JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY最新文献

{"title":"Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend by Taylor Hagood (review)","authors":"Sara K. Eskridge","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925488","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>Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend</em> by Taylor Hagood <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sara K. Eskridge </li> </ul> <em>Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend</em>. By Taylor Hagood. Music in American Life. (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Pp. [xii], 241. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-252-08711-0; cloth, $110.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04498-4.) <p>In the rural South, <em>Hee Haw</em> (1969–1992) was once a fixture of television. Get past the corny jokes—literally, characters popped up out of a cornfield to tell jokes—and the hayseed costumes, and viewers were treated to top-notch bluegrass performances from multiple generations of talent. Among those performers was David Akeman, a banjo player and comic performer professionally known as Stringbean. It is his life and tragic end that Taylor Hagood shares in <em>Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend</em>, taking us from Akeman’s humble beginnings in rural Kentucky through his brutal murder and the subsequent trial of his killers. Hagood depicts Stringbean as an exceptional talent preserving old-fashioned banjo music in a time of sweeping musical innovation. Stringbean helped develop the bluegrass sound, went out of fashion with rock and roll, and was then reborn as a musical icon of folk musicians in the 1960s. Hagood presents Stringbean as a laconic man with simple pleasures, a man with no enemies and many friends, whose death rocked the foundations of the Nashville country music community.</p> <p>Hagood, whose previous books include <em>Faulkner, Writer of Disability</em> (Baton Rouge, 2014), <em>Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers</em> (Columbus, Ohio, 2010), and others, gives us a cursory examination of Stringbean’s youth before delving into his early years as a musician and the evolution of his performance style. The sources for this section are a bit thin—Stringbean did not give many interviews, and, as a result, the author is sometimes left to guess on some of the major events of his subject’s life. For example, Hagood is on shaky footing discussing Stringbean’s time with Bill Monroe’s band and his eventual replacement by Earl Scruggs, although he does demonstrate that it was Stringbean’s time with the band, not Scruggs’s, that solidified the banjo as part of the burgeoning bluegrass sound.</p> <p>The book’s second half is stronger, tracing Stringbean’s navigation of the rock and roll craze of the mid-1950s. As country music fell out of favor, he pressed on, playing schoolhouses at a fraction of his previous price just to make ends meet. After more than a decade of struggling, a new generation of folk musicians discovered him. By the late 1960s, he was in high demand, a <strong>[End Page 462]</strong> regular on 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":"140637046","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":"Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State by Kathryn Walkiewicz (review)","authors":"Deborah A. Rosen","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925464","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>Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State</em> by Kathryn Walkiewicz <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Deborah A. Rosen </li> </ul> <em>Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State</em>. By Kathryn Walkiewicz. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. xx, 293. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7295-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7294-6.) <p><em>Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State</em> examines the relationship between colonization, enslavement, and state-making in the nineteenth-century United States. In this carefully researched and clearly presented study, Kathryn Walkiewicz argues that Indigenous dispossession, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy were central to the formation and identity of U.S. states; that states’-rights discourse was used to reinforce white men’s rights and their control over land; and that statehood itself was (and is) incompatible with Indigenous and Black <strong>[End Page 430]</strong> freedom. The author analyzes how white Americans used printed texts and visual images to imagine exclusionary states into being, and also how Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Native people used their own print culture to contest the entire settler-colonial project and advocate for their own freedom and self-determination.</p> <p>After an introduction that lays out the themes of the book, four substantive chapters analyze debates about Black and Native freedom in Georgia (1830s), Florida (1820s–1840s), Kansas and Cuba (1850s), and Indian Territory (1890s–1900s). In keeping with the title <em>Reading Territory</em>, the book concentrates more on colonization than on enslavement, and it analyzes more extensively Native-produced texts than Black-authored ones. Chapters 1 and 2 draw from various short primary sources to illustrate the ideological role of print culture in both justifying and opposing state control, subjugation, and the removal of Indigenous people. By the 1850s, longer published texts provided fuller contemporary counternarratives to the dominant stories justifying state-hood, and <em>Reading Territory</em> is most intriguing when it delves deeply into those singular printed works. This is especially evident in chapter 3, which focuses mostly on how Kansas statehood was framed in the 1850s as a way of promoting Black people’s liberation and freedom, while Natives’ forced removal was erased. The chapter provides insightful, thought-provoking analysis of Martin R. Delany’s serialized novel <em>Blake</em> (1859–1862), John Brougham’s play <em>Columbus el Filibustero!