JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet by Bart Elmore
• Steve Striffler

Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet is an exceptionally readable history centered on the emergence and extraordinary growth of five very large corporations: Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, FedEx, and Bank of America. These companies transformed the world in a multiplicity of ways, including what we eat; how we travel; the way we make, buy, sell, move, and consume pretty much everything; and even how we treat workers and think about work. Author Bart Elmore’s focus is ultimately on exploring how these companies, all born in the South, transformed the economy and forever altered the environment on a global scale. It makes for a fascinating read, one that has the virtue of being very well researched and exceptionally well told.

The book also makes a larger argument about the role of the U.S. South. For Elmore, it is not a coincidence that these corporate behemoths are from the same region. Rather, these companies experienced colossal success precisely because the relatively rural nature of the South led them to adapt in innovative ways. The South, particularly the challenges it posed for companies seeking to extract profit from a region with a relatively dispersed population, was an incubator of corporate innovation. This argument provides a provocative hook that drives the story and will no doubt be debated by scholars, even if at times it feels a bit underdeveloped.

The book is divided into five parts, each corresponding to one of the corporate case studies. The first part explores the rise of Coca-Cola, focusing particularly on its innovative move toward franchising bottling plants, which allowed the company to extend its reach into rural areas and eventually the entire globe. Elmore points our attention to how this expansion transformed global ecosystems as it required more and more of everything—sugar, water, trucks, roads, refrigerators, and so on. He also explores how Coca-Cola attempted to address its ecological impact as environmental concerns arrived on the public radar.

The history of Delta Airlines, originally nicknamed “The Airline of the South,” is particularly interesting. Its success depended heavily on the migration of industry and people from the Midwest to the South during the decades after World War II. The company’s trajectory mirrored shifts in the American economy. Delta’s rise is also import

Reviewed by:

• Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century by Brent Cebul
• Darren E. Grem

Brent Cebul’s Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century argues that neoliberalism is neither “neo” nor “liberal.” [End Page 648] New Dealers invented it nearly a century ago, and it is better understood as a political economy that Cebul terms “supply-side liberalism” (p. 4). This approach privileged local business interests, public-private partnerships, and market solutions to poverty. Historians have long acknowledged the business- friendly approaches of liberal social policy. But none have delved as deeply into the archives and told as subtle a story as Cebul, who masterfully traces the American welfare state’s early and long-lasting capture by the market’s means and ends.

Half of Cebul’s book focuses on northwest Georgia, especially the small city of Rome, which he casts as a counterpart and contrast to Cleveland, Ohio, the setting of the book’s other half. Both Rome’s and Cleveland’s civic and business leaders privileged job growth and urban renewal–based development schemes, partnering with state planners, advisory boards, governmental commissions, and nonprofit entities to manage rural and urban poverty as primarily a local matter. “Liberals’ faith in economic growth also ensured that poverty continued to be immensely profitable for local elites,” Cebul argues, “cementing decentralized, administrative partnerships between liberals and often conservative businesspeople” (p. 91). Though hardly a radical policy shift, the War on Poverty presented “an unprecedented threat to their [business elites’] relationship with the supply-side state,” all while sparking revolt by the very communities under its administration (p. 148). Supply-side liberalism, however, would prove durable under protest. Urban renewal’s failures in Cleveland and the limits of liberalism’s growth-oriented platform in Rome set up space for a new round of Democrats in the 1960s and 1970s to “more muscularly articulate their producerist bona fides, expanded to include not simply their essential role in producing jobs, taxes, or affordable housing, but also their role in fighting poverty and reforming government itself” (p. 148).

For Cebul, the quintessential supply-side liberal was Jimmy Carter. Carter advanced a “generational suspicion about traditional public programs,” especially as he and other “younger liberals reckoned with the reality that eve

Reviewed by:

• Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU by Robert Mann
• Jack Carey

Robert Mann’s Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU tells the story of Louisiana’s most famous political figure and the state’s flagship university. Mann, a professor at Louisiana State University (LSU) with an extensive background in journalism and politics in that state, fills the book’s twenty-seven brisk chapters with tales of scandals, portraits of an ambitious political and educational vision, and sketches of a sprawling cast of scheming characters. Throughout the story, Huey P. Long stands at the center.

Long’s “fraught relationship with LSU” dated to his childhood (p. xv). As a teenager, Long’s first extended trips away from his family’s home were to Baton Rouge for competitions in Louisiana’s High School Rally program. Long later claimed that “he fell in love with LSU” on these trips (p. 9). He never attended LSU, though. For students from places like Winnfield, Long’s hometown in “hilly, north-central Louisiana,” Mann writes, attending LSU may have seemed like “an unattainable dream” (pp. 7, 10). In 1923, during his first gubernatorial campaign, Long denounced plans for an expanded LSU as a “temple of vanity erected to Governor [John M.] Parker” (p. 28). Long lost that election—the only one he ever lost. By 1927, during his successful gubernatorial campaign, Long was telling crowds in Baton Rouge, “There is no man in this state that holds dearer sentiments than I toward Louisiana State University” (p. 36).

Mann disputes the idea that Long ignored LSU during the first two years of his governorship (1928 and 1929), but he acknowledges that it was not until “late 1930” that Long’s “active, near daily involvement” with the university began (p. 51). From November 1930, after bringing the LSU Board of Supervisors under his control, Long consistently meddled in the university, often involving himself in the hiring and firing of faculty members and administrators. While Long often denied his role in day-to-day decisions at LSU, he promoted his involvement with the school’s football team and marching band. Long’s belief in his prowess as a play-caller aside, Mann writes that the Kingfish acted as the football “team’s chief booster, motivational speaker, and sidelines cheerleader” (pp. 109–10). [End Page 643]

Mann credits Long, through his own governorship and the terms of his successors Oscar Allen and Richard Leche, with “lasting accomplishments at LSU, including increased enrollment, expansion of the campus, more and better faculty, and new academic departments” (p. 265). The money Long poured int

Reviewed by:

• Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm by Susan Crawford
• Margaret Lynn Brown

“Experience the timeless charm and unrivaled hospitality only found in Charleston,” a December 26, 2022, New Yorker advertisement proclaims, with “a stirring sense of history.” Full-page spreads like these attract “seven million mostly white tourists” every year to the city’s “luxury hotels . . . for care-free indulgence and relaxation,” according to author Susan Crawford (pp. 6, 7). Tourism contributes $10 billion a year to the regional economy. Little wonder why leaders of the coastal city will not utter the words “sea level rise,” [End Page 604] especially if to do so implies that climate change and human activity have something to do with increased flooding. “[I]f you were planning for the Charleston region of 2050 and beyond, you would not build there and you would not want people to move there,” Crawford writes. “Tick off the dangers: storm surge, sea level rise, chronic flooding, groundwaters rising, risk to drinking water—it’s all about to get much more dangerous” (p. 258).

Susan Crawford’s Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm juxtaposes the shortsighted view of civic leaders with the city’s long history of privileged development and racism. Like Annette Gordon-Reed, who has written a foreword to the book, Crawford is a professor at Harvard Law School, and the book often adopts the tone of a polemic with grim statistics and frightening forecasts. “Forty years ago, the city flooded ten times a year. The city flooded eighty-nine times in 2019, almost once every four days, sixty-eight times in 2020, and forty-six times in 2021” (pp. 10–11). Historians—always more comfortable with measured statements focused on the past—may not read this book. Perhaps they should. Crawford describes how modern development rests upon “creeks and marshes,” filled in with “trash, rubble, dirt, [and] offal” and covered with sand and dirt, work that had been done using slave labor (p. 34). “Today,” she writes, “much of Charleston is sitting on landfill. Floating on trash” (p. 35).

The most engaging part of Crawford’s book, though, is a series of interviews with members of the African American community, including Rev. Joseph A. Darby, a Columbia, South Carolina–born pastor who led the Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston for fifteen years. Darby describes how, when the Arthur J. Ravenel Jr. Bridge was built between 2001 and 2005, African Americans were displaced: “‘The city,’ Darby says drily, ‘created a few college

• Abortion on Campus: Sexual Liberation and Reproductive Control at Southern Colleges and Universities before 1973
• Lisa Lindquist Dorr (bio)

On October 6, 1971, Ron Sachs, editor of the University of Florida’s student newspaper, the Florida Alligator, was arrested for violating the state’s 1868 law prohibiting abortion. Sachs had not provided or been involved directly in any abortion himself. Instead, he was charged with violating the section of the law that prohibited the dissemination of any information that could lead to abortion.¹ Against the advice of the president and university attorneys, Sachs and his editorial team had published a list of abortion referral and counseling services in the October 6 edition of the Alligator. These services counseled women with unwanted pregnancies and provided information on competent abortion providers. Florida students, the editors believed, deserved information about abortion referral services regardless of the law, as debate on campus over the previous few years had made clear. The charges against Sachs ultimately were dismissed, with a ruling that Florida’s abortion law violated women’s privacy and that the prohibition on information was a violation of free speech rights. Two months later, in February 1972, the Florida Supreme Court concurred, throwing out [End Page 539] Florida’s 1868 law entirely.² As a result, college newspapers in Florida were free to publish information about where women could seek safe abortions. Student newspapers nationwide celebrated Sachs’s victory, as did several major newspapers in the state and around the country. The University of Florida even went a step further, providing its own on- campus referral service through the Student Government Association, recognizing Florida students’ interest in the procedure.

The story of Sachs’s victory for abortion rights has been resurrected recently in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022. But the efforts by students at southern colleges and universities to gain access to abortion before Roe v. Wade in 1973 made abortion legal went beyond the drama involving the Florida Alligator. College students across the South demanded access to reproductive services on college campuses. Their lively arguments, activities, and personal efforts illustrate the complicated debate over abortion in the South long before Roe. Although women’s liberation groups were part of this process, voicing their desire for the repeal of abortion laws, they were not alone. Indeed, the debate about abortion was less abo

• Historical News and Notices

THE ASSOCIATION

The Southern Historical Association will hold its ninetieth annual meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, October 24–27, 2024, at the Westin Kansas City at Crown Center. Registration is now open. For the most up-to-date information and to register, please visit https://thesha.org/meeting.

The 2024 annual meeting will not be one to miss. For the first time in our collective histories, the Southern will meet concurrently with the Western History Association (WHA). This first-ever meeting of the leading regional history associations in the United States is not just a marriage of convenience. The SHA Program Committee, chaired by Angela Murphy, has created a host of panels and plenaries emphasizing the SXSW turn in our historiography. The SHA Local Arrangements Committee, chaired by Diane Mutti-Burke, has also outdone itself, planning tours and events at off-site venues that will allow us to explore the city, including an opening plenary jazz performance at the National WWI Museum, a teaching panel at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and much more.

The deadline for submissions for the William F. Holmes Award, recognizing the best paper presented at the Kansas City meeting by a graduate student or recent Ph.D., is October 12, 2024. For more information, please visit https://www.thesha.org/holmes.

The 2025 Program Committee has issued its call for papers for the ninety- first annual meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida, November 5–8, 2025. All proposals should be submitted electronically through the SHA website. The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2024. In accordance with the SHA’s “one year off” rule, no one who was accepted to give a paper or participate in a roundtable during the Kansas City program will be eligible for participation in St. Pete Beach. (Panel chairs and commentators do not have to take a year off.) The SHA strongly encourages session proposals that reflect racial, gender, and institutional diversity.

LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES

The Georgia Historical Society is pleased to announce that the following collections are now available for research. Please consult the Research Center catalogs for further information about these and other Georgia Historical Society collections: www.georgiahistory.com.

Judge Timothy R. Walmsley Collection of Ahmaud Arbery Murder Trial Materials (GHS 2844)—This collection consists of correspondence sent to Judge Timothy R. Walmsley of the Superior Court of the Eastern Judicial Circuit of Georgia. The correspondence consists of letters, greeting cards, postcards, and other messages related to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery and the trial of Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William “Roddie” Bryan, a trial presided over by Judge Walmsley. The majority of the

• Higher Education on the Texas Blackland Prairie: Trinity University’s Civil War Era
• Sarah Beth Kaufman (bio)

Across the United States, institutions of higher learning are grappling with legacies rooted in slavery. Catalyzed by the historic mandate of Brown University president Ruth J. Simmons, the first Black woman to lead an Ivy League school, colleges and universities have documented the role of enslaved labor, celebrated the accomplishments of formerly enslaved members of their communities, and taken steps toward reconciliation.¹ This essay extends such work, centering the slave economy’s influence on universities founded during southern Reconstruction. Scholars argue that Civil War–era racial capital deserves more attention.² The story of Trinity University’s founding illuminates one aspect of this era: how higher education funneled wealth gained from enslavement before the Civil War to Protestant Anglo children after slavery’s abolition. Drawing on materials such as letters from the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen’s Bureau) and university archival records, this essay provides a model for other southern colleges and universities founded during the Civil War era to clarify how they, too, benefited from the slave economy. [End Page 503]

Today, Trinity University is a small private school in San Antonio, Texas. With an enrollment of over 2,500 undergraduate students, it ranks among the top fifty liberal arts schools in the United States, and it has an endowment to match.³ Like other predominantly white institutions, Trinity has historically served students racialized as white (herein referred to as “white” or “Anglo”), to the detriment of minoritized racial groups, particularly those racialized as Black.⁴ Trinity was opened in 1869 by Cumberland Presbyterians as one of the many evangelical colleges propagated throughout the South during the later nineteenth century. The school is now secular, with a covenantal relationship with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It resided for the first half of the twentieth century in Waxahachie, Texas, near Dallas, before moving to its current home in San Antonio. But Trinity University was begun in a remote settlement in east central Texas called the Tehuacana Hills, in Limestone County. It was not founded by a single person or family but by a group of Anglo church and community leaders who were wealthy enough to donate land and money, sit on the board of trustees, and travel to solicit contributions for the school. Most of these were farmer- businessmen-ministers who migrated from prominent families in the lower southern states, who enslaved people, and who fought for the

Reviewed by:

• Seven Virginians: The Men Who Shaped Our Republic by John B. Boles
• Jeffrey J. Malanson

John B. Boles’s Seven Virginians: The Men Who Shaped Our Republic provides a highly readable account of the “long revolutionary era” between the 1740s and 1830s as lived by George Mason, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Marshall, and James Monroe (p. 2). According to Boles, these “seven men were born in the northeast quadrant of the colony of Virginia” and played “a vastly disproportionate role in the founding of this nation” (p. 1). The book’s first thirteen chapters tell the story of the country’s founding in a largely chronological narrative from the French and Indian War through the late 1820s. A fourteenth chapter on “Institution Builders” examines Marshall’s tenure as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Jefferson’s role in founding the University of Virginia. A final chapter considers the legacies of Jefferson, Madison, Marshall, and Monroe regarding slavery and their influence on the effort to write a new constitution for the state of Virginia in 1829.

Boles moves briskly through more than eighty years of history while trying to tell coherent stories about each Virginian, but he tries to do too much, and the book’s primary contribution is ultimately unclear. The narrative thrust of Seven Virginians is the chronology of America’s founding, often with Washington, Jefferson, or Madison at the center. Little space is left for the contributions of Mason, Henry, Monroe, and Marshall, who are not central to Boles’s conception of the founding. Devoting more space to their achievements and service would have helped readers to better understand who these four were as politicians and Virginians—especially so for Monroe, who is briefly described as an Antifederalist Francophile in the 1780s and 1790s and as a mildly pro-British nationalist in the 1810s, with little context provided to explain the transition. Monroe and Marshall are at least highlighted in chapters near the end of the book, but Henry and especially Mason receive short shrift. The same can be said of the putative unifying theme of the book—that these seven were all Virginians. Virginia, and the ways the state and its politics shaped who these leaders were, is not a prominent enough character in the book to make it feel as if we learned anything new about the founding or these leaders from this approach.

Boles admits that “a book about seven white slaveholders will appear inappropriate or even repugnant to some readers in 2023,” but he justifi

• Yes, There Is a “Quare”/Queer South!: A Review Essay
• Leisa D. Meyer (bio)

Recently I was one of the faculty representing William & Mary at an “affinity group” breakfast for parents and friends of newly admitted students. This particular affinity group was for families whose children identified as LGBTQ+. The most frequent question (and, in many ways, the biggest fear) expressed by those attending was whether their child would be safe at William & Mary. When I asked them to expand on the question, their focus was not if their child would be “safe” at college, but rather if their queer child would be “safe” in “the South.” I cannot blame them for the assumption they were making, that the southeastern United States—the “American South”—was likely to be less welcoming of their queer children. In our current cultural moment, when there is an ever-expanding number of laws being passed in state legislatures focused on regulating the bodies of women and youths (and particularly trans youths), the states occupying the southeastern portion of the United States are certainly leading the way on some of these measures.¹ That said, as we spoke more, it became clear [End Page 581] that their presumption that the South might be dangerous for their children was also based in their sincere belief that there was nothing queer in the South—that it is a region queer people flee from not to, and that it is a region where LGBTQ+ culture never had the opportunity to develop and was stifled if it was tried.

This presumption seems even more problematic given the explosion of books, articles, and digital projects (among other online and print publications) that we have witnessed in the last two-plus decades engaging and narrativizing the “queer South.”² Among this work is Mary L. Gray’s study on Appalachian Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee, Out in the Country, which finds some truth to the assumptions made by the Wil

Reviewed by:

• Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: Power and Human Rights, 1975–2000 by E. Stanly Godbold Jr
• Kristin L. Ahlberg

The second part of a two-part biography of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, this volume begins with Jimmy’s departure from the Georgia governor’s office in January 1975 and continues up through 2020. In narrating the intervening forty-five years, E. Stanly Godbold Jr. balances the domestic and foreign policy accomplishments and crises of the Carter administration against Jimmy [End Page 660] and Rosalynn Carter’s professional and personal lives. The work’s exhaustive scope covers well-known successes and failures. But of more interest is Godbold’s characterization of the Carters’ shared southern background and their advocacy. Their experiences, beliefs, and trust in one another all influenced their political partnership and the issues that they chose to prioritize, both in the White House and after. Godbold notes that the Carters “raised their caring and nurturing of family and neighbors to the national and international levels” (p. 661). It is this interplay that reveals a more complete assessment of both Carters, consistent with recent scholarship and the increased availability of archival documentation from the Carter administration.

As befits the title, the Carters’ partnership and the identification of human rights within the Carter administration and beyond constitute two major themes knitted together throughout the narrative. Rosalynn Carter adapted to situations and environments necessitated by her husband’s naval service, his return to Georgia to run the Carter peanut warehouse, and his nascent political career. In all instances, she assumed greater responsibilities and felt empowered to share her views. Godbold suggests that these proved helpful in 1975 as Rosalynn campaigned for her husband. Jimmy Carter’s recognition and appreciation of his wife’s political acumen, tact, and interpersonal skills meant that he not only encouraged Rosalynn to pursue initiatives in the area of mental health but also selected her, in early 1977, as a presidential envoy to several South American countries, where she engaged in substantive discussions on human rights. While these activities sometimes subjected her to criticism concerning the “proper” role for a First Lady, Godbold concludes that Jimmy Carter’s willingness to ask his wife to assume these responsibilities “should not have surprised those who had come to know him” (p. 112).

Throughout the 1976 campaign, Jimmy Carter emphasized human rights and asserted that his administration would pur