945, the first African American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School; in 1947, the first African American woman to practice law in North Carolina; and in 1968, the first Black woman elected a district court judge. She also became part of the first integrated law firm in the South.</p> <p>Summey attributes Alexander’s accomplishments to her family and to her upbringing in East Greensboro, North Carolina, which provided greater educational opportunities to African American children than did most a","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":"141722326","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 Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenridge (review)","authors":"Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932567","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 Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family</em> by Kerri K. Greenridge <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz </li> </ul> <em>The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family</em>. By Kerri K. Greenridge. (New York: Liveright, 2023. Pp. xxviii, 404. Paper, $21.99, ISBN 978-1-324-09454-8; cloth, $32.50, ISBN 978-1-324-09084-7.) <p>In her carefully argued family biography <em>The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family</em>, Kerri K. Greenridge details the history of the Grimke sisters—Angelina Grimke and Sarah Moore Grimke—and the several generations that followed, those born from Angelina Grimke’s marriage to famed abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld and those born to an enslaved woman, Nancy Weston, and her abuser (and possible rapist) Henry Grimke. The work opens and closes with details of queer writer Angelina (“Nana”) Weld Grimke, granddaughter of Nancy Weston and Henry Grimke, whose life, like all others in the family, was shaped by race, the legacy of slavery, and her link to the Grimke name.</p> <p>Greenridge’s engrossing narrative centers three themes. First, she traces what she describes as the multigenerational attempt by white reformers (and the Grimke-Welds, specifically) to disavow their “complicity in America’s racial project” (p. xxvi). She highlights the children of Henry and Nancy, too, as in a denial of sorts, highlighting Black elites’ “superficialities” and their classist belief in the politics of respectability in the post–Civil War world (p. xxvii). Third—and possibly most important for those scholars reading this book for intersections with recent abolitionist historiography—she describes “the limits of interracial alliances” (p. xxvii).</p> <p>Greenridge revisits the oft-told story of the power that the Grimke sisters (and Weld) held in late-1830s America as they lectured widely and authored powerful tracts in addition to their work on <em>American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses</em> (1839). The many narrative choices made by Greenridge to juxtapose the lives of the white Grimkes in Philadelphia and New York with those of their Black neighbors, such as James Forten, are striking. Through this technique, Greenridge shows how Angelina and Sarah—fleeing the sin of southern slavery and seeking personal atonement—failed to see the full humanity of the Black community they supposedly looked to save.</p> <p>A pivotal early moment in the narrative comes when the sisters took up correspondence with Sarah Mapp Douglass. Two years in, they began to really listen to her, as well as to the Forten women. Greenridge presents Angelina as having this moment where she really was changed, newly aware of the antislavery work done by Black activists and committed to a substantive interracial cooperation. However, the moment ","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":"141722335","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":"Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South by Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd (review)","authors":"Misti Nicole Harper","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932599","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932599","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>Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South</em> by Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Misti Nicole Harper </li> </ul> <em>Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South</em>. By Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 191. Paper, $30.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6232-8; cloth, $120.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6231-1.) <p>“What sort of trauma has their frivolity obscured?” (p. 146)—Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd’s question drives her investigation of why the ideal of “the southern beauty figure” continues to endure into the twenty-first century after decades of radical social changes that destabilized white supremacy through the civil rights movement, feminism, and multiculturalism (p. xi). In <em>Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South</em>, Boyd dismantles the figure of the southern belle turned southern lady. She traces the evolution of a potent symbol of an “imagined place and golden time when their [white people’s] interests were in favor and their privilege intact” (p. 33). The southern beauty is also wielded as an effective political weapon that suffocates further social progress by standing in for white southerners who relish reinforcing conservative, Eurocentric notions of femininity, heteronormativity, sexual <strong>[End Page 651]</strong> belonging, race, and class for the modern era. Boyd’s analysis of how the southern beauty and her political meaning remain relevant turns sorority rush, beauty pageants, and Old South spectacles into battlefields where white girls and women compete for physical and social validation, and where they defend the myths through which the southern beauty was first elevated.</p> <p>Boyd’s study shines like sequins on the gown of a Miss America contestant. Her first chapter, “Sister Act,” considers the rituals of exclusion during sorority rush at the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi. In their bids for social relevance, coeds subject themselves to an intense scrutinization of their lineage and looks—all of which “reinscribe notions of race, region, and social place” (p. 5). Selecting new pledges hinges on a labyrinth of unspoken but understood rules of achievement and behavior that belie Greek organizations’ insistence that any young woman may join. Despite some notable attempts from white Greeks to dismantle discrimination, Boyd affirms that implicit tenets continue to prefer southern pledges (“Pity the poor Yankee”!), reject women whose personal styles do not conform to type, and defer to white patriarchy by favoring white candidates (p. 63). One member defended their racism by stating, “If we had a Black girl . . . none of the fraternities would want anything to do with us” (p. 56). With rare exception, Boyd notes, a culture of decorum polices mid","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":"141720094","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":"Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America by Leslie A. Schwalm (review)","authors":"Rana A. Hogarth","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932578","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>Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America</em> by Leslie A. Schwalm <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Rana A. Hogarth </li> </ul> <em>Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America</em>. By Leslie A. Schwalm. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 215. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7269-4; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7268-7.) <p>Leslie A. Schwalm has put her impressive skills to work in her latest book, <em>Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America</em>. In this powerful study, Schwalm investigates the Union army’s project of systematically collecting data on the bodies of Black and white troops under the guise of advancing what contemporaries “often described as the ‘science of man”’ (p. 48). Not only did northern medical men preserve the belief that Blackness and Black bodies were inferior even as the system of racial slavery was coming to an end, but they also contributed to the longevity of race science as a legitimate sub-discipline practiced by highly trained experts. Schwalm’s book complements existing histories of the American Civil War that focus on the war’s relationship to science, public health, and medical knowledge production. Schwalm focuses on Union medical men and their statistics-driven quest to locate and prove the existence of embodied racial difference. In this regard, Schwalm joins the likes of Margaret Humphreys, Jim Downs, and Gretchen Long—scholars whose work foregrounds the racial dimensions of health and disease during the Civil War and documents the ever-present racism that African Americans faced during their wartime freedom struggles.</p> <p>The bulk of the book is about white Union medical personnel’s view of Black people rather than Black people’s interactions with white northerners who purported to have their interests at heart. That said, Schwalm dedicates sections of her book to the unique struggles Black people faced as they <strong>[End Page 623]</strong> mobilized for war. Indeed, the first two chapters offer background on how Black people had to navigate wartime either as soldiers, denied fair treatment and dignity, or as physicians, rebuffed when they sought to work in Black regiments. Schwalm also recounts how Black women were deliberately shut out of most wartime relief activities of the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC). It is a familiar story of racial discrimination, and Schwalm’s rendering seeks to amplify African American women’s responses to this exclusion through the creation of their own relief associations.</p> <p>The third and fourth chapters are arguably the strongest. Schwalm zeroes in on the undercurrents of anti-Black sentiment that steered the Union’s efforts at measuring racial features during the war. She taps into a wide range of sources, including records from the US","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141722324","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":"Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature by Kelly Ross (review)","authors":"Rodney Taylor","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932571","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932571","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>Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature</em> by Kelly Ross <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Rodney Taylor </li> </ul> <em>Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature</em>. By Kelly Ross. Oxford Studies in American Literary History. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. [viii], 191. $89.00, ISBN 978-0-19-285627-2.) <p>Coming from the background of literary studies, <em>Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature</em> delivers on its title. It is a valuable contribution to the study of southern, African American, American, and surveillance literature. Kelly Ross examines how surveillance and “sousveillance . . . watching from below” appear and reappear in antebellum American literature by exploring the interconnections between genre and race and “by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction” (pp. 1, 13). Ross’s argument is inherently interdisciplinary as she incorporates social science and historical evidence to offer a fresh perspective on canonical literary works and to shed light on the often neglected literatures of slavery.</p> <p>Across four chapters, Ross presents different ways in which literary genres portray both surveillance and sousveillance. The first chapter discusses how fugitive slave narratives that predated the authorial intrusions from abolitionist culture provided enslaved narrators who are astute observers and informants within the slave system. Enslaved narrators who “sousveille” successfully offer a primary glimpse into southern society and show the protective means that sousveillance provided from racialized violence and surveillance (p. 26). The second chapter applies the framework of surveillance, sousveillance, and investigation to Edgar Allan Poe’s <em>The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym</em> (1838) as well as his Dupin tales by linking how “surveillance migrates from slave narratives . . . [to] detective fiction” (p. 13). Chapter 3 provides readings of Thomas R. Gray’s <em>The Confessions of Nat Turner</em> (1831), Frederick Douglass’s <em>The Heroic Slave</em> (1853), and Herman Melville’s <em>Benito Cereno</em> (1855) to show how Black rebellions destroyed the illusion of white surveillance, which in turn shows that white surveillants were neither invisible nor immune from the Black gaze. The fourth and final chapter discusses the speculative possibilities of both Black and white surveillance in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to protect enslaved women and their families from violence and capture in Harriet Jacobs’s <em>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself</em> (1861) and Hannah Crafts’s <em>The Bondwoman’s Narrative</em> (ca. 1853–1860).</p> <p><em>Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre i","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141722336","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 First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders' Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America's Great Migration by Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld (review)","authors":"Dwain Coleman","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a932587","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a932587","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 First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration</em> by Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Dwain Coleman </li> </ul> <em>The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration</em>. By Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023. Pp. xxii, 458. $36.95, ISBN 978-1-4962-3084-3.) <p><em>The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration</em>, by Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld, provides readers with a fascinating glimpse into the largely unknown and understudied history of early Black migration to the <strong>[End Page 634]</strong> western plains of America. With this monograph, Edwards and Friefeld seek to disrupt and enrich the conventional story of the settlement of the Great Plains by reinserting Black homesteaders into their rightful place in the story of westward expansion. In addition, by examining the creation of colonies and communities as well as individual Black homesteaders, <em>The First Migrants</em> asserts the important strategic role homesteading played in Black Americans’ struggle for citizenship rights before the Great Migration of the early twentieth century.</p> <p>As members of the Black Homesteader Project of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska, Edwards and Friefeld have gathered the latest and greatest research on Black homesteaders of the Great Plains. As such, <em>The First Migrants</em> utilizes various source materials like state and local archival records, newspaper articles, homestead claims, and census records to assist them in telling the story of Black homesteaders. In particular, the authors’ use of the remembrances, family photos, and oral histories of the descendants of Black homesteaders allows the reader a window into the lived experience of Black Americans on the Great Plains from 1877 to 1920. Through these intimate sources, readers explore the struggles of Black homesteaders, the close-knit families and communities they built on the rural plains, and the continued significance these colonies and individual homesteads play in the lives of the descendants of Black homesteaders today.</p> <p><em>The First Migrants</em> makes several major assertions. First, Black migrants did indeed participate in the post-Reconstruction settlement of the West and utilized the Homestead Act to their benefit. Second, these early post- Reconstruction southern Black migrants were fleeing racial injustice and violence in the hopes of creating new lives and communities on the Great Plains. In the West, they hoped to experience true freedom and independence through the ownership of land and the exercise of citizens","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720089","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}