JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY最新文献

Reviewed by:

• The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Women: Stories of Landscape and Community in the Mountain South ed. by Kami Ahrens
• Penny Messinger

Launched in 1966 in Rabun Gap, Georgia, Foxfire magazine was intended to foster intergenerational connections between high school students and older [End Page 656] community members, to preserve folkways, and to record traditional practices that were vanishing. Many people encountered Appalachia through Foxfire and continue to view the region through its lens. This book presents the stories of twenty-one women interviewed for the Foxfire project over the past five decades. The accounts are arranged chronologically, beginning with interviewees born around the turn of the twentieth century and continuing through the youngest, born in 1988. While the initial focus of Foxfire was on elderly people, its later profiles are of much younger women. Many of the women profiled in this volume were interviewed multiple times, and the contents of these interviews were combined and edited into shorter versions (ten to fifteen pages each) that highlight specific topics, issues, and time periods, while also using the women’s own words to convey their individual stories. The major themes of this volume include the transformation of land use and the changes in mountain communities over more than a century; economic hardship; the legacies of enslavement and racism; Cherokee and Catawba perspectives; growing national and global connections; women’s relationship to the land and their role in agriculture and food preparation; and growing economic disparities in the area. Individual accounts also focus on such topics as weaving, hunting, pottery-making, herbalism and healing, religion, segregation, trauma, and migration.

The greatest strength of the book is its demonstration of the diversity of women’s identities and experiences, which challenges some of the most persistent stereotypes about Appalachian women. The profiles include a breadth of experiences and ethnicities. There are accounts by twelve white, four Black, two Cherokee, one Catawba, and two immigrant women, who together represent a wide variety of socioeconomic statuses and experiences. Highlighting the changing roles and occupations of women in the region is another through-line in the book. While earlier accounts foreground traditional expectations and restrictions related to marriage, child-rearing, and household management facing women, accoun

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• In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana by Stephen Small
• Tanya L. Shields

Stephen Small’s In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana explores the lives of the enslaved by looking at the physical spaces they occupied: their cabins. Small focuses on “how power and access to resources lead to certain types of social remembering and social forgetting” in the remnants of slave cabins on three plantations in Natchitoches, Louisiana (p. 178).

The core chapters showcase Small’s main claims about the discursive and ideological framing of tour narratives. Small asserts that integrating the enslaved quarters would undermine plantation sites’ “grand narrative,” which emphasizes elite white southerners’ gentility, romance, and paternalism, while leaning heavily on visitors’ expectations to maintain the status quo (p. vii). Countering this ubiquitous heritage tourism script, he argues that cabins were “places of community, shared experiences, and family . . . [and] places of relative independence, autonomy, and decision-making free from the wretched surveillance and unrestricted violence of white racism” (pp. 195–96). Alongside paying scrupulous attention to the materiality of the dwellings, he pieces together information on the people, known and unknown, who lived in them, on the respite cabins provided to their enslaved residents, and on their use in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, phrases like “no definitive proof,” “little documentary evidence,” and other mitigating language stifle Small’s claims, highlighting that the archive of documentary evidence about enslaved people relies on reading contextually (pp. 96, 131). Small suggests methods of historically grounded speculation as we await an ever- growing body of archaeological research. [End Page 633]

Small explains that heritage tourism in Natchitoches was framed by the commemorative work of white women in the postbellum period. Women of all races, ethnicities, and classes commemorated the dead, but “White women of all classes had primary responsibility for commemorating their dead husbands, brothers, and sons. Elite white women took the lead” (p. 47). He juxtaposes how competing interests reflect current concerns. Melrose plantation, originally called Yucca plantation and owned by Louis

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• Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South by By Sarah McNamara
• Jennifer E. Brooks

In Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South, Sarah McNamara restores the history of cigar workers, their radical politics, and their dynamic community [End Page 630] to the history of Florida and the New South. McNamara neatly threads the needle of multiple historiographies, including southern history, immigration history, and labor history. Inspired by her family’s history in Ybor City and in Tampa, the author crafts a nuanced account of the Cubana/o cigar workers who fashioned a vibrant community along with their top-notch cigars, remaking Tampa and themselves in the process. The first generation arrived around the turn of the twentieth century and set to work crafting cigars, their community, and a radical progressive politics that “battled for just employment, supported Cuban independence, organized against fascism, and wrestled with Jim Crow” (p. 10). The accelerating collapse of the American cigar-making industry in the 1930s, followed by the expanded economic opportunities brought by war mobilization and the stifling anticommunism of the Cold War, prompted relocation away from Ybor City and the remaking of ethnic and political identities by later generations. Ultimately, U.S.-born Latinas/os birthed “a new ethnic, non-Black identity” to transform themselves from “foreign subversives to acceptable U.S. citizens” (p. 10).

McNamara organizes this rather complicated narrative through a nicely straightforward structure of chapters, titled “Searching,” “Building,” “Resisting,” “Surviving,” “Remaking,” and “Finding.” The author also packs a lot into this concise monograph. In “Building,” for example, readers learn how Latina/o cigar workers built Ybor City and transformed Tampa into the industrial heart of Florida and an international hub of labor activism. As Tampa emerged as a New South “borderland” city, Ybor City’s Cuban cigar workers disrupted the stability of Jim Crow “because the economy of this one-industry town depended on their labor and their presence” (p. 21). Cuban cigar workers thus made Ybor City their own community, and Ybor City made Tampa more than it had been.

McNamara finds, however, that de facto segregation still shaped Ybor City, with white Cubans living separately from Black Cubans who experienced lower wages, discrimination, and violence. Not being Black, nonetheless, did not protect white Cubans from Anglo violence directed against foreign-born residen

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• The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670–1825 by Edward Pearson
• Thomas J. Little

Drawing on the scholarship of Ira Berlin, Edward Pearson’s The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670–1825 offers a panoramic history of slavery in South Carolina from 1670 through the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822, with a special focus on how African Americans experienced slavery in different geographic settings over time. The wide variety of slaveholding practices and the revolutionary changes that occurred within slavery after the institution’s founding in South Carolina created a multitude of experiences of slavery across generations, from region to region, and between historical periods. The Enslaved and Their Enslavers places stress on the dynamic process of how enslaved people’s lives changed and evolved as African American slavery grew and expanded geographically over 150 years of South Carolina history. Pearson’s book emerges with an important interpretive message that makes geographic and temporal considerations central to understanding the full dimensions of slavery in South Carolina during the colonial, Revolutionary, and antebellum years. As the author puts it, “Only by disaggregating slavery in South Carolina—the mosaic of distinctive relationships between enslaved people and their enslavers across time and space—may we grasp the diverse ecologies, populations, economies, practices, and traditions that gave each moment of rebellion or mundane survival its unique dynamic” (p. 3).

Pearson draws together the work of the principal historians who have written about South Carolina slavery while carefully linking his study to developments in Atlantic history. His book offers a systematic exploration of South [End Page 603] Carolina’s Caribbean roots, shows how the colony began its existence with a preference for the use of captive African labor, explains how rice cultivation transformed the province into a full-fledged slave society, surveys the experiences of enslaved people in towns and the countryside prior to the Stono Rebellion, describes the organization of eighteenth-century plantation management, and explores how slavery expanded into the backcountry during the late colonial period. Pearson writes that as commercial farming emerged along the colony’s frontier, “the household and the church became the foundations on which slavery rested; accordingly, the institution’s trajectory in the upcountry to

Reviewed by:

• Heartsick and Astonished: Divorce in Civil War–Era West Virginia ed. by Allison Dorothy Fredette
• Katharine Lane Antolini

In Heartsick and Astonished: Divorce in Civil War–Era West Virginia, Allison Dorothy Fredette offers twenty-seven divorce cases between 1850 and [End Page 619] 1873 from Ohio County, (West) Virginia. This region is significant, according to Fredette, due to the extent of economic, political, and social transition it experienced in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a region gripped by the Civil War and a statehood movement with the county seat, the city of Wheeling, providing the leadership for the formation of West Virginia in 1863. Rapid transformations forced the construction of a new regional identity in which changes in divorce law were one small reflection. Wheeling, as Fredette explains, “was a city of free Blacks, enslaved people, and immigrants, of industry and agriculture, southern by geography and northern by nature” (p. 11). These dynamics were embodied within the bills of divorce, testimonies, and evidentiary letters submitted on behalf of the men and women wishing to end a marriage.

Fredette begins with a thorough introduction that provides the reader with the necessary historical context to begin the exploration of divorce cases included in the book. The selected records offer a snapshot of a community’s social change across a twenty-year period, according to Fredette, and she includes a discussion of the local and national socioeconomic changes captured for that period. I was especially drawn to her discussion of expanding and conflicting gender roles as exposed within the divorce suits. The changing divorce laws reflected the evolving debates about women’s legal and economic rights and the new cultural expectations of an emotionally fulfilling marriage and family life. Women were both the oratrix (plaintiff) and the defendant in these cases. As plaintiffs, women sought divorce on grounds of adultery, abandonment, and cruelty, unwilling to suffer any longer in silence. As defendants, women found the soiling of their reputation to be an acceptable sacrifice for freedom from a restrictive marriage and unhappy life. Many chose to ignore the summons to appear in court in their own defense.

Placing the divorce cases within the context of the Civil War and its aftermath reveals another level of women’s wartime experiences. Fredette documents a 284 percent increase in the Ohio County divorce rate

Reviewed by:

• Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900–1955 by Kristine M. McCusker
• Steven Noll

In the past thirty years, much historical work has been done on cemeteries and rituals of death and mourning in the South. These books and articles have tied these rites of passage and commemoration to larger regional concerns of race, class, gender, and disability. Kristine M. McCusker’s new book, Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making [End Page 641] of a Healthier South, 1900–1955, adds to this literature by examining how southerners, both Black and white, dealt with issues surrounding death in the first half of the twentieth century in light of changing patterns of medicine, two world wars, a major pandemic, and the increasing presence of the federal government. She concludes that these changes “fashioned a new citizenship, albeit an incipient one, based on good health” (p. 177).

McCusker starts her book in 1900, describing a region where death was omnipresent and often early, and where southerners struggled “to loosen the strong ties between death and the southern landscape” (p. 29). She examines southerners’ relationship with caring for the dying in light of religion, focusing on the biblical notion of the life cycle being “three score and ten” (seventy years old) and the implications of that for the region (p. 3). By stressing the changes in death rates and what she calls “life extension,” McCusker shows how rituals of death and mourning became tied together (p. 1). It became a “commercial system of death . . . with its elaborate rituals and consumer goods [becoming] . . . a new economic and political concern, not just a social and cultural one” (p. 46).

The Progressive era, World War I, and the flu pandemic radically reshaped the southern death (and life) experience. Federal and private philanthropic interventions drastically reduced deaths from diseases such as diphtheria and hookworm in the first quarter of the twentieth century. McCusker is very good at stressing the importance of these outside involvements in changing not only patterns of death but also southern attitudes toward dying itself. Both Black and white southerners became less resigned to the fate of an early death and more positive about living a longer and more productive life. World War I and the flu pandemic produced differing response

Reviewed by:

• The Rhetorical Road to Brown v. Board of Education: Elizabeth and Waties Waring’s Campaign by Wanda Little Fenimore
• Brian Daugherity

Scholars and others interested in the Jim Crow era, southern race relations, South Carolina history, political disenfranchisement, school segregation, and Brown v. Board of Education (1954) will find Wanda Little Fenimore’s The Rhetorical Road to Brown v. Board of Education: Elizabeth and Waties Waring’s Campaign of interest. This book examines the judicial rulings of federal district court judge Waties Waring of South Carolina, along with Judge Waring’s advocacy and that of his second wife, Elizabeth Waring, in the years preceding the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The Rhetorical Road argues that scholars have thus far neglected to fully consider the impact of the Warings’ speeches, interviews, and correspondence in the legal campaign to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Fenimore’s account focuses on the Warings’ “rhetorical campaign” to end racial segregation, which spanned from Judge Waring’s involvement in a notable civil rights case in 1949 to his retirement and the couple’s relocation to New York City in 1952 (p. 5). Using the lens of rhetorical studies and the scholarship of speech and communication, Fenimore argues that the Warings carefully orchestrated a campaign of more than thirty public addresses, interviews, and other actions to bring about the end of segregation and racial injustice. The book also analyzes the motivations of Elizabeth and Waties, their personal and historical context, and reactions to the Warings’ actions.

The Rhetorical Road is an easily digestible and a well-researched account of the Warings’ activism and their historical context. The book is composed of eight chapters, along with an introduction and a conclusion, and is arranged chronologically. There is some overlap between chapters and some repetition, especially when the author seeks to reiterate the book’s principal arguments and impact. The story begins with the beating of Sergeant Isaac Woodard Jr. by police chief Lynwood Shull in Batesburg, South Carolina, in 1946, and the subsequent trial of Shull overseen by Judge Waring. Fenimore argues that Shull’s acquittal, and the trial generally, served as Elizabeth Waring’s “‘baptism in racial prejudice’” and as a motivating factor in the determination of both Warings to publicly combat racial ine

Reviewed by:

• Knowing Him by Heart: African Americans on Abraham Lincoln ed. by Fred Lee Hord and Matthew D. Norman
• Maurice Adkins

The anthology Knowing Him by Heart: African Americans on Abraham Lincoln, edited by Fred Lee Hord and Matthew D. Norman, provides a captivating exploration of the varied perspectives held by African Americans on Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and legacy. With more than two hundred letters and speeches delivered by local and national figures, the book offers a diverse range of views from African Americans who praised and criticized the president’s speeches, policies, and politics. Aiming to demonstrate how African Americans maintained and critiqued the memory of Abraham Lincoln within national discourse, the editors convincingly argue that views on the sixteenth president were not monolithic, as some spoke with adulation while others offered critiques and criticism of his candidacy, his presidency, and, after his death on April 15, 1865, his legacy.

The editors are not the first to pursue this examination; scholars have engaged in these critiques because Lincoln’s legacy has coincided with the political and pedagogical debates on African American history. Though this text forgoes participating in this discussion, its content is a vital resource for historians and students who seek to understand the short- and long-term impact of Lincoln’s presidency on African Americans, particularly as posterity has maintained the moniker “the Great Emancipator,” which has come under scrutiny not only within academia but also among the broader public.

The anthology, arranged chronologically, proves valuable, providing the reader with perspectives from Lincoln’s contemporaries, whose views have continued to guide the discourse on his legacy in the present day. Beginning with Frederick Douglass’s Emancipation Day address at Poughkeepsie, New York, on August 2, 1858, and closing with Barack Obama’s remarks at the Abraham Lincoln Association banquet in Springfield, Illinois, on February 12, 2009, speeches and opinions from national voices are combined with those of lesser-known individuals, which gives this book its uniqueness by featuring voices from all corners of African American society. It displays differing perspectives on Lincoln during his life and after his death, particularly views that were, and continue to be, shaped by the local, regional, and national narratives on the man who maintained the Union and ended slavery.

As the reader navigates

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• The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenridge
• Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz

In her carefully argued family biography The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, Kerri K. Greenridge details the history of the Grimke sisters—Angelina Grimke and Sarah Moore Grimke—and the several generations that followed, those born from Angelina Grimke’s marriage to famed abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld and those born to an enslaved woman, Nancy Weston, and her abuser (and possible rapist) Henry Grimke. The work opens and closes with details of queer writer Angelina (“Nana”) Weld Grimke, granddaughter of Nancy Weston and Henry Grimke, whose life, like all others in the family, was shaped by race, the legacy of slavery, and her link to the Grimke name.

Greenridge’s engrossing narrative centers three themes. First, she traces what she describes as the multigenerational attempt by white reformers (and the Grimke-Welds, specifically) to disavow their “complicity in America’s racial project” (p. xxvi). She highlights the children of Henry and Nancy, too, as in a denial of sorts, highlighting Black elites’ “superficialities” and their classist belief in the politics of respectability in the post–Civil War world (p. xxvii). Third—and possibly most important for those scholars reading this book for intersections with recent abolitionist historiography—she describes “the limits of interracial alliances” (p. xxvii).

Greenridge revisits the oft-told story of the power that the Grimke sisters (and Weld) held in late-1830s America as they lectured widely and authored powerful tracts in addition to their work on American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839). The many narrative choices made by Greenridge to juxtapose the lives of the white Grimkes in Philadelphia and New York with those of their Black neighbors, such as James Forten, are striking. Through this technique, Greenridge shows how Angelina and Sarah—fleeing the sin of southern slavery and seeking personal atonement—failed to see the full humanity of the Black community they supposedly looked to save.

A pivotal early moment in the narrative comes when the sisters took up correspondence with Sarah Mapp Douglass. Two years in, they began to really listen to her, as well as to the Forten women. Greenridge presents Angelina as having this moment where she really was changed, newly aware of the antislavery work done by Black activists and committed to a substantive interracial cooperation. However, the moment

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• The Life of Elreta Melton Alexander: Activism Within the Courts by Virginia L. Summey
• Janet Allured

This book’s dive into the public and private life of Judge Elreta Melton Alexander of Greensboro, North Carolina, reminds us how the politics of respectability sometimes translated into civil rights and feminist activism on the local level. For many well-educated Black women like Alexander, participating in public demonstrations such as pickets and boycotts—with the attendant risk of arrest and imprisonment—was unseemly and not an option. Instead, she and others of her class joined service organizations like the Links, defied segregation customs, and quietly integrated white professional spaces as they sought to uplift their communities. As author Virginia L. Summey explains, “Through performance and everyday acts of resistance, she [Alexander] used her career as a platform to create change for African Americans within the law” (p. 56). This book, then, broadens our understanding of what civil rights activism looked like.

It also speaks to the conundrum that domestic violence caused well-educated women of color. For those who practiced the politics of respectability, divorce was not an option (or so they believed). Alexander and her husband, Girardeau “Tony” Alexander, a successful Black doctor, discussed divorce. But the judge stayed in her marriage to avoid damaging both her and her family’s reputation, though on more than one occasion she barely escaped with her life. [End Page 644]

Summey resurrects this unsung heroine through masterful research into campus newspapers, local newspapers, trial transcripts, Judge Alexander’s files at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Alexander’s unpublished book of poetry, interviews conducted by others, and Summey’s own interviews with those who knew the judge. Born in 1919 to a family lacking material wealth but possessing strong values of education and racial uplift, Alexander went on to achieve several significant firsts. She became, in 1945, the first African American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School; in 1947, the first African American woman to practice law in North Carolina; and in 1968, the first Black woman elected a district court judge. She also became part of the first integrated law firm in the South.

Summey attributes Alexander’s accomplishments to her family and to her upbringing in East Greensboro, North Carolina, which provided greater educational opportunities to African American children than did most a