JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves ed. by Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White
• Boyd R. Harris

The subject of death is never far from any book about the Civil War, but a book about final resting places provides a clarity about death that resonates beyond the war. The scope of loss during the Civil War is still unparalleled in American history, with 2 percent of the population having died during those four years. COVID-19 has killed over one million Americans, but an event at the scale of the Civil War would have meant over six million dead by 2023. This analogy is perhaps as close as we can get to understanding the cataclysmic cost of the war for that generation of Americans. How they understood that loss and what it means to our present generation are the subjects of Final [End Page 624] Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves, edited by Brian Matthew Jordan and Jonathan W. White. Containing academic scholarship alongside personal reminiscences from nearly thirty historians, Final Resting Places provides a wide-ranging depiction of gravesites, burial pits, and memorials from all around the United States and also in Brazil.

Emphasizing the eclectic nature of death during the Civil War is the greatest strength of the book. Readers will learn not only about the resting places of Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant but also about the recovery of sailors from the sunken U.S.S. Monitor, the grave of a Black porter and valet in the Abraham Lincoln White House, and the double tomb-stones on the grave of Albert D. J. Cashier in Illinois. It is commendable to the contributors that more than half the book focuses on the final resting places of common soldiers, Native Americans, enslaved people, and civilians. Enough ink has been spilled writing about the graves and memorials of generals and presidents. Focusing on the common individual is also in keeping with the overall commemoration and memorialization of the war in both the North and the South.

Highlighting the common person’s death also conveys the gaping hole that loss creates among families and communities. Throughout the book, the recurring theme of closure emerges as the driving force for both the survivors of the war and the contributing historians themselves. Whether it is Colonel William C. Oates of Alabama spending decades looking for his brother’s body, lost at Gettysburg, or Dr.

Reviewed by:

• Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance by Nikki M. Taylor
• Oran Patrick Kennedy

In her latest monograph, Nikki M. Taylor delves into the history of enslaved women’s lethal resistance in the United States. Through an in-depth analysis of newspaper records, trial and court records, and other primary sources, Taylor demonstrates that countless enslaved women, in response to inhumane treatment, conspired to murder their enslavers. In doing so, they conceptualized an alternative framework for justice.

Spanning from the colonial era to the antebellum period, the book follows a broadly chronological structure. Each chapter is oriented around a specific case study. Chapter 1, for instance, focuses on Philis and Phoebe, two enslaved women in Massachusetts who, in 1755, were convicted of poisoning their enslaver, Captain John Codman. Meanwhile, chapter 7 examines the case of Lucy, an enslaved woman in Galveston, Texas, who murdered her enslaver’s wife in 1858. Other chapters explore cases of lethal resistance in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. The chapters themselves vary in length, which, as Taylor notes, reflects “the fullness or scarcity of the archive across space and time” (p. 20). Nevertheless, Taylor’s analysis is undoubtedly impressive in scope.

Across nine chapters, Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance vividly details how enslaved women planned and carried out the murder of their enslavers. Their methods included poisoning, drowning, arson, and physical assault. Each case study examines a method of lethal resistance. At the end of each chapter, Taylor discusses similar documented examples of lethal resistance that were recorded elsewhere. However, Brooding over Bloody Revenge is not an exhaustive study of enslaved women’s lethal resistance. Taylor acknowledges that “it is hard to know with certainty how many enslaved women murdered their enslavers in the United States before 1865” (p. 2). Regardless, the structure and organization of the book enable readers to become more invested in each case study.

Taylor’s most compelling and original argument is that enslaved women constructed a “framework of a Black feminist practice of justice,” which, at its core, “boiled down to a sense of fairness, decency, justness, and humane treatment” (p. 9). They were motivated to kill their enslavers by an overriding sense of injustice, usually brought about by cruelty and inhumane treatment. In this sense, they did not set out to dismantle the instit

Reviewed by:

• Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons by Jill L. Newmark
• Edward Valentin Jr.

In Without Concealment, Without Compromise: The Courageous Lives of Black Civil War Surgeons, Jill L. Newmark chronicles the lives of fourteen Black men known to have served as surgeons with the United States military during the American Civil War. Newmark’s argument that the “presence and accomplishments” of Black soldiers “contributed to the U.S. Army’s success, influenced change, and forged new pathways for African Americans in society” is a familiar theme across other studies of the Civil War era (p. 7). Newmark brings a fresh perspective to this argument by highlighting an understudied dimension of Black military experiences. Without Concealment, Without Compromise should be read alongside other scholarship that is more representative of the average wartime experiences of the 200,000 rank-and-file soldiers and sailors who served in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy during the Civil War.

From individual pension files and other military records to historical newspapers and manuscript collections from across the country, Newmark relies on a wide range of sources to craft an intimate portrait of each surgeon. Nine of the twelve chapters in this study function as biographies of individual surgeons, and the remaining three chapters address the barriers that Black physicians faced in obtaining their medical educations at Keokuk Medical College [End Page 617] in Iowa, Yale University, and other institutions. This structure allows Newmark to expand her scope of analysis beyond Black surgeons’ experiences during the immediate war years. The author provides insight into Black life in the northern United States and Canada during the antebellum era, the role of Black Americans in antislavery movements, Black students’ quests for higher educations at white collegiate institutions, Black membership in medical associations, the struggle of Black veterans to secure pensions in the post–Civil War era, and a host of other topics. In the classroom, educators could easily assign a chapter or two of Newmark’s book to students, offering some unique perspectives into what it meant to be a Black person in the United States during the nineteenth century.

The strength of this biographical approach can also be a hindrance. While this deeply researched monograph contains rich details about the lives of each Black physician, the sheer volume of info

Reviewed by:

• Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall
• Steven P. Garabedian

Zora Neale Hurston was lost and then found in the U.S. literary canon. This valuable monograph by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall, Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon, expands that process [End Page 645] of corrective finding to the realm of the social sciences. Freeman Marshall is an associate professor of English at Purdue University, with degrees and affiliations in women’s studies, anthropology, African American studies, and American studies. She brings the full range of her expertise to bear on this reframing of Hurston beyond the lauded, yet ultimately narrowing, status of literary icon and celebrity. Hurston’s intellect inspired inventive scholarship, not just accomplished fiction. Yet the same spirit and dynamism that was celebrated in a canonical work like Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) occasioned marginalization when it came to major ethnographies from the same period, such as Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). In the world of literature, Zora Neale Hurston is championed as authoritative, but in the world of anthropology (and its related field of folklore studies), Hurston has been dismissed as non-authoritative. Freeman Marshall highlights how Hurston, the novelist, is revered, and Hurston, the anthropologist, is relegated to novelty.

Hurston was a sensation in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. She was prolific, publishing fiction and nonfiction to wide critical and popular attention. Her achievement was rewarded with private patronage (such as by the white philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason) and formal academic support, degrees, and mentorship (Franz Boas at Columbia University). Nevertheless, Hurston remained her own person and took her own intellectual and creative counsel. Freeman Marshall opens with Hurston’s prophetic statement in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” from 1928: “It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame” (p. 1). Indeed, by the time of her death in 1960, Hurston was living in the South in public obscurity and dire financial straits.

There are elements beyond strictly disciplinary conservatism that account for Hurston’s recovery in literature and sidelining in anthropology. Freeman Marshall ex

Reviewed by:

• Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment by Daniel Spoth
• Weston Twardowski

It is to our detriment, Daniel Spoth persuasively argues, that the South remains something of a conceptual afterthought in environmental imaginations. Spoth’s contention is that directing our attention to the South challenges ecocriticism to think more broadly about the kind of spaces (and the people who inhabit those spaces) we imagine and theorize about in our study of the environment. By approaching the South as a landscape of natural and man-made ruins, Spoth challenges romantic notions of ruination and instead asks us to consider why and how this framing exists. Throughout Ruin and Resilience: Southern Literature and the Environment, Spoth reveals the ways that southerners resist ruination through strategies of resilience. In marrying ruin and resilience, Spoth pushes us to see the South not as a space of ruin, but as a living, ongoing place where resilient people continue to invent stories and means of survival.

Across five chapters, Spoth moves through case studies from literature and film ranging across the nineteenth century to the present. In mixing authors and eras, the argument demonstrates patterns of ruination in southern culture with accompanying resilience narratives and how these ideas define our conception of southern environmentalism. The first chapter takes examples by John Muir, William Faulkner, and Natasha Trethewey to establish the larger concept of southern ruination. The subsequent chapters establish patterns of resilience across different places and times, in each case exploring both ruin and how groups resist the ruination through resilience. In the second chapter, highways and infrastructures that cut across the region are directly connected to urban sprawl and the collapse of traditional cultural lifeways, offering a much-needed addition to ecocritical understanding of southern environments and highlighting an attention to environmental justice that Spoth develops across the book. The third chapter powerfully critiques the romanticization of southern foodways, noting the deep relationship between class and poverty, race, and food culture.

The fourth and fifth chapters investigate disasters and climate change, respectively. These chapters mark a change in the book, which moves to a more expansive and largely contemporary reading of environmental violence that points to the unequal distribution of harm left by disasters. The final chapter moves beyond the present and into the postapocalyptic

Reviewed by:

• Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States by Sharon Ann Murphy
• Lindsay Schakenbach Regele

Until now, we have not understood in precise detail how southern banks made possible the spread and growth of slavery in the United States. Sharon Ann Murphy, a master at explaining and analyzing the nitty-gritty of how [End Page 613] financial institutions and practices worked, has completed yet another act of scholarly service by hunting down the extant records of obscure banking transactions. The sources she has cobbled together from at least fifteen states allow us to see the grotesque relationship among “southern banks, the slaveholders who were their customers, and the enslaved people used as collateral” (p. 11). Previous scholars have attempted to understand how white southerners financed the “rapid settlement of the Southwest,” but while they have focused on, for example, mortgages and investors, Murphy is the first to look at commercial banks (p. 7). The book moves from the turn of the nineteenth century up to the Civil War and then closes with an epilogue grappling with the long aftermath of the Thirteenth Amendment and the complicated “question of who should absorb the pecuniary loss of enslaved individuals” (p. 318). That query is one of the jarring questions this book seeks to answer regarding the violent subjugation of an individual’s humanity by mortgage and court negotiations.

Banking on Slavery: Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States begins with a tour through New Orleans, whose slave auction “was the physical embodiment of the South’s full embrace and celebration of slavery as the engine behind its antebellum economic prosperity,” which sets the stage for Murphy to ask how banks managed to finance the movement of enslaved individuals from the auction to the frontier (p. 7). The book is divided into three parts, each of which offers stark details about how individual enslavers kept growing their wealth out of indebtedness. In response to the demands of white people moving into the frontier, the early conservative banking practice of providing short-term loans backed by business paper, banknotes, and a limited supply of silver and gold gave way to much riskier long-term loans secured directly by land and human property. Louisiana banks engaged in some of the riskiest practices; Alabama banks, the least. These riskier practices culminated in the Panics of 1837 and

Reviewed by:

• Remembering Antônia Teixeira: A Story of Missions, Violence, and Institutional Hypocrisy by Mikeal C. Parsons and João B. Chaves
• Alison Collis Greene

Remembering Antônia Teixeira: A Story of Missions, Violence, and Institutional Hypocrisy describes how nineteenth-century Southern Baptists, their Foreign Mission Board, and Baylor University cultivated “narratives of institutional goodness” by reframing and erasing the stories of two generations of Brazilian Baptists: Antônio Teixeira, Brazil’s first native-born Baptist pastor, and his daughter Antônia Teixeira, who was raped while living in the university president’s household (p. 10).

Mikeal C. Parsons, a New Testament scholar at Baylor, and João B. Chaves, a historian of religion in the Americas, focus first on Antônio Teixeira and his encounters with Southern Baptist missionaries. Born to a wealthy white Brazilian Catholic family and educated in the best schools, Teixeira became a priest who courted political and personal controversy. At thirty-five, he either kidnapped or ran away with a seventeen-year-old girl, whom he married upon his conversion to Protestantism in 1878. In 1882, at age forty-two and having already become a Southern Baptist, Teixeira met two Baptist missionaries and joined their cause. Teixeira, not the bumbling Baptists, held the upper hand: “he was a highly educated, multilingual, well-connected, and nationally known leader who had learned to navigate his way around controversy” (p. 38). Though graduates of the best institutions that nineteenth-century Southern Baptists had to offer, the missionaries “were young, inexperienced, unsophisticated, monolingual, and undereducated” (p. 38). Teixeira was famous throughout his home country, first as a priest and then as an anti-Catholic firebrand. Yet when he died at forty-seven, the Baptist Church reframed his story to make him a local saint, a spiritual prodigy who took on the Catholics without upstaging the American Protestants who claimed his story.

The second half of the book tells the story of Teixeira’s oldest child, his daughter Antônia, who traveled to Waco, Texas, with a missionary’s family in [End Page 636] July 1892. Baylor president Rufus C. Burleson promised to house Antônia and send her to Baylor in exchange for domestic work in his household. Soon the domestic labor superseded her student status, further isolating her. In 1894, Teixeira reported a series of rapes by Stein Morris, a neighbor and relative of the Burleson family