</em> (1857), and published maps of Kansas Territory. Likewise, chapter 4 on Indian Territory—which describes Indigenous and Black residents’ unsuccessful effo","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":"140637329","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":"A City without Care: 300 Years of Racism, Health Disparities, and Health Care Activism in New Orleans by Kevin McQueeney (review)","authors":"Ezelle Sanford III","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925448","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 City without Care: 300 Years of Racism, Health Disparities, and Health Care Activism in New Orleans</em> by Kevin McQueeney <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ezelle Sanford III </li> </ul> <em>A City without Care: 300 Years of Racism, Health Disparities, and Health Care Activism in New Orleans</em>. By Kevin McQueeney. Studies in Social Medicine. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. xiv, 271. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7392-9; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7391-2.) <p>Kevin McQueeney joins the likes of Keith Wailoo, Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr., and Andrew T. Simpson among a growing cohort of scholars who critically examine racial inequities and the history of American medicine and health care at the local level. With his new book, <em>A City without Care: 300 Years of Racism, Health Disparities, and Health Care Activism in New Orleans</em>, McQueeney brings a deep knowledge of the complex development of health care in New Orleans to join others’ studies of Memphis, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Houston.</p> <p>McQueeney traces the development of a “racialized health care system,” which he defines as “one built on [d]ifferent levels of access to, and treatment for, whites versus nonwhites, based on the placement of individuals into racial categories, and often on ideas of scientific racism that define African Americans as biologically different from and inferior to whites” and on “[t]he embedding of racism into the structure of health care, seen most visibly in historically white health care institutions (hospitals, clinics, medical schools, etc.) that have carried out efforts of exclusion of African Americans as patients and practitioners and the exploitation of African Americans by white medical practitioners for profit and professional advancement” (p. 5). Central to McQueeney’s exploration of racialization in urban American health care is the notion that racial health disparities are historically produced.</p> <p>His sweeping study traverses more than three hundred years, beginning with the French colonial foundations of New Orleans in 1718. He explores the <strong>[End Page 408]</strong> development of its white medical establishment and its connections to the economies of enslavement. By 1861, New Orleans had become “the ‘medical metropolis of the South,’” a title supported by two of the city’s first hospitals: the French Company of the Indies’s Royal Hospital and the private Charity Hospital (p. 33). Both institutions owned enslaved people. After an examination of the short-lived Freedmen’s Bureau hospital system, McQueeney recounts the development of an “alternate Black medical district,” which included the city’s Black-owned and Black-operated Flint Goodridge Hospital, a facility with more than one hundred beds (p. 14). The district also included Black doctors’ priva","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":"140637423","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":"Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative by Zachary McLeod Hutchins (review)","authors":"Lacey Hunter","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925445","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>Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative</em> by Zachary McLeod Hutchins <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lacey Hunter </li> </ul> <em>Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative</em>. By Zachary McLeod Hutchins. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 291. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7154-3; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7153-6.) <p><em>Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative</em> is a thoughtful and compelling reassessment of this early American literary genre. Commonly positioned within African American canonical traditions, this writing type has long been defined by scholars as one that emerged within the context of a racialized system of chattel slavery. Acknowledging the genre’s notable links to the narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others, Zachary McLeod Hutchins argues that this narrow purview of the category limits our understanding of slavery during the American colonial period. Consequently, he notes, <em>Before Equiano</em> is “a prehistory of the North American slave narrative, tracing the genre back to its origins in eighteenth-century newspapers and following its evolution into a literary form with well-established tropes” (p. 2). Hutchins provides a well-organized, thoroughly <strong>[End Page 404]</strong> researched book that examines thousands of print news advertisements and challenges its audience to think beyond the traditionally accepted definitions of the slave narrative.</p> <p>Focusing primarily on print newspapers from Boston, Massachusetts, Hutchins demonstrates that the city’s documentation of slave trading is critical to understanding its unfolding in the Americas. Linking the details of slave advertisements to the larger development of colonial North America, the book paints a vivid portrayal of slavery’s evolution from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth. Indeed, <em>Before Equiano</em> is a striking complement to Peter H. Wood’s <em>Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America</em> (New York, 1996), in which Wood documents the political and cultural shifts across the Americas that marked the decline of an early fluid system of enslavement and the rise of a rigid one.</p> <p>The main thrust of <em>Before Equiano</em> is its argument for an expanded consideration of slave narratives to include print news advertisements. Specifically, Hutchins asserts that eighteenth-century newspaper ads should be understood as the foundation of the slave narrative genre. Paying careful attention to the language and frequency of slave ads through the colonial period of the United States, Hutchins makes a convincing argument that the earliest narratives about slavery are not the full-length accounts written by African Americans. Inste","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":"140637347","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":"American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era by Robert Emmett Curran (review)","authors":"Adam L. Tate","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925470","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925470","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 Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era</em> by Robert Emmett Curran <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Adam L. Tate </li> </ul> <em>American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era</em>. By Robert Emmett Curran. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 458. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7930-7.) <p>Robert Emmett Curran’s <em>American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era</em> is a spirited work that examines Catholics’ participation in American life, “in pursuit of a promised equality that had never fully included” them, between 1846 and 1877 (p. 2). One might expect, Curran intimates, that Catholics, who had suffered for years at the hands of political nativists, would have embraced the end of slavery, national citizenship, and equal rights for all. Instead, Curran gripes that white Catholics were committed “to slavery and the racial order it guaranteed” and thus helped “[turn] backward” Abraham Lincoln’s “revolution” before they retreated into their self-imposed postwar ghettos (pp. 4, 6). The book offers a useful perspective on Catholicism in mid-nineteenth-century America, but its polemical tone distorts its historical narrative.</p> <p>Curran’s book provides a wealth of interesting information. In the past, Curran has written on numerous topics—Catholic higher education and anti-Catholicism in North America, in particular—and edited diaries and letters of both prominent and obscure nineteenth-century American Catholics. He expertly weaves in his previous research throughout the book, producing a volume that includes the perspectives of both clergy and laity, men and women. Curran laments the Catholic majority opinion during the 1850s and 1860s, but his volume actually shows Catholics on all sides of the issues of the day. During the Civil War, Catholics supported both abolition (such as Orestes Brownson and General William Rosecrans) and slavery (Bishop Patrick Lynch of Charleston). Catholics could be found among the enlisted men in both armies as well as in the officer corps. Curran points out that three generals, William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and Thomas Ewing Jr., saved the Union war effort in 1864. All had attended the same Catholic church, St. Joseph’s in Somerset, Ohio, as boys. Additionally, Catholics were involved in diplomacy on both sides (Archbishop John Hughes of New York and Lynch). Tragically, Catholics were involved in Lincoln’s assassination, too. Mary Surratt, a Catholic, was the first woman executed by the United States government. <strong>[End Page 438]</strong> Ewing was one of the lawyers involved in the trials of the conspirators. In fact, Curran demonstrates that Catholics were prominent throughout the whole history of the war. That white Catholics took varied positions and were d","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":"140637348","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":"Annual Report of the Secretary-Treasurer","authors":"Stephen Berry","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925440","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 --> Annual Report of the Secretary-Treasurer <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Stephen Berry (bio) </li> </ul> <p>T<small>he</small> S<small>outhern</small> H<small>istorical</small> A<small>ssociation is now in its ninetieth</small> year. As we begin turning our attention to our looming centennial, I think it appropriate to take a broader-than-usual look at the health and vitality of our organization.</p> <p>Once understood as a meeting and a journal, the SHA is now an organization that serves its members 365 days of the year (or 366 as the case may be). Our virtual programming includes our Junior Scholars Fellows program, the Second Book Writers Workshop, the new Classic Texts in Southern History book discussion, the SHA Coffee, Tea, and Confab, and the History Across the Generations interview, in which a junior scholar interviews a senior one. As always, our presence as a full voting board member of the Executive Council of the National Coalition for History ensures that our voice is heard on matters of public policy.</p> <p>In addition to “what the SHA does,” “who the SHA is” is undergoing important shifts. Our membership software focuses on those in arrears, allowing the Membership Committee to concentrate on growing our representation among new populations: museum professionals, folks at HBCUs, National Park Service personnel, K–12 teachers, and so on. The innovations and adaptations go deeper, however: our newest committees—the Professional Development Committee, the Committee on Teaching, the Communications Committee, and the Graduate Student Council; our new SHA Public Square, which creates a stage and a spotlight in our exhibit hall for the local history work being done on the ground by our allies in the cities we visit; and our new Prison History Book Initiative. Along with the continued growth and vitality of our affiliate organizations (European History Section, Latin American and Caribbean Section, Southern Conference on British Studies, Society of Civil War Historians, Southern Association for Women Historians, and a potential Native South section), these new developments have the combined effect of returning us to our roots as <strong>[End Page 391]</strong> an organization that absolutely, yes, represents all historians <em>of</em> the South but also represents all history educators <em>in</em> the South.</p> <p>Walking our exhibit hall last year in Charlotte, I heard one message again and again: “We’re back!” The exhibit hall was alive with laughter. People were pitching books and talking history (and football). The panels, roundtables, and plenaries—including those designed by our Committees on Minorities and on Women, Gender, and Sexuality—were well attended and generative; the Public Square was a complete hit; and the vibe was exhilarating. Other highlights included the opening and closing plenaries—devoted to t","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":"140637045","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 Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces: Cold War Necessity, Presidential Leadership, and Southern Resistance by Geoffrey W. Jensen (review)","authors":"Nathan K. Finney","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925483","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 Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces: Cold War Necessity, Presidential Leadership, and Southern Resistance</em> by Geoffrey W. Jensen <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Nathan K. Finney </li> </ul> <em>The Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces: Cold War Necessity, Presidential Leadership, and Southern Resistance</em>. By Geoffrey W. Jensen. Modern War Studies. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2023. Pp. xxxiv, 395. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-3529-0; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 978-0-7006-3531-3.) <p>Analyzing the critical role of the American president in driving racial equality in the military during the Cold War, <em>The Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces: Cold War Necessity, Presidential Leadership, and Southern Resistance</em> focuses on the accomplishments and failures of administrations from Harry S. Truman’s to Richard M. Nixon’s. It is the first book written by Geoffrey W. Jensen, an associate professor of history at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Using the lens of presidential power, Jensen attempts to supplement recent historical scholarship that focuses on bottom-up civil rights and public action for desegregation by describing how the integration of the military was dependent on presidents using their power to force change.</p> <p><em>The Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces</em> builds on previous research, however, by describing how pressure from civil rights activists and <strong>[End Page 455]</strong> the dynamics of Cold War ideologies pushed presidents toward integrating the military, for reasons of both morality and military effectiveness. On the other side of the equation, white southern culture and political power inhibited the integration of the military. According to Jensen, the American presidency sat in the middle of these forces, capable of changing the status of African Americans in the military by using its power to force change. Whether a president was willing to wield such power was dependent on their personality and incentives at that time. The causality and processes in which such change happened are somewhat opaque, however, requiring the reader to piece them together over the course of the book. Additionally, the three main elements at the heart of Jensen’s analysis—activist and geopolitical pressure, southern political sway, and presidents’ positions—ebb and flow throughout the narrative without clear description of causality, reducing the salience of their interplay as drivers or inhibitors of racial integration.</p> <p>This book is composed of six main chapters, beginning with a brief discussion on race and the military from the founding of the United States to the Cold War. The remaining chapters describe the presidential administrations of Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, ","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":"140637405","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":"Book Notes","authors":"Dionne T. Babineaux, Andrew W. Sanders, Bohan Zhang, William Gillispie","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925491","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 --> Book Notes <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Dionne T. Babineaux, Andrew W. Sanders, Bohan Zhang, and William Gillispie </li> </ul> <p><em>A Secret among the Blacks: Slave Resistance in the Haitian Revolution</em>. By John D. Garrigus. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2023. Pp. [x], 236. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-27282-8.) John D. Garrigus uses archival research and knowledge of Caribbean plantation societies to discuss enslaved life in the eighteenth-century French colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). He explores the colony’s conditions, their effects on slavery, and the rising tensions, which led to the secret of resistance among Black people that circulated in the years before the Haitian Revolution.</p> <p>Garrigus opens with the story of Médor, whose elevated status in slavery allowed him to move freely around his town, Cap Français. Médor could visit the local market, where, as Garrigus shows, free and unfree Black inhabitants connected through common language, origin, and circumstance. Knowledge, plans, and supplies were often shared and purchased through these local connections. Like other Black residents, Médor purchased “powders” and “herbs” to treat illness among the enslaved and the livestock (p. 37). After the deaths of people he treated on the plantation, Médor was accused of poisoning and subjected to intense interrogation. Garrigus speculates that Médor’s guilt over the supposed poisonings caused him to divulge that enslaved people also used powders to influence their masters’ temperament and will. Médor’s alarming revelation of this secret created fear and panic among the whites and led to the belief in a Black conspiracy to overthrow the colony. Fear and uneasiness were not limited to whites; local Black people were also confused amid the rising unrest because medicines were traditionally intended to influence, not kill.</p> <p>Garrigus explores the records of Médor, Assam, and Makandal to expose their connected acts of slave resistance and survival through the use of medicines. The unexplained deaths of people and animals caused many healers to be accused, tortured, and forced to identify others as co-conspirators in a widespread slave poisoning plot. High death rates among whites and a significantly higher number of deaths among enslaved Blacks indicate another cause. Garrigus reveals that a strain of anthrax, not poisoning, was responsible for the decades of suspicious deaths. The disease was spread by eating contaminated meat, through contact with livestock, and due to conditions of drought and starvation common among the enslaved.</p> <p>Garrigus has examined three decades of conspiracy and persecution that engulfed plantations in Saint-Domingue. <em>A Secret among the Blacks: Slave Resistance in the Haitian Revolution</em> is invaluable for understanding local plantation condition","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":"140637418","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":"Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism Before the Civil War by Mark Power Smith (review)","authors":"Graham A. Peck","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925463","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>Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism Before the Civil War</em> by Mark Power Smith <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Graham A. Peck </li> </ul> <em>Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism Before the Civil War</em>. By Mark Power Smith. A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 277. $49.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4853-9.) <p>Mark Power Smith’s <em>Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism Before the Civil War</em> examines the intellectual and political currents in the Young America movement from 1844 to 1861. Smith claims that its adherents pioneered a “novel conception of American nationalism” based on “the liberal tradition of natural law” and precipitated the political crisis of the 1850s (p. 10). To Young Americans, democracy “constituted the bedrock of American nationality, [and] increasingly became a natural right that predated political institutions, rather than a national inheritance designed to safeguard more fundamental rights” (p. 10). In so believing, Young Americans merged natural and political rights. State sovereignty rested on the “popular will” that preceded political institutions, and suffrage became “a natural right for white men” in accordance with natural distinctions between races and sexes (p. 12). These views were not retrogressive. Rather, Young Americans incorporated emerging ideas about political economy, international relations, and racial science into a conviction that “the social, economic, and political relations of the nation were, themselves, governed by natural law” (p. 12).</p> <p>Smith traces these ideas primarily through the pages of New York City’s <em>Democratic Review—</em>the unofficial organ of Young America—and the words of literary and political figures associated with the periodical. Young Americans began as Jacksonian Democrats, boasting both northern and southern adherents, but splintered in the 1850s under the pressure of sectional politics. Their unifying “principles” were “state sovereignty, local self-government, and free trade for white men around the world” (p. 7). Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas was perhaps the most prominent Young American. His youth, dynamism, territorial expansionism, militant nationalism, and advocacy of white <strong>[End Page 429]</strong> men’s democracy made him Young America’s ideal exponent. He corresponded with its literary figures and the <em>Review</em>’s editors, and he led its political arm in Congress. There, he turned an intellectual project into a political program of immense consequence.</p> <p>Smith argues that Douglas’s Young American ideology precipitated the collapse of American democracy. The critical moment came in 1854, when Douglas drove the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress despite the risk of ag","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":"140637421","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":"Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz by Caroline Vézina (review)","authors":"Lauren Eldridge Stewart","doi":"10.1353/soh.2024.a925460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2024.a925460","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>Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz</em> by Caroline Vézina <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lauren Eldridge Stewart </li> </ul> <em>Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz</em>. By Caroline Vézina. American Made Music Series. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022. Pp. x, 236. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4242-8; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-4240-4.) <p>In <em>Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz</em>, Caroline Vézina pulls together a variety of sources to create a collage of Creole identity, New Orleans racial politics, and the music that emerged from that milieu. The resulting product combines carefully mined research in jazz studies, creolization theory, and folklore. The book begins by outlining the unique origins of Louisiana. Unlike most of the United States, Louisiana was populated “as a cosmopolitan, but asymmetric, three-tiered Creole society under the French and Spanish Empires, closely tied to the Caribbean” (p. 10). As a result, people engaged regularly with one another across racial divides while being governed by a complex set of rules. However, these three tiers did not survive the American Civil War. The antebellum period was an important inflection point in Creole identity, forcing the racial structures of the rest of the United States into the Gulf Coast region. Black Creoles became simply Black, white Creoles became white, and language loss contributed to the disappearance of a once influential sector of society.</p> <p>Vézina’s writing emphasizes this point, repeatedly pointing toward a community and identity that once existed more as fact than abstraction. She features the surviving narratives of two Creole women, one Black and one white, and their recollection of songs. The book is divided into two parts after the introduction and the opening material defining Creole identity. Part 1, “The Precursors of Jazz,” provides the reader with a soundscape of Louisiana around the turn of the twentieth century. Chapters in this section cover “Black American/French Creole Folk Music” (chap. 2), “French Religious Music” (chap. 3), and “European Music and Dances” (chap. 4). Throughout, the Creole narrators introduced in the first chapter furnish their impressions of and <strong>[End Page 425]</strong> interactions with these categories. The chapter on French religious music is particularly informative. The sub-chapter on classical music and Creole composers provides context for the widely known Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The reader gets a glimpse into his world and, perhaps more important for the literature, the world of his sister, Clara Gottschalk Petersen, who published a collection of Creole songs.</p> <p>Part 2, “Early Jazz,” begins with a chapter profiling prominent Creole composers and mus","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":"140634870","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}