Peculiar Whiteness: Racial Anxiety and Poor Whites in Southern Literature, 1900-1965 argues for deeper consideration of the complexities surrounding the disparate treatment of poor whites throughout southern literature and attests to how broad such experiences have been. While the history of prejudice against this group is not the same as the legacy of violence perpetrated against people of color in America, individuals regarded as ""white trash"" have suffered a dehumanizing process in the writings of various white authors. Poor white characters are frequently maligned as grotesque and anxiety inducing, especially when they are aligned in close proximity to blacks or to people with disabilities. Thus, as a symbol, much has been asked of poor whites, and various iterations of the label (e.g., ""white trash,"" tenant farmers, or even people with a little less money than average) have been subject to a broad spectrum of judgment, pity, compassion, fear, and anxiety. Peculiar Whiteness engages key issues in contemporary critical race studies, whiteness studies, and southern studies, both literary and historical. Through discussions of authors including Charles Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Sutton Griggs, Erskine Caldwell, Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor, we see how whites in a position of power work to maintain their status, often by finding ways to recategorize and marginalize people who might not otherwise have seemed to fall under the auspices or boundaries of ""white trash.

In 2011, the Midwest suffered devastating floods. Due to the flooding, the US Army Corps of Engineers activated the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway, one of the flood prevention mechanisms of the Mississippi Rivers and Tributaries Project. This levee breach was intended to divert water in order to save the town of Cairo, Illinois, but in the process, it completely destroyed the small African American town of Pinhook, Missouri. In When They Blew the Levee: Race, Politics, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri, authors David Todd Lawrence and Elaine J. Lawless examine two conflicting narratives about the flood--one promoted by the Corps of Engineers that boasts the success of the levee breach and the flood diversion, and the other gleaned from displaced Pinhook residents, who, in oral narratives, tell a different story of neglect and indifference on the part of government officials. Receiving inadequate warning and no evacuation assistance during the breach, residents lost everything. Still after more than six years, displaced Pinhook residents have yet to receive restitution and funding for relocation and reconstruction of their town. The authors' research traces a long history of discrimination and neglect of the rights of the Pinhook community, beginning with their migration from the Deep South to southeast Missouri, through purchasing and farming the land, and up to the Birds Point levee breach nearly eighty years later. The residents' stories relate what it has been like to be dispersed in other small towns, living with relatives and friends while trying to negotiate the bureaucracy surrounding Federal Emergency Management Agency and State Emergency Management Agency assistance programs. Ultimately, the stories of displaced citizens of Pinhook reveal a strong African American community, whose bonds were developed over time and through shared traditions, a community persisting despite extremely difficult circumstances.

Most communists, as any plains state patriot would have told you in the 1950s, lived in Los Angeles or New York City, not Minot, North Dakota. The Cold War as it played out across the Great Plains was not the Cold War of the American cities and coasts. Nor was it tempered much by midwestern isolationism, as common wisdom has it. In this book, David W. Mills offers an enlightening look at what most of the heartland was up to while America was united in its war on Reds. Cold War in a Cold Land adopts a regional perspective to develop a new understanding of a critical chapter in the nation's history. Marx himself had no hope that landholding farmers would rise up as communist revolutionaries. So it should come as no surprise that in places like South Dakota, where 70 percent of the population owned land and worked for themselves, people didn't take the threat of internal subversion very seriously. Mills plumbs the historical record to show how residents of the plains states - while deeply patriotic and supportive of the nation's foreign policy - responded less than enthusiastically to national anticommunist programs. Only South Dakota, for example, adopted a loyalty oath, and it was fervently opposed throughout the state. Only Montana, prodded by one state legislator, formed an investigation committee - one that never investigated anyone and was quickly disbanded. Plains state people were, however, ""highly churched"" and enthusiastically embraced federal attempts to use religion as a bulwark against atheistic communist ideology. Even more enthusiastic was the Great Plains response to the military buildup that accompanied Cold War politics, as the construction of airbases and missile fields brought untold economic benefits to the region. A much-needed, nuanced account of how average citizens in middle America experienced Cold War politics and policies, Cold War in a Cold Land is a significant addition to the history of both the Cold War and the Great Plains.

The general store in late-nineteenth-century America was often the economic heart of a small town. Merchants sold goods necessary for residents' daily survival and extended credit to many of their customers; cash-poor farmers relied on merchants for their economic well-being just as the retailers needed customers to purchase their wares. But there was more to this mutual dependence than economics. Store owners often helped found churches and other institutions, and they and their customers worshiped together, sent their children to the same schools, and in times of crisis, came to one another's assistance.

For this social and cultural history, Linda English combed store account ledgers from the 1870s and 1880s and found in them the experiences of thousands of people in Texas and Indian Territory. Particularly revealing are her insights into the everyday lives of women, immigrants, and ethnic and racial minorities, especially African Americans and American Indians.

A store's ledger entries yield a wealth of detail about its proprietor, customers, and merchandise. As a local gathering place, the general store witnessed many aspects of residents' daily lives--many of them recorded, if hastily, in account books. In a small community with only one store, the clientele would include white, black, and Indian shoppers and, in some locales, Mexican American and other immigrants. Flour, coffee, salt, potatoes, tobacco, domestic fabrics, and other staples typified most purchases, but occasional luxury items reflected the buyer's desire for refinement and upward mobility. Recognizing that townspeople often accessed the wider world through the general store, English also traces the impact of national concerns on remote rural areas--including Reconstruction, race relations, women's rights, and temperance campaigns.

In describing the social status of store owners and their economic and political roles in both small agricultural communities and larger towns, English fleshes out the fascinating history of daily life in Indian Territory and Texas in a time of transition.

"The Mississippi Secession Convention" is the first full treatment of any secession convention to date. Studying the Mississippi convention of 1861 offers insight into how and why southern states seceded and the effects of such a breech. Based largely on primary sources, this book provides a unique insight into the broader secession movement.

There was more to the secession convention than the mere act of leaving the Union, which was done only three days into the deliberations. The rest of the three-week January 1861 meeting as well as an additional week in March saw the delegates debate and pass a number of important ordinances that for a time governed the state. As seen through the eyes of the delegates themselves, with rich research into each member, this book provides a compelling overview of the entire proceeding.

The effects of the convention gain the most analysis in this study, including the political processes that, after the momentous vote, morphed into unlikely alliances. Those on opposite ends of the secession question quickly formed new political allegiances in a predominantly Confederate-minded convention. These new political factions formed largely over the issues of central versus local authority, which quickly played into Confederate versus state issues during the Civil War. In addition, author Timothy B. Smith considers the lasting consequences of defeat, looking into the effect secession and war had on the delegates themselves and, by extension, their state, Mississippi.

The story of banking in twentieth-century Oklahoma is also the story of the Sooner State's first hundred years, as Michael J. Hightower's new book demonstrates. Oklahoma statehood coincided with the Panic of 1907, and both events signaled seismic shifts in state banking practices. Much as Oklahoma banks shed their frontier persona to become more tightly integrated in the national economy, so too was decentralized banking revealed as an anachronism, utterly unsuited to an increasingly global economy. With creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 and subsequent choice of Oklahoma City as the location for a branch bank, frontier banking began yielding to systems commensurate with the needs of the new century.
Through meticulous research and personal interviews with bankers statewide, Hightower has crafted a compelling narrative of Oklahoma banking in the twentieth century. One of the first acts of the new state legislature was to guarantee that depositors in state-chartered banks would never lose a penny. Meanwhile, land and oil speculators and the bankers who funded their dreams were elevating get-rich-quick (and often get-poor-quick) schemes to an art form. In defense of country banks, the Oklahoma Bankers Association dispatched armed vigilantes to stop robbers in their tracks.
Subsequent developments in Oklahoma banking include adaptation to regulations spawned by the Great Depression, the post-World War II boom, the 1980s depression in the oil patch, and changes fostered by rapid-fire advances in technology and communication. The demise of Penn Square Bank offers one of history's few unambiguous lessons, and it warrants two chapters--one on the rise, and one on the fall. Increasing regulation of the banking industry, the survival of family banks, and the resilience of community banking are consistent themes in a state that is only a few generations removed from the frontier.

In Land, Community, and the State in the Caucasus, Ian Lanzillotti traces the history of Kabardino-Balkaria from the extension of Russian rule in the late-18th century to the ethno-nationalist mobilizations of the post-Soviet era. As neighboring communities throughout the Caucasus mountain region descended into violence amidst the Soviet collapse, Russia's multiethnic Kabardino-Balkar Republic enjoyed intercommunal peace despite tensions over land and identity. Lanzillotti explores why this region avoided violent ethnicized conflict by examining the historic relationships that developed around land tenure in the Central Caucasus and their enduring legacies. This study demonstrates how Kabardino-Balkaria formed out of the dynamic interactions among the state, the peoples of the region, and the space they inhabited. Deeply researched and elegantly argued, this book deftly balances sources from Russia's central archives with rare and often overlooked archival material from the Caucasus region to provide the first historical examination of Kabardino-Balkaria in the English language. As such, Land, Community, and the State in the Caucasus is a key resource for scholars of the Caucasus region, modern Russia, and peace studies.

This book examines the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games. It tells the story of the extensive infrastructural transformation of the city and its changing global image in relation to hosting of the Games. Reviewing different cultural representations of Sarajevo in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, the book explores how the promotion of the city as a future global tourist centre resulted in an increased awareness among its populace of the city's cultural particularities. The analysis reveals how the process of modernisation relating to hosting of the Olympics provided an opportunity to re-imagine the city as a particularly environmentally progressive city. Placed within the field of studies of late socialism, the book offers important insights into Yugoslav society during the period, including those relating to the country's unique geopolitical position and its nationalities policies.

The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the attack by Confederate forces under Forrest's command left many of the Tennessee Unionists and black soldiers garrisoned there dead in a confrontation widely labeled as a "massacre." In "The River Was Dyed with Blood," best-selling Forrest biographer Brian Steel Wills argues that although atrocities did occur after the fall of the fort, Forrest did not order or intend a systematic execution of its defenders. Rather, the general's great failing was losing control of his troops.

A prewar slave trader and owner, Forrest was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. Because the attack on Fort Pillow--which, as Forrest wrote, left the nearby waters "dyed with blood"--occurred in an election year, Republicans used him as a convenient Confederate scapegoat to marshal support for the war. After the war he also became closely associated with the spread of the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, the man himself, and the truth about Fort Pillow, has remained buried beneath myths, legends, popular depictions, and disputes about the events themselves.

Wills sets what took place at Fort Pillow in the context of other wartime excesses from the American Revolution to World War II and Vietnam, as well as the cultural transformations brought on by the Civil War. Confederates viewed black Union soldiers as the embodiment of slave rebellion and reacted accordingly. Nevertheless, Wills concludes that the engagement was neither a massacre carried out deliberately by Forrest, as charged by a congressional committee, nor solely a northern fabrication meant to discredit him and the Confederate States of America, as pro-Southern apologists have suggested. The battle-scarred fighter with his homespun aphorisms was neither an infallible warrior nor a heartless butcher, but a product of his time and his heritage.

Studies of the Irish presence in America have tended to look to the main corridors of emigration, and hence outside the American South. Yet the Irish constituted a significant minority in the region. Indeed, the Irish fascination expresses itself in Southern context in powerful, but disparate, registers: music, literature, and often, a sense of shared heritage. "Rethinking the Irish in the South" aims to create a readable, thorough introduction to the subject, establishing new ground for areas of inquiry. These essays offer a revisionist critique of the Irish in the South, calling into question widely held understandings of how Irish culture was transmitted. The discussion ranges from Appalachian ballads, to "Gone With the Wind," to the Irish rock band U2, to Atlantic-spanning literary friendships. Rather than seeing the Irish presence as "natural" or something completed in the past, these essays posit a shifting, evolving, and unstable influence. Taken collectively, they offer a new framework for interpreting the Irish in the region. The implications extend to the interpretation of migration patterns, to the understanding of Irish diaspora, and the assimilation of immigrants and their ideas

The field of environmental history emerged just decades ago but has established itself as one of the most innovative and important new approaches to history, one that bridges the human and natural world, the humanities and the sciences. With the current trend towards internationalizing history, environmental history is perhaps the quintessential approach to studying subjects outside the nation-state model, with pollution, global warming, and other issues affecting the earth not stopping at national borders. With 25 essays, this Handbook is global in scope and innovative in organization, looking at the field thematically through such categories as climate, disease, oceans, the body, energy, consumerism, and international relations.

In 1981, decades before mainstream America elected Barack Obama, James Chase became the first African American mayor of Spokane, Washington, with the overwhelming support of a majority-white electorate. Chase's win failed to capture the attention of historians--as had the century-long evolution of the black community in Spokane. In "Black Spokane: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Inland Northwest," Dwayne A. Mack corrects this oversight--and recovers a crucial chapter in the history of race relations and civil rights in America.
As early as the 1880s, Spokane was a destination for black settlers escaping the racial oppression in the South--settlers who over the following decades built an infrastructure of churches, businesses, and social organizations to serve the black community. Drawing on oral histories, interviews, newspapers, and a rich array of other primary sources, Mack sets the stage for the years following World War II in the Inland Northwest, when an influx of black veterans would bring about a new era of racial issues. His book traces the earliest challenges faced by the NAACP and a small but sympathetic white population as Spokane became a significant part of the national civil rights struggle. International superstars such as Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong and Hazel Scott figure in this story, along with charismatic local preachers, entrepreneurs, and lawyers who stepped forward as civic leaders.
These individuals' contributions, and the black community's encounters with racism, offer a view of the complexity of race relations in a city and a region not recognized historically as centers of racial strife. But in matters of race--from the first migration of black settlers to Spokane, through the politics of the Cold War and the civil rights movement, to the successes of the 1970s and '80s--Mack shows that Spokane has a story to tell, one that this book at long last incorporates into the larger history of twentieth-century America.

Japan at Nature's Edge is a timely collection of essays that explores the relationship between Japan's history, culture, and physical environment. It greatly expands the focus of previous work on Japanese modernization by examining Japan's role in global environmental transformation and how Japanese ideas have shaped bodies and landscapes over the centuries. The immediacy of Earth's environmental crisis, a predicament highlighted by Japan's March 2011 disaster, brings a sense of urgency to the study of Japan and its global connections. The work is an environmental history in the broadest sense of the term because it contains writing by environmental anthropologists, a legendary Japanese economist, and scholars of Japanese literature and culture. The editors have brought together an unparalleled assemblage of some of the finest scholars in the field who, rather than treat it in isolation or as a unique cultural community, seek to connect Japan to global environmental currents such as whaling, world fisheries, mountaineering and science, mining and industrial pollution, and relations with nonhuman animals. The contributors assert the importance of the environment in understanding Japan's history and propose a new balance between nature and culture, one weighted much more heavily on the side of natural legacies. This approach does not discount culture. Instead, it suggests that the Japanese experience of nature, like that of all human beings, is a complex and intimate negotiation between the physical and cultural worlds. Contributors: Daniel P. Aldrich, Jakobina Arch, Andrew Bernstein, Philip C. Brown, Timothy S. George, Jeffrey E. Hanes, David L. Howell, Federico Marcon, Christine L. Marran, Ian Jared Miller, Micah Muscolino, Ken'ichi Miyamoto, Sara B. Pritchard, Julia Adeney Thomas, Karen Thornber, William M. Tsutsui, Brett L. Walker, Takehiro Watanabe.

All regions and places are unique in their own way, but the Ozarks have an enduring place in American culture. Studying the Ozarks offers the ability to explore American life through the lens of one of the last remaining cultural frontiers in American society. Perhaps because the Ozarks were relatively isolated from mainstream American society, or were at least relegated to the margins of it, their identity and culture are liminal and oftentimes counter to mainstream culture. Whatever the case, looking at the Ozarks offers insights into changing ideas about what it means to be an American and, more specifically, a special type of southerner. In Where Misfits Fit: Counterculture and Influence in the Ozarks, Thomas Michael Kersen explores the people who made a home in the Ozarks and the ways they contributed to American popular culture. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Kersen argues the area attracts and even nurtures people and groups on the margins of the mainstream. These include UFO enthusiasts, cults, musical troupes, and back-to-the-land groups. Kersen examines how the Ozarks became a haven for creative, innovative, even nutty people to express themselves-a place where community could be reimagined in a variety of ways. It is in these communities that communitas, or a deep social connection, emerges. Each of the nine chapters focuses on a facet of the Ozarks, and Kersen often compares two or more cases to generate new insights and questions. Chapters examine real and imagined identity and highlight how the area has contributed to popular culture through analysis of the Eureka Springs energy vortex, fictional characters like Li'l Abner, cultic activity, environmentally minded communes, and the development of rockabilly music, and near communal rock bands such as Black Oak Arkansas.

During World War II, Allied casualty rates in the air were high. Of the roughly 125,000 who served as aircrew with Bomber Command, 59,423 were killed or missing and presumed killed-a fatality rate of 45.5%. With odds like that, it would be no surprise if there were as few atheists in cockpits as there were in foxholes; and indeed, many airmen faced their dangerous missions with beliefs and rituals ranging from the traditional to the outlandish. Military historian S. P. MacKenzie considers this phenomenon in Flying against Fate, a pioneering study of the important role that superstition played in combat flier morale among the Allies in World War II. Mining a wealth of documents as well as a trove of published and unpublished memoirs and diaries, MacKenzie examines the myriad forms combat fliers' suspicions assumed, from jinxes to premonitions. Most commonly, airmen carried amulets or talismans-lucky boots or a stuffed toy; a coin whose year numbers added up to thirteen; counterintuitively, a boomerang. Some performed rituals or avoided other acts, e.g., having a photo taken before a flight. Whatever seemed to work was worth sticking with, and a heightened risk often meant an upsurge in superstitious thought and behavior. MacKenzie delves into behavior analysis studies to help explain the psychology behind much of the behavior he documents-not slighting the large cohort of crew members and commanders who demurred. He also looks into the ways in which superstitious behavior was tolerated or even encouraged by those in command who saw it as a means of buttressing morale. The first in-depth exploration of just how varied and deeply felt superstitious beliefs were to tens of thousands of combat fliers, Flying against Fate expands our understanding of a major aspect of the psychology of war in the air and of World War II.

Millions of southerners left the South in the twentieth century in a mass migration that has, in many ways, rewoven the fabric of American society on cultural, political, and economic levels. Because the movements of southerners-and people in general-are controlled not only by physical boundaries marked on a map but also by narratives that define movement, narrative is central in building and sustaining borders and in breaking them down. In Leaving the South: Border Crossing Narratives and the Remaking of Southern Identity, author Mary Weaks-Baxter analyzes narratives by and about those who left the South and how those narratives have remade what it means to be southern. Drawing from a broad range of narratives, including literature, newspaper articles, art, and music, Weaks-Baxter outlines how these displacement narratives challenged concepts of southern nationhood and redefined southern identity. Close attention is paid to how depictions of the South, particularly in the media and popular culture, prompted southerners to leave the region and changed perceptions of southerners to outsiders as well as how southerners saw themselves. Through an examination of narrative, Weaks-Baxter reveals the profound effect gender, race, and class have on the nature of the migrant's journey, the adjustment of the migrant, and the ultimate decision of the migrant either to stay put or return home, and connects the history of border crossings to the issues being considered in today's national landscape.

Histories of civil rights movements in America generally place little or no emphasis on the activism of Asian Americans. Yet, as this fascinating new study reveals, there is a long and distinctive legacy of civil rights activism among foreign and American-born Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino students, who formed crucial alliances based on their shared religious affiliations and experiences of discrimination. Stephanie Hinnershitz tells the story of the Asian American campus organizations that flourished on the West Coast from the 1900s through the 1960s. Using their faith to point out the hypocrisy of fellow American Protestants who supported segregation and discriminatory practices, the student activists in these groups also performed vital outreach to communities outside the university, from Californian farms to Alaskan canneries. Highlighting the unique multiethnic composition of these groups, Race, Religion, and Civil Rights explores how the students' interethnic activism weathered a variety of challenges, from the outbreak of war between Japan and China to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Drawing from a variety of archival sources to bring forth the authentic, passionate voices of the students, Race, Religion, and Civil Rights is a testament to the powerful ways they served to shape the social, political, and cultural direction of civil rights movements throughout the West Coast.

During the 1920s and 1930s, anthropologists and folklorists became obsessed with uncovering connections between African Americans and their African roots. At the same time, popular print media and artistic productions tapped the new appeal of black folk life, highlighting African-styled voodoo networks, positioning beating drums and blood sacrifices as essential elements of black folk culture. Inspired by this curious mix of influences, researchers converged on one site in particular, Sapelo Island, Georgia, to seek support for their theories about ""African survivals."" The legacy of that body of research is the area's contemporary identification as a Gullah community and a set of broader notions about Gullah identity. This wide-ranging history upends a long tradition of scrutinizing the Low Country blacks of Sapelo Island by refocusing the observational lens on those who studied them. Cooper uses a wide variety of sources to unmask the connections between the rise of the social sciences, the voodoo craze during the interwar years, the black studies movement, and black land loss and land struggles in coastal black communities in the Low Country. What emerges is a fascinating examination of Gullah people's heritage, and how it was reimagined and transformed to serve vastly divergent ends over the decades.

Emory Kemp is the founder and director of the Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology at West Virginia University, where he also served as a chair and professor of civil engineering and a professor of history. This collection of essays encompasses over fifty years of his research in the field of the history of technology. Within these twelve essays, Kemp describes and analyzes nineteenth century improvements in building materials such as iron, steel, and cement; roads and bridges, especially the evolution of the suspension bridge; canals and navigable rivers, including the Ohio River and its tributaries; and water supply systems. As one of the few practicing American engineers who also researches and writes as an academic, Kemp adds an important historical context to his work by focusing not only on the construction of a structure but also on the analytical science that heralds a structure's design and development.

This book is aimed both at researchers and advanced students of Central Asia, the space of the former USSR, and the foreign policy of Russia and China. The authors adopt a sociological approach in understanding how power structures emerged in the wake of the Soviet collapse. The independencies in Central Asia did not happen as a consequence of a nationalist struggle, but because the USSR imploded. Thus, instead of the elites being replaced, the same Soviet elites who had competed for power in the previous system continued to do so in the new one, which they had to build, adapting themselves and the system to their needs. Additionally, unlike in the immense majority of the independent states that emerged from decolonization, the social movements and capacity to mobilize the people were very weak in the new Central Asian states. For this reason, the configuration of the new systems was the product of a competition for power between a very small number of elites who did not have to answer to the people and their demands. Thus, the new power regimes acquired a strong neopatrimonial component. Analyzing the structure of societies, economies and polities of post-socialist states, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Central Asia, to sociologists, and to scholars of China's rise.

Parisian Pauline Guyot (1805-1886), who wrote under the nom de plume Camille Lebrun, published many novels, translations, collections of tales, and articles in French magazines of her day. Yet she has largely been forgotten by contemporary literary critics and readers. Among her works is a hitherto-untranslated 1845 French novel, Amitie et devouement, ou Trois mois a la Louisiane, or Friendship and Devotion, or Three Months in Louisiana, a moralizing, educational travelogue meant for a young adult readership of the time. Lebrun's novel is one of the few perspectives we have by a mid-nineteenth-century French woman writer on the matters of slavery, abolition, race relations, and white supremacy in France's former Louisiana colony. E. Joe Johnson and Robin Anita White have recovered this work, providing a translation, an accessible introduction, extensive endnote annotations, and period illustrations. After a short preface meant to educate young readers about the geography, culture, and history of the southern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase, the novel tells the tale of two teenaged, orphaned Americans, Hortense Melvil and Valentine Arnold. The two young women, who characterize one another as "sisters," have spent the majority of their lives in a Parisian boarding school and return to Louisiana to begin their adult lives. Almost immediately upon arrival in New Orleans, their close friendship faces existential threats: grave illness in the form of yellow fever, the prospect of marriage separating the two, and powerful discrimination in the form of racial prejudice and segregation.

Charles Swett (1828-1910) was a prosperous Vicksburg merchant and small plantation owner who was reluctantly drawn into secession but then rallied behind the Confederate cause, serving with distinction in the Confederate Army. After the war some of Swett's peers from Mississippi and other southern states invited him to explore the possibility of settling in British Honduras or the Republic of Honduras.

"Confederates in the Tropics" uses Swett's 1868 travelogue to explore the motives of would-be Confederate migrants' fleeing defeat and Reconstruction in the United States South. The authors make a comparative analysis of Confederate communities in Latin America, and use Charles Swett's life to illustrate the travails and hopes of the period for both blacks and whites.

Swett's diary is presented here in its entirety in a clear, accessible format, edited for contemporary readers. Swett's style, except for his passionate prefatory remarks, is a remarkably unsentimental, even scientific look at Belize and Honduras, more akin to a field report than a romantic travel account. In a final section, the authors suggest why the expatriate communities of white Southerners nearly always failed, and follow up on Swett's life in Mississippi in a way that sheds light on why disgruntled Confederates decided to remain in or eventually to return to the U.S. South.