Pulitzer prizewinner Carl Degler has written the first general history of women in America for our generation. The book brings into historical perspective one climactic question: How is woman's right to equality of opportunity going to be reconciled with the demands of the family? The modern family, Degler writes, has been shaped by women's search for greater autonomy within the family. "At Odds" shows how that evolution took place, beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In his historical perspective on the changes in scientific thought over the last 100 years, Carl N. Degler explores the study of social evolution and the ongoing search for human nature. In Search of Human Nature provides a detailed perspective on the reasons behind the shifting emphasis in social thought from biology, to culture, and again to biology. Degler examines why these changes took place, the evidence and people fostering these changes and why students of human nature decided to accept this momentous change in thought. He suggests varying ideologies as the underlying force behind this shift in the study of social science. From Darwin's theory that human social behaviour has drastically evolved from animals, to the belief that human experience serves as the basic differentiating factor in humans, Degler provides a thorough and captivating examination of the roots of human behaviour.

Perhaps the most prominent historian of his time, C. Vann Woodward (1908-1999) was always at the center of public controversy, wielding power inside the history profession while exercising influence on the reading public. In this collection of essays, historians examine the writings of the American South's esteemed scholar. Examining Woodward's work from various angles, the "critics" in this volume reveal his contributions as history, as ideas, and as part of an activist scholar's quest to understand and influence the racial and social dynamics of his region and times.

Contributors: Edward L. Ayers, M. E. Bradford, Carl N. Degler, Gaines M. Foster, Paul M. Gaston, F. Sheldon Hackney, August Meier, James Tice Moore, Albert Murray, Michael O'Brien, Allan Peskin, David Morris Potter, Howard N. Rabinowitz, John Herbert Roper, Joel R. Williamson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown.

Nearly twenty years after its original publication, "Place Over Time" remains an influential work in an ongoing debate at the heart of southern historiography--what is the South and how is it different from other parts of the country?

Carl N. Degler takes issue with historians C. Vann Woodward, Eugene Genovese, and others who view the Old South as a fading memory overtaken by a bold New South, with the Civil War and its aftermath as the sharp dividing point between the two eras. He also challenges the conventional wisdom that the South is fundamentally different from the rest of the country. Instead, Degler makes an eloquent and thought-provoking argument for a narrowly limited but persistent southern cultural identity that shares common values with the rest of the country while retaining its own distinctiveness and continuity with the past.