JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement by Stephen A. King and Roger Davis Gatchet
• Torren L. Gatson

Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement’s seemingly ominous yet agreeably impactful topic unearths a need to center attention on the framing of memory. Authors Stephen A. King and Roger Davis Gatchet write, “This is not a book about the civil rights movement. Rather, it is about the memory of the civil rights movement” (p. xv). Mississippians will feel a sense of investment and empowerment from reading this book. It joins the list of studies framing the monumental importance of memory in shaping public identity and historical discourse on the topic of the civil rights movement and cultural heritage tourism. King and Gatchet make a convincing argument that understanding the lasting memory of the civil rights movement and, more important, crystallizing that memory are the tenets of cultural heritage tourism. Steeped in captivating evidence, this place-based study hinges on in-depth fieldwork and oral history, two hallmarks of the historical enterprise, of public history, and of community-based research.

Overflowing with descriptive analysis of the numerous methods of racial violence, this book paints a vivid depiction of how the Magnolia State struggled to embrace a cohesive narrative of the legacies of the civil rights movement. After a thorough introduction cementing the need and purpose for such a study, the first chapter traces the origins of Mississippi’s civil rights heritage tourism. This “synoptic history” is a significant intervention in scholarship as it “is the first systematic effort to narrate the history of Mississippi’s civil rights tourism industry” (p. 32).

The study describes Mississippi’s first attempts at civil rights heritage tourism, which were rooted in grassroots efforts that predated any formal commitment or involvement from the state. The authors brilliantly display local Mississippians’ commitment to principles of community, highlighting their creation of small museums like the Canton Freedom House Civil Rights Museum, public performances, and local support for such projects. All of those factors worked to ensure that the memory of the brutal legacy of the civil rights movement did not erode from the landscape.

An entire chapter is dedicated to framing the impact of the tragic murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. Till’s murder

Reviewed by:

• Congress of States: Proceedings of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America ed. by R. David Carlson
• Ben H. Severance

Legislative minutes are an invaluable primary source when studying the political life of a country. They often make for monotonous reading, however, even when they pertain to a government just forming at the outset of a war. Such is the case with the Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1895 (1904–1905), seven volumes that mostly record various motions, appointments, and roll call votes while leaving out the speeches, debates, and petitions that instill the statistical data with vibrancy and interest. To augment this information, historians have long consulted the “Proceedings of the Confederate Congress,” a supplement of nine volumes compiled by Douglas S. Freeman and published through the Southern Historical Society Papers (1923–1959). This supplement incorporates newspaper coverage that presents the detail missing from the journals themselves. Unfortunately, Freeman produced “Proceedings” only for the first and second congresses of the Confederacy; the Provisional Congress, which presided over the first year of the Civil War, was neglected. Enter R. David Carlson, who rectifies this oversight with Congress of States: Proceedings of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America, a book that both emulates and improves upon Freeman’s approach to the other volumes in the collection.

Congress of States is essentially a documentary editing project that supplements the Journal minutes for the Provisional Congress in two significant ways. First, like Freeman, Carlson weaves in the reports of newspaper correspondents who daily attended the sessions. But whereas Freeman used only the Richmond, Virginia, press, Carlson draws on newspapers from many of the South’s other big cities, too, particularly Charleston, South Carolina; Montgomery, Alabama; and New Orleans, Louisiana. The result is coverage that better reflects the national outlook of the Confederate Congress as opposed to just what Virginia’s journalists chose to address. Second, unlike Freeman’s “Proceedings,” Carlson has fully annotated his own work. Every person mentioned and every event discussed receives detailed explanations in the endnotes. Combined with its extensive index, Congress of States greatly facilitates research into the subject matter. [End Page 622]

Reviewed by:

• A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction by Drew A. Swanson
• Elijah Gaddis

It is a shopworn cliché among scholars of the South that the events and people we study are intimately tied to the places of their origin. At least since Eudora Welty and U. B. Phillips, we have endeavored to consider the South not just through regionality but also through the landscapes of the social worlds we study. These are big-picture currents. I mention them because Drew A. Swanson’s slim new volume, A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction, [End Page 629] builds on this tradition and admirably complicates our understanding of the experience of Reconstruction and the landscape of the southern Piedmont.

While not a complete reorientation toward the study of space and away from time, A Man of Bad Reputation gives weight to a broad temporal and spatial scope while nominally focusing on a single event. Swanson uses the 1870 assassination of North Carolina state senator John Stephens as a jumping- off point for a broad consideration of the experience of Reconstruction. Crucially, he does not confine that consideration to the years of Reconstruction alone, but shows instead how the idea of Reconstruction continued to be an animating force in Caswell County and throughout North Carolina long after its nominal conclusion. This book is concerned not just with memory, but also with the continual unfolding and narration of events over a longer duration. It is not the much-abused longue durée of the Annales school, but rather part of an important trend in recent southern historiography that recognizes the continual overlaps of historical production with what we often call memory.

The story of John Stephens’s killing unfolds over six chapters and an epilogue. More accurately, the book’s subject is “the ghost of John Stephens” read backward and forward (p. 4). Swanson’s introduction sets out the scale under which he is considering Reconstruction: his focus is on “hinge[s]” and other moments of both turmoil and possibility on the ground (p. 3). Other chapters read the Civil War through the agricultural and environmental lens of the Piedmont (chapter 1, “Promise”) or the tenuous politics of mobility and labor in the immediate aftermath of the war (chapter 3, “Perdition”). Most often the titular c

Reviewed by:

• Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church by Christopher Alan Graham
• Stephen R. Haynes

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church by Christopher Alan Graham traces the history of a single congregation: St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia. But because the church has existed in the same urban neighborhood since the 1840s, the book is also the story of an evolving South, as well as of white Christians’ attempts to adapt to changing racial and social landscapes. Located downtown near the Virginia state capitol, St. Paul’s has always attracted Richmonders of wealth and influence. From its founding, the church was embedded in the culture of chattel [End Page 625] slavery (in 1845, most of St. Paul’s members and vestry members were enslavers); and during the Civil War St. Paul’s “bec[a]me a de facto state church for the slaveholding republic,” where Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis were regular visitors (p. 37).

By 1870, St. Paul’s had become popular among tourists as the place where President Davis was at worship when General Lee sent news of the breaking of Confederate lines near Petersburg. After Davis’s death in 1889, the vestry moved to inscribe the church’s Confederate connections in “‘two conspicuous windows’” that were “‘dedicated as memorials to perpetuate’” the names and legacies of Lee and Davis (p. 53). Revealed in 1892, the Lee and Davis windows translated these heroes of the Lost Cause into quasi-biblical figures who were compared to Moses and St. Paul, respectively. These and other ecclesiastical tributes to the Confederate past lead Graham to call St. Paul’s “the ‘religious shrine of the Confederacy’” that “stood second to no other religious institution in contributing to the larger Lost Cause ideology” (pp. 76, 61).

In one fascinating chapter, Graham explores the church’s history in the early twentieth century, when Lost Cause–based racial paternalism struggled for St. Paul’s soul with the Social Gospel preached by W. Russell Bowie, who became rector in 1911. During this era, St. Paul’s became a leader in interracial cooperation while holding on to racial paternalism and “romanticized notions of faithful slaves and beloved ‘mammies’” (p. 77). In a chapter titled “St. Paul’s in Reaction,” Graham traces the church’s response to judicial and ecclesiastical attacks on segregation, which he describes as a genteel, paternalistic middle path between

Reviewed by:

• Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant
• Christopher S. DeRosa

If what we call childhood makes up half of a person’s felt history, then the growing field of the history of youth should command our attention. Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant’s new work, Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era, is an illuminating addition to this literature. The authors are not primarily concerned with trying to see through the eyes of the boys who served in Civil War armies (although the book contributes on this level nevertheless). Rather, their goal is to explain how nineteenth-century American society weighed private and public demands on young males, navigated those boys’ own aspirations, and differed on these issues sectionally.

By taking an admirably long view of their topic, Clarke and Plant uncover underage enlistment as a major flashpoint of U.S. civil-military relations going back to the War of 1812. Fathers considered themselves the owners of their sons’ labor until the age of majority, twenty-one before the War of 1812, eighteen after. By this age their children were capable of full, able-bodied work: work that could be rented out, realized for profit, or simply needed for family survival. Able-bodied youth went to school with children of all ages and served in the militia under community guidance. All of these things made youths in their late teens—unable to vote or to make contracts for themselves—cognizant of their ability, their worth, and their personal stake in American politics and wars.

If militia service was part of a local upbringing, enlisting in the U.S. military was more in the nature of making a contract for oneself. In Of Age, we learn how in the Civil War, the federal government in the Union gradually broke the power of parental ownership of youth labor and further eroded local control of militias. The major blow in this fight was the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Clarke and Plant argue that historians, by interpreting the suspension in light of Copperheads’ antiwar activities, have missed its central importance in squelching parents’ attempts to reclaim their sons from the army. Thwarting parental claims may be considered another part of the radicalizing of the northern war effort. Through a careful comparison of regimental records and nonmilitary records, and corroboration with the Early [End Page 616] Indicators of Later Work Levels, Disease, and Death database, the auth

Reviewed by:

• Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment by Christina Greene
• Debra L. Schultz

In 1976, the National Alliance of Black Feminists (NABF) drafted a Black Woman’s Bill of Rights. “The NABF’s logo,” as historian Christina Greene tells us in Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment, “was a pair of clenched fists in handcuffs, evoking both enslavement and imprisonment; one cuff was marked ‘sexism,’ the other labeled ‘racism’” (p. 83). This image distills many of the histories invoked and questions raised in this ambitious, groundbreaking work centered on Joan Little’s iconic 1974 sexual self-defense case against her jailer, a sixty-two-year-old white man, Clarence Alligood. The twenty-year-old African American woman fled her rural North Carolina jail cell, leaving Alligood naked from the waist down with multiple (and fatal) stab wounds. She escaped the death penalty through an international support campaign and a successful claim of self-defense against sexual assault, catalyzing important debates about such rights.

Greene writes engagingly, using the Joan Little case to make incisive intersectional contributions in several historiographies. She states, for example, “By the 1970s, female activists on both sides of the prison walls drew on the women’s liberation, civil rights, and Black Power movements to fashion a politics that included incarcerated women” (p. 83). By making visible southern Black women’s prison and anti-rape organizing, she challenges the declension theory of the Black freedom movement after the late 1960s, writes Black women’s leadership into second-wave feminism—particularly the antiviolence movement—and honors Black women’s contributions to critiquing state violence as embodied by the growing prison industrial complex.

The book is organized into three sections. The first demythologizes Joan Little (in the spirit of recent scholarship on Rosa Parks), illuminating how her case inspired alliances among many 1970s movements. The second sketches the foundations of a women’s tradition of prison organizing at the nexus of civil rights and Black Power. The third chronicles how a robust, multi-issue Black feminist movement led the way on organizing against sexual violence targeting women of color, part of a long tradition of Black women’s resistance to racialized and sexualized violence, including lynching. An epilogue on the 1994 Crime Bill and the Violence Against Women Act

Reviewed by:

• Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America by Leslie A. Schwalm
• Rana A. Hogarth

Leslie A. Schwalm has put her impressive skills to work in her latest book, Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America. In this powerful study, Schwalm investigates the Union army’s project of systematically collecting data on the bodies of Black and white troops under the guise of advancing what contemporaries “often described as the ‘science of man”’ (p. 48). Not only did northern medical men preserve the belief that Blackness and Black bodies were inferior even as the system of racial slavery was coming to an end, but they also contributed to the longevity of race science as a legitimate sub-discipline practiced by highly trained experts. Schwalm’s book complements existing histories of the American Civil War that focus on the war’s relationship to science, public health, and medical knowledge production. Schwalm focuses on Union medical men and their statistics-driven quest to locate and prove the existence of embodied racial difference. In this regard, Schwalm joins the likes of Margaret Humphreys, Jim Downs, and Gretchen Long—scholars whose work foregrounds the racial dimensions of health and disease during the Civil War and documents the ever-present racism that African Americans faced during their wartime freedom struggles.

The bulk of the book is about white Union medical personnel’s view of Black people rather than Black people’s interactions with white northerners who purported to have their interests at heart. That said, Schwalm dedicates sections of her book to the unique struggles Black people faced as they [End Page 623] mobilized for war. Indeed, the first two chapters offer background on how Black people had to navigate wartime either as soldiers, denied fair treatment and dignity, or as physicians, rebuffed when they sought to work in Black regiments. Schwalm also recounts how Black women were deliberately shut out of most wartime relief activities of the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC). It is a familiar story of racial discrimination, and Schwalm’s rendering seeks to amplify African American women’s responses to this exclusion through the creation of their own relief associations.

The third and fourth chapters are arguably the strongest. Schwalm zeroes in on the undercurrents of anti-Black sentiment that steered the Union’s efforts at measuring racial features during the war. She taps into a wide range of sources, including records from the US

Reviewed by:

• Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature by Kelly Ross
• Rodney Taylor

Coming from the background of literary studies, Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature delivers on its title. It is a valuable contribution to the study of southern, African American, American, and surveillance literature. Kelly Ross examines how surveillance and “sousveillance . . . watching from below” appear and reappear in antebellum American literature by exploring the interconnections between genre and race and “by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction” (pp. 1, 13). Ross’s argument is inherently interdisciplinary as she incorporates social science and historical evidence to offer a fresh perspective on canonical literary works and to shed light on the often neglected literatures of slavery.

Across four chapters, Ross presents different ways in which literary genres portray both surveillance and sousveillance. The first chapter discusses how fugitive slave narratives that predated the authorial intrusions from abolitionist culture provided enslaved narrators who are astute observers and informants within the slave system. Enslaved narrators who “sousveille” successfully offer a primary glimpse into southern society and show the protective means that sousveillance provided from racialized violence and surveillance (p. 26). The second chapter applies the framework of surveillance, sousveillance, and investigation to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) as well as his Dupin tales by linking how “surveillance migrates from slave narratives . . . [to] detective fiction” (p. 13). Chapter 3 provides readings of Thomas R. Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853), and Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) to show how Black rebellions destroyed the illusion of white surveillance, which in turn shows that white surveillants were neither invisible nor immune from the Black gaze. The fourth and final chapter discusses the speculative possibilities of both Black and white surveillance in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to protect enslaved women and their families from violence and capture in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861) and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (ca. 1853–1860).

Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre i