This book covers topics from Cherokee chiefs to womanless weddings. The follow-up to the critically acclaimed collection ""Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South"" (Georgia, 2004), ""Southern Masculinity"" explores the contours of southern male identity from Reconstruction to the present. Twelve case studies document the changing definitions of southern masculine identity as understood in conjunction with identities based on race, gender, age, sexuality, and geography.After the Civil War, southern men crafted notions of manhood in opposition to northern ideals of masculinity and as counterpoint to southern womanhood. At the same time, manliness in the South - as understood by individuals and within communities - retained and transformed antebellum conceptions of honor and mastery. This collection examines masculinity with respect to Reconstruction, the New South, racism, southern womanhood, the Sunbelt, gay rights, and the rise of the Christian Right. Familiar figures such as Arthur Ashe are investigated from fresh angles, while other essays plumb new areas such as the womanless wedding and Cherokee masculinity.

This rich collection of original essays illuminates the causes and consequences of the South's defining experiences with death. Employing a wide range of perspectives, while concentrating on discrete episodes in the region's past, the authors explore topics from the seventeenth century to the present, from the death traps that emerged during colonization to the bloody backlash against emancipation and civil rights to recent canny efforts to commemorate - and capitalize on - the region's deadly past. Some authors capture their subjects in the most intimate of moments: killing and dying, grieving and remembering, and believing and despairing. Others uncover the intentional efforts of Southerners to publicly commemorate their losses through death rituals and memorialization campaigns. Together, these poignantly told Southern stories reveal profound truths about the past of a region marked by death and unable, perhaps unwilling, to escape the ghosts of its history.

This rich collection of original essays illuminates the causes and consequences of the South's defining experiences with death. Employing a wide range of perspectives, while concentrating on discrete episodes in the region's past, the authors explore topics from the seventeenth century to the present, from the death traps that emerged during colonization to the bloody backlash against emancipation and civil rights to recent canny efforts to commemorate - and capitalize on - the region's deadly past. Some authors capture their subjects in the most intimate of moments: killing and dying, grieving and remembering, and believing and despairing. Others uncover the intentional efforts of Southerners to publicly commemorate their losses through death rituals and memorialization campaigns. Together, these poignantly told Southern stories reveal profound truths about the past of a region marked by death and unable, perhaps unwilling, to escape the ghosts of its history.

Touted as an American Eden, Kentucky provides one of the most dramatic social histories of early America. In this collection, ten contributors trace the evolution of Kentucky from First West to Early Republic. The authors tell the stories of the state's remarkable settlers and inhabitants: Indians, African Americans, working-class men and women, wealthy planters and struggling farmers. Eager settlers built defensive forts across the countryside, while women and slaves used revivalism to create new opportunities for themselves in a white, patriarchal society. The world that this diverse group of people made was both a society uniquely Kentuckian and a microcosm of the unfolding American pageant. In the mid-1700s, the trans-Appalachian region gained a reputation for its openness, innocence, and rusticity- fertile ground for an agrarian republic founded on the virtue of the yeoman ideal. By the nineteenth century, writers of history would characterize the state as a breeding ground for an American culture of distinctly Anglo-Saxon origin. Modern historians, however, now emphasize exploring the entire human experience, rather than simply the political history, of the region. An unusual blend of social, economic, political, cultural, and religious history, this volume goes a long way toward answering the question posed by a Virginia clergyman in 1775: ""What a buzzel is this amongst people about Kentuck?""

A sweeping historiographical collection, Reinterpreting Southern Histories updates and expands upon the iconic volumes Writing Southern History and Interpreting Southern History, both published by Louisiana State University Press. With nineteen original essays co-written by some of the most prominent historians working in southern history today, this volume boldly explores the current state, methods, innovations, and prospects of the richly diverse and transforming field of southern history. Two scholars at different stages of their careers coauthor each essay, working collaboratively to provide broad knowledge of the most recent historiography and an expansive vision for historiographical contexts. This innovative approach provides an intellectual connection with the earlier volumes while reflecting cutting-edge scholarship in the field. Underlying each essay is the cultural turn of the 1980s and 1990s, which introduced the use of language and cultural symbols and the influence of gender studies, postcolonial studies, and memory studies. The essays also rely less on framing the South as a distinct region and more on contextualizing it within national and global conversations. Reinterpreting Southern Histories, like the two classic volumes that preceded it, serves as both a comprehensive analysis of the current historiography of the South and a reinterpretation of that history, reaching new conclusions for enduring questions and establishing the parameters of future debates.

Spanning the era from the American Revolution to the Civil War, these nine path breaking original essays explore the unexpected, competing, or contradictory ways in which southerners made sense of manhood. Employing a rich variety of methodologies, the contributors look at southern masculinity within African American, white, and Native American communities; on the frontier and in towns; and across boundaries of class and age. Until now, the emerging subdiscipline of southern masculinity studies has been informed mainly by conclusions drawn from research on how the planter class engaged issues of honor, mastery, and patriarchy. But what about men who didn't own slaves or were themselves enslaved? These essays illuminate the mechanisms through which such men negotiated with overarching conceptions of masculine power. Here the reader encounters Choctaw elites struggling to maintain manly status in the market economy, black and white artisans forging rival communities and competing against the gentry for social recognition, slave men on the southern frontier balancing community expectations against owner domination, and men in a variety of military settings acting out community expectations to secure manly status. As "Southern Manhood brings definition to an emerging subdiscipline of southern history, it also pushes the broader field into new directions. All of the essayists take up large themes in antebellum history, including southern womanhood, the advent of consumer culture and market relations, and the emergence of sectional conflict.

American culture has long celