JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY最新文献

{"title":"American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795 by Edward J. Larson (review)","authors":"Matthew R. Hale","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925449","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>American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795</em> by Edward J. Larson <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Matthew R. Hale </li> </ul> <em>American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795</em>. By Edward J. Larson. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2023. Pp. x, 358. Paper, $17.99, ISBN 978-1-324-07521-9; cloth, $32.50, ISBN 978-0-393-88220-9.) <p>As Edward J. Larson notes in the preface to his new book, <em>American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765–1795</em>, “The role of liberty and slavery in the American Revolution is a partisan minefield” (p. vii). While “some on the right,” he states, “dismiss the role of slavery in the founding of the republic,” “some on the left see the defense of state-sanctioned slavery as a cause of the Revolution and an effect of the Constitution” (p. vii). Despite this opening reference to politics, Larson does not mention, although he is clearly aware of, the more intellectually rigorous, intrapartisan debate on the left concerning related issues. That omission is suggestive, as Larson fully enters neither the Left-Right “minefield” nor the Left’s intrapartisan dispute. Rather, he attempts to traverse lightly both conflicts for the sake of providing a popular audience with a readable overview of the career of liberty and slavery in late-eighteenth-century American society.</p> <p>In many ways, that attempt is successful. In less than 270 pages of main text, Larson ingeniously surveys virtually every well-known phenomenon dealing with slavery and liberty between 1765 and 1795. Even a partial list of the topics discussed in the first 120 pages—John Locke; the relationship between chattel slavery and the rhetoric of political slavery; Crispus Attucks, John Adams, and the Boston Massacre; the <em>Somerset</em> case; Black and white antislavery activism; the Declaration of Independence; George Washington’s stance on African Americans in the military; Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation; Phillis Wheatley; Rhode Island’s recruitment of Black soldiers; and various state constitutions—reveals the scope of authorial ambition. The book’s big idea—that “the American Revolution and the new American nation became less about liberty or slavery than about liberty and slavery”—is less a well-developed original thesis than an organizing theme (p. 15). Even so, Larson, a Pulitzer Prize winner and gifted storyteller, offers insightful commentary at every turn and deftly glides from one topic to another.</p> <p>The adroit narration of so many developments could allow this text to work well in undergraduate surveys or American Revolution classes. Students sometimes benefit from wrestling with a book that is less than fully invested in carving out a clear historiographical position because it affords them the","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140637041","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":"Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South by Alejandra Dubcovsky (review)","authors":"Heather Miyano Kopelson","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925444","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>Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South</em> by Alejandra Dubcovsky <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Heather Miyano Kopelson </li> </ul> <em>Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South</em>. By Alejandra Dubcovsky. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 263. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-300-26612-2.) <p>The core argument of this book is that Native women were (and are) at the center of their communities, that they held power in what is now the U.S. South during the key period of 1670–1710 even as the Spanish established a few small settlements, and that they continued to hold power in the region afterward. Alejandra Dubcovsky skillfully weaves relevant philosophies and art from Indigenous intellectuals and artists with her historical analysis to show continuities between the past and present. The first half of the book delves into women and gender in a Native world that remained strong in the face of intensifying slave raiding linked to colonization efforts by the English and the Spanish, while the second half analyzes women during and after Queen Anne’s War, particularly the 1702 English siege of San Agustín.</p> <p>The book begins with a painstaking reconstruction of the life of a murder victim, unnamed in the colonial Spanish record, who nonetheless held power in her community. Her tribe, the Chacatos, was forced to relocate several times to avoid slave raiders, whose seizures of young women threatened demographic collapse and starvation. Despite this upheaval, the case of this “Yndia Chacata” demonstrates how Native women had political, economic, and spiritual power in the Native world (p. 15). They were not usually chiefs, but a chief’s power depended on his matrilineal claims. All wives dictated where their husbands lived and worked, chiefs or not. This knowledge changes the interpretation of what the Spanish dubbed the Chacato Revolt into an assertion of political and cultural autonomy, in which the Chacatos expelled Franciscan missionaries who had violently tried to enforce patriarchy and new religious practices. Dubcovsky also details the political and social acumen that Native, African, and African-descended women required in order to forge an existence for themselves in colonial society. For example, Isavel de los Ríos, a free Black woman, used her business connections and knowledge of San Agustín to avoid shouldering the blame when two Apalachee men targeted her shop by paying with fake currency. <strong>[End Page 403]</strong></p> <p>The latter half of the book shows how Native women influenced Spanish military policy during the 1702 English siege of San Agustín’s Castillo de San Marcos. These women’s centrality within their communities compelled the Spanish governor to allow women and children to enter the previously male-dominated spa","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140637422","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":"Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia's Most Notorious Shoot-Out by Travis A. Rountree (review)","authors":"Ryan D. Chaney","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925480","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>Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia’s Most Notorious Shoot-Out</em> by Travis A. Rountree <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ryan D. Chaney </li> </ul> <em>Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia’s Most Notorious Shoot-Out</em>. By Travis A. Rountree. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2023. Pp. [viii], 174. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-9722-7.) <p>Though not introduced in this way, <em>Hillsville Remembered: Public Memory, Historical Silence, and Appalachia’s Most Notorious Shoot-Out</em> is, unfortunately, well suited to grappling with our present, repetitious American reality of mass gun violence. Examining representations of a 1912 courthouse shooting that left five people dead in a small Virginia mountain town, Travis A. Rountree thoroughly and thoughtfully clocks the violent event’s local, regional, and national reverberations, the multiple scales on which all collective traumas, then and today, resonate. One of the text’s strengths lies in asking us to consider connections and dissonances between how a violently traumatic event might be experienced proximally, shockingly, or even intimately, and how representations of the event are abstracted in various degrees of spatial and temporal remove. In that effort, <em>rhetorical remembering</em>, defined as “how individuals create public or private artifacts or memories that construct meaning about a public event,” is Rountree’s lens onto newspaper accounts and balladry of the time, museum displays and narratives, and a set of recently conceived and performed dramatic interpretations of the tragedy (p. 9). <strong>[End Page 451]</strong></p> <p>Reaching a wide American audience, the contemporary news media renderings, in particular, reflect a national-cultural construction, and thus a remembering, of the shoot-out and its succeeding events. The problem with national-cultural imaginings of Appalachia and things that happen there, as Rountree notes throughout, is that they depend, too often, “on speculation and specter instead of reality” (p. 145). Another salient value of <em>Hillsville Remembered</em> is thus its contribution to the critiques of literary, pop-cultural, and even scholarly representations of Appalachia animated by stereotypes of “hillbilly” lawlessness or nostalgia for the noble but naive backwoodsman, two generically familiar projections of an uncivilized Other onto Appalachian peoples and places. The way newspapers swarmed to document but mostly sensationalize the Hillsville tragedy emblematizes such projections, inflected with anxieties and desires of America’s waning Progressive era. These tropes were signified, for instance, by cartoonish representations of Floyd Allen, the man whose trial and conviction sparked the violence, and his familial accomplices as b","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140637344","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":"Rethinking American Disasters ed. by Cynthia A. Kierner, Matthew Mulcahy and Liz Skilton (review)","authors":"Robin L. Roe","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925451","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>Rethinking American Disasters</em> ed. by Cynthia A. Kierner, Matthew Mulcahy and Liz Skilton <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Robin L. Roe </li> </ul> <em>Rethinking American Disasters</em>. Edited by Cynthia A. Kierner, Matthew Mulcahy, and Liz Skilton. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. [viii], 247. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-7993-2.) <p>Since the early 2000s, major disasters have had serious consequences for a growing number of Americans, leading to both a growing public awareness and contentious debates over response and interpretation. Scholarly work on historical disasters, almost nonexistent in 2000, has also expanded rapidly, starting with the interdisciplinary collection of essays <em>American Disasters</em> (New York, 2001), edited by Steven Biel. Now a new collection of interdisciplinary essays, <em>Rethinking American Disasters</em>, edited by Cynthia A. Kierner, Matthew Mulcahy, and Liz Skilton, reexamines the key questions that drive American disaster studies.</p> <p>The editors clearly introduce the essential scholarly debates about historical disasters, including the most fundamental question: What is a disaster? The answer is quite complex, given the breadth of events that can be identified as <strong>[End Page 412]</strong> disasters, but at its most simplified, “A ‘disaster’ can be any incident that negatively impacts a group of individuals” (p. 3). Human loss of some sort, in other words, creates disaster out of incident. These essays draw a small sample from that wide scope, ranging from the geological, to floods and hurricanes, to biological epidemics and cancer rates. Contributors use cultural, political, and environmental lenses for their analysis, though these often overlap. Temporally, contributions range from the early British North American colonies to an analysis of the recent collision of diabetes and SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19).</p> <p>Matthew Mulcahy, Benjamin L. Carp, and Jonathan Todd Hancock each examine early public perceptions of disasters, including how authorities tried to control narratives about such events, covering days of prayer and fasting in colonial New England, conspiracy theories during the American Revolution, and even a volcano hoax during the already disastrous 1810s. But by the 1810s, Americans were slowly turning from providentialism to science, even if flawed, to understand geological disasters. Scott Gabriel Knowles and Ashley Rogers, Richard M. Mizelle Jr., and Sarah E. Naramore focus on longer histories of medical disasters: public response to yellow fever between 1793 and 1820; the tragic interplay of diabetes, COVID-19, race, and class; and the continuity of racial violence, from enslaved African Americans on the German Coast of Louisiana to their descendants, who experience extraordinarily high cancer rates tied to p","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140637345","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":"Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 by Brooke M. Bauer (review)","authors":"Matthew Kruer","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925443","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>Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840</em> by Brooke M. Bauer <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Matthew Kruer </li> </ul> <em>Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840</em>. By Brooke M. Bauer. Indians and Southern History. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023. Pp. xviii, 245. $54.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-2143-7.) <p>In <em>Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840</em>, an important and methodologically innovative book, Brooke M. Bauer writes a history of Catawba women, and in doing so she rewrites Catawba history and the history of the Native South. Through archaeological analysis, fresh approaches to familiar sources, and insights drawn from language and storytelling, Bauer persuasively argues that women were central to the creation of Catawba Nation and its continuity through centuries of upheaval.</p> <p>Bauer’s methodology skillfully combines ethnohistory with techniques from Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS). Her ethnohistorical work is first-rate, displaying equal facility with material culture and colonial texts. She intersperses these analyses with stories, both traditional and personal. For example, she uses the First Woman creation story as evidence that women were central to the Catawba worldview; similarly, she connects the Indian slave trade to the origin of the mischievous, child-stealing “Little Wild Indians”—stories Bauer’s mother told her as a girl to warn about the consequences of misbehavior (p. 71). Bauer amply proves that storytelling is a powerful tool of analysis.</p> <p>In another NAIS technique, Bauer grounds interpretations in the Catawba language. She introduces words ranging from simple objects (<em>ituskre</em>, pot) to complex concepts (<em>y</em><em>ę</em><em>pasiha yá ki</em>, a woman of poor character doomed to the Under World) (pp. 122, 68). In Bauer’s hands, even simple words illuminate. For example, she relates how contemporary women’s usage of <em>ituskre</em> shows that crafting pottery plays a central role in the maintenance of Catawba identity and its transmission to the next generation—in other words, to Catawba Nation’s continuity. Bauer powerfully argues that stories and language are necessary to “decolonize the archival material” because “personal and tribal knowledge unlocks voices silenced for hundreds of years” (p. 12). Her deft combination of ethnohistory and NAIS produces insights into Catawba history that could only be possible from her emic perspective as a Catawba woman.</p> <p><em>Becoming Catawba</em> offers a history of Catawba Nation that corrects a historiography dominated by men. The opening portrays the gendered world of the <em>Ye Isw</em><em>ą</em> (“People of the River,” the Catawba ethnonym) and Piedmont Indians (diverse peoples, in","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140637043","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":"Pulpits of the Lost Cause: The Faith and Politics of Former Confederate Chaplains during Reconstruction by Steve Longenecker (review)","authors":"Brendan J. J. Payne","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925473","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>Pulpits of the Lost Cause: The Faith and Politics of Former Confederate Chaplains during Reconstruction</em> by Steve Longenecker <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Brendan J. J. Payne </li> </ul> <em>Pulpits of the Lost Cause: The Faith and Politics of Former Confederate Chaplains during Reconstruction</em>. By Steve Longenecker. Religion and American Culture. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 257. $54.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-2149-9.) <p>Steve Longenecker, professor of history emeritus at Bridgewater College and author of various other books on religion in the Civil War era, has produced yet another excellent addition to the field. <em>Pulpits of the Lost Cause</em>: <em>The Faith and Politics of Former Confederate Chaplains during Reconstruction</em> takes a deep dive into ten white former Confederate chaplains, the deepest such study to date. Longenecker somewhat affirms yet complicates Charles Reagan Wilson’s assertion that former Confederate chaplains were “the ‘main celebrants’ of the Lost Cause” (p. 2). The text also recasts the Lost Cause as a remarkably malleable ideology open to varied interpretations.</p> <p>More generally, the book strikes a nuanced balance in the old debate between scholars stressing the South’s homogeneity or heterogeneity. Longenecker’s book affirms a well-known aspect of human nature, that people can hold strongly to contradictory beliefs and compartmentalize different parts of their lives. Refreshingly, Longenecker explicitly notes that his subjects’ lives were varied and fascinating, multilayered and multifaceted—an implicit reminder that history is best at its most human.</p> <p>Longenecker not only sheds light on an underexamined part of the scholarly conversation on Lost Cause religion but also tells the story in a manner both neatly organized and pleasantly flowing. The introduction displays the casual mastery of topic and writing of a senior scholar, covering in a few pages the origins and development of the Lost Cause as well as the book’s major points and structure. Chapter 1 covers the general experience of Confederate chaplains during the Civil War, while the subsequent chapters trace the careers of his case studies. Some, like Moses Drury Hoge, George Gilman Smith, and John L. Girardeau were conventionally conservative Lost Cause preachers who best fit Charles Reagan Wilson’s description. Others, such as Lachlan C. Vass and Randolph H. McKim, were compartmentalizers, sometimes promoting the Lost Cause and at other times focusing on their congregations. Atticus G. Haygood, who promoted the New South, was an outlier for his limited promotion of racial <strong>[End Page 442]</strong> equality. William Porcher DuBose read liberal theology, while bishop Charles T. Quintard was a theologically conservative institution-builder, yet both shared ","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140637273","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":"Rock and Roll, Desegregation Movements, and Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era: An \"Integrated Effort.\" by Beth Fowler (review)","authors":"Brian Suttell","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925486","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925486","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>Rock and Roll, Desegregation Movements, and Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era: An “Integrated Effort.”</em> by Beth Fowler <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Brian Suttell </li> </ul> <em>Rock and Roll, Desegregation Movements, and Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era: An “Integrated Effort.”</em> By Beth Fowler. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2022. Pp. x, 362. Paper, $42.99, ISBN 978-1-7936-1387-5; cloth, $130.00, ISBN 978-1-7936-1385-1.) <p>Beth Fowler provides historical and social insights in <em>Rock and Roll, Desegregation Movements, and Racism in the Post–Civil Rights Era: An “Integrated Effort.”</em> The heart of her research is interviews from forty-five individuals, whose reflections on their experiences related to race and rock and roll illuminate both the subjects’ history and Fowler’s analysis. In assessing seemingly distinct yet interrelated topics, Fowler effectively delivers the historical context, and her skillful framing of the interviewees’ responses carries her subjects’ complexity.</p> <p>Fowler offers nuanced yet clear arguments, such as “the focus on individual achievement that was so crucial to integration strategies also urged many white supporters to embrace a ‘color-blind’ approach to race relations rather than recognizing the need for group-based solutions to structural problems” (p. 9). She demonstrates broad patterns in music and in desegregation, as well <strong>[End Page 459]</strong> as their interrelatedness, without overstating connections. She points out that crossover records (appealing to different styles) were hitting <em>Billboard</em> charts concurrently with civil rights developments such as the <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em> (1954) decision and the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. Much of her analysis emphasizes the limits of the seeming racial progress of things such as white youth embracing music by Black musicians or the apparently decreasing discrimination in the music industry. “But this ‘integration’ of popular culture through crossover records,” she states, “would not ultimately lead to the fundamental investigation of structural white supremacy that deeper change would require” (p. 75).</p> <p>One strength of the book is its balance between explaining the impact of key musicians and using interviewee responses to reflect societal shifts. Fowler utilizes quotations from John Lennon and Mick Jagger to highlight the impact that R&amp;B had on them, but she then provides reflections from interviewees. She addresses the influence of Black musicians such as Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Chuck Berry whose sounds were often emulated or covered by white artists. Some of her most insightful analysis suggests how lyrics were affected by the context of the times, as in the Coasters’ “Charlie Brown” pondering, “Why’s everybody always ","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140637330","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 Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama by Victoria E. Ott (review)","authors":"David T. Gleeson","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925466","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 Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama</em> by Victoria E. Ott <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> David T. Gleeson </li> </ul> <em>The Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama</em>. By Victoria E. Ott. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 209. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-2147-5.) <p>Victoria E. Ott seeks to understand the role of family in the lives of Alabama’s “common whites” (those who, for the most part, did not own slaves) and in their relationship with the Confederacy (p. 2). <em>The Failure of Our Fathers: Family, Gender, and Power in Confederate Alabama</em> takes readers through prewar, wartime, and postwar experiences to highlight that “family remained the central focus” of these common whites (p. 175). Loyalty to their state and its participation in the Civil War ebbed and flowed depending on the conflict’s effect on their families. Despite most not having a direct interest in slavery, the majority supported the Confederacy. As Stephanie McCurry has discovered in South Carolina, Ott finds in Alabama that the “shared belief [between elite and non-elite white southerners] that outsiders threatened to undermine their liberties, invade their communities, and, in the process, harm their families brought poor whites and yeomen to join the [secessionist] cause” (p. 5).</p> <p>These new Confederates, however, expected substantial support from the state and central governments in return, especially proper treatment (equipment, food, pay, and so on) in the army and support for their families left at home. For these soldiers, as mostly nonslaveholders, departing for war meant a <strong>[End Page 433]</strong> serious removal of labor from farms. Ott clearly shows that as Confederate authorities failed to meet expectations of aid, patriotism waned. First, soldiers and their families at home complained to each other, and eventually to government officials, about their hardships. The Confederate government’s introduction of conscription in April 1862 brought a further loss of agricultural labor and of important skilled workers such as millers and blacksmiths. Revisions to conscription through the rest of the war, especially expanding the age range for compulsory military service (more so than the exemptions for overseers who supervised more than twenty slaves), raised discontent among non-elite white Alabamians. The Confederate “tax-in-kind” law, which obliged producers to give up 10 percent of their “agricultural products,” only exacerbated resentment (p. 125). With families already facing serious food shortages, the extra levy made their lives even more difficult. There were some private and public phil-anthropic efforts to help soldiers’ wives, but they were never sufficient to ease all distress. Many common white A","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140637336","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 Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit ed. by Andre E. Johnson (review)","authors":"Jim Casey","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925476","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 Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit</em> ed. by Andre E. Johnson <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Jim Casey </li> </ul> <em>The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit</em>. Edited by Andre E. Johnson. Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2023. Pp. x, 201. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4386-9; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4385-2.) <p><em>The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit</em>, edited by Andre E. Johnson, is a “long overdue” collection of speeches, sermons, and editorials by one of the late-nineteenth-century United States’ most prolific, influential, and largely forgotten figures (p. 5). Henry McNeal Turner spent much of his life in service of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, but his ministry extended across many different arenas and eras. He was a chaplain in the Union army during the U.S. Civil War, and he was deeply immersed in building the postbellum AME Church across the South. He was a politician and political activist who spent a half century fighting for Black citizenship, civil rights, and emigration. Turner gave thousands of speeches, drafted even more letters, and wrote nonstop for the Black religious press. Such a career almost defies being reconciled into any one profession or historical period.</p> <p>Johnson has impressively selected for this volume a representative sampling of Turner’s extensive career. The book is organized chronologically. It is effectively an oratorical biography, making it possible to see Turner developing and refining his arguments. This book has two brief introductions and light endnotes. It would be suitable for courses on Black social movements, civil rights, religious history, and intellectual history.</p> <p>The first half of the book covers the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Turner moved to Georgia, where his Emancipation Day speech on January 1, 1866, helped bring the young minister political notoriety. Though he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1868, he was expelled along with nearly all Black elected officials in Georgia later that year. The expulsion inspired Turner’s “I Claim the Rights of a Man” speech, which Johnson frames as “probably one of the finest orations in American history” (p. 48). The oration offers a cross section of Turner’s speaking powers and techniques, blending history, satire, and prophetic condemnations. God, Turner reminded his audience, “never fails to vindicate the cause of Justice” (p. 48).</p> <p>The second half of the book focuses on Turner’s many speeches in AME Church conferences and congregations from 1880 to 1913. Some discussed the responsibilities of ministers. Others delved","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140637029","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":"Historical News and Notices","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925492","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Historical News and Notices <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <h2>THE ASSOCIATION</h2> <p>The Blassingame Award Committee, composed of Deirdre Cooper Owens, University of Connecticut, chair; Bertis D. English, Alabama State University; and Françoise N. Hamlin, Brown University, is calling for nominations for the John W. Blassingame Award, established in 2004 to honor distinguished scholarship and mentorship in African American history. In order to nominate a candidate for the award, a letter describing the person’s accomplishments should be sent by email to berrys@thesha.org by June 1, 2024, when it will be forwarded to committee members. Two supporting letters should accompany each nomination.</p> <p>For nominations involving a primary role of mentoring, the committee particularly welcomes letters from students, either graduate or undergraduate. Nominees from all areas of the academic community, including those from community/junior colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and research universities, are welcome. Nominees will be considered based on distinguished careers as mentors of African American studies, personal scholarly accomplishments, or some combination of both qualities. The award consists of a $1,000 stipend, and is awarded every third year. The next award will be given at the 2024 annual meeting in Kansas City, Missouri.</p> <p>The Junior Scholars Workshop is a program to support and encourage advanced graduate students and recent graduates working in all fields of southern history, as well as to provide a space for SHA members to connect outside the annual meeting. Workshops take place on Zoom. The papers will be circulated in advance, and the hour’s program will consist of a brief introduction by the author and comments by two senior scholars, with the rest of the time devoted to audience questions and discussion. For updates on the schedule of papers, please visit https://www.thesha.org/workshop. To register to receive the precirculated papers and the Zoom link, please fill out the form at https://forms.gle/zbm1yM1f6aAFfHKKA. The Junior Scholars Workshop is sponsored by the SHA Professional Development Committee.</p> <h2>OBITUARY</h2> <p>Charles Pierce Roland, Alumni Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Kentucky, died at the age of 104 on April 12, 2022. A noted historian of the American South and the Civil War era, he served as president of the Southern Historical Association in 1981.</p> <p>Born in Maury City, Tennessee, on April 8, 1918, Roland was the son and grandson of educators. He spent two years at Freed-Hardeman College in Henderson, Tennessee, before enrolling at Vanderbilt University in 1936. There he studied under Frank L. Owsley and graduated in 1938. He taught high school before joining the National Park Service in 1940. Inducted into the army in January 1942, he r","PeriodicalId":45484,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140637412","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}