This book reflects the best of contemporary scholarship on the history of the American South. Each contributor is an authority--one a Pulitzer Prize winner. The essays examine what life was like for the slaves; for the victims of terror and lynchings; for workers who dared strike and demand fairness; and for dissenters who challenged the accepted truths. The essays are grouped around three major research areas: history and the social sciences, history and biography, and the new labor history.

This is a unique collection of essays by some of the world's leading historians of the South, together with work by younger scholars. All contributors, however, are working at the cutting edge of their particular methodological approaches. The book, for example, includes both an essay by Pulitzer Prize winner Rhys Isaac, and one by Rutgers University graduate student Beth Hale. Yet, both have a common concern to explore the reaches of the Southern past through the dimension of ethnography.

The essays in the book are grouped according to theme. The largest section, the social sciences and Southern history, includes essays drawing heavily on the insights of anthropology of ethnography and of statistical analysis. Each essay in the second section is designed to illustrate how life history can be used to illuminate much larger histoical themes and processes. The essays in the last section on labor in the new South all illustrate, among other things, the importance of drawing on the insights of historians of women in order to redress the masculinist presuppositons of labor historians. All the essays in the book, in fact, reflect current concerns with gender and race in the re-interpretation of the Southern past.

One might argue as to whether `the South is another land' or only a separate verse in the American song. There should be little argument over the usefulness of this collection of ten essays. They find their common ground in a loose schema--the 20th-century South with subsections on politics, `the world of work,' religious affairs, and the `search for the South.' All the work is most competently done. It may appear to some that the essays on the southern politicians are generic stories now thrice told; however, they show the individual differences and the uniqueness of personality that always make the biographical approach worthwhile. For sheer relevance to contemporary concerns it would be hard to surpass Willard B. Gatewood's `After Scopes: Evolution in the South.' The expected questions of the southern nature, character, identity, and mind make their due appearances. Full notes with each essay, and a useful bibliographical essay on the major works. There is something here for professor, student, and general reader; university, college, and public libraries should have this volume. Choice The South is another land--different from the rest of the nation in its identity and its self-perception. This was the conclusion reached by ten outstanding historians after completing the research collected in this essay collection. Every recognized topic of importance in Southern and American history--politics, race, religion, women's role, social, economic, and intellectual history--is incorporated in this collection of essays.

"A splendid sampler of the very latest and best of scholarship in the field of southern women's history."--Thomas Appleton, Eastern Kentucky University

Spanning the sweep of southern women's history from colonial times to the late 20th century, this collection represents the best scholarship on the lives and experiences of black and white southern women. Through topics as diverse as the rise of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the organization of labor in the apparel industry, these essays explore how southern women constantly moved beyond the traditional confines of race, class, and gender to resist the restrictions of a patriarchal society and assert themselves through organizations and institutions in their communities and personal lives.

Contents

Introduction, by Anne Firor Scott
Part I. The Private World
1. "The Empire of My Heart" The Marriage of William Byrd II and Lucy Parke Byrd, by Paula A. Treckel
2. The New Andromeda: Sarah Morgan and the Post-Civil War Domestic Ideal, by Giselle Roberts
3. "The Worst Results in Mississippi May Prove the Best for Us" Blanche Butler Ames and Reconstruction, by Warren Ellem
4. "College Girls" The Female Academy and Female Identity in the Old South, by Anya Jabour
Part II. The Civil War Era
5. "'Tis True That Our Southern Ladies Have Done and Are Still Acting a Conspicuous Part in This War" Women on the Confederate Home Front in Edgefield County, South Carolina, by Orville Vernon Burton
6. Ministries in Black and White: The Catholic Nuns of St. Augustine, 1859-1869, by Barbara E. Mattick
7. The Rise of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1894-1914, by Karen L. Cox
Part III. The Segregation Era
8. Keepers of the Hearth: Women, the Klan, and Traditional Family Values, by Glenn Feldman
9. Warm Personal Friend, or Worse Than Hitler? How Southern Women Viewed Eleanor Roosevelt, 1933-1945, by Pamela Tyler
Part IV. The Era of Social Change
10. Esther Cooper Jackson: A Life in the Whirlwind, by Sarah Hart Brown
11. From Sharecropper to Schoolteacher: Thelma McGee's Mississippi Girlhood, by Kathi Kern
12. "Bridges Burned to a Privileged Past" Anne Braden and the Southern Freedom Movement, by Catherine Fosl
13. Vivion Brewer of Arkansas: A Ladylike Assault on the "Southern Way of Life," by Elizabeth Jacoway
14. After the Wives Went to Work: Organizing Women in the Southern Apparel Industry, by Michelle Haberland

Bruce Clayton is Harry A. Logan Professor of History at Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania. He is the author of a biography of W. J. Cash and has co-authored a previous book with John Salmond, Debating Southern History: Ideas and Actions in the Twentieth Century South.

John A. Salmond is professor of American history at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike; "My Mind Set on Freedom" A History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968; and The General Textile Strike of 1934: From Maine to Alabama (2002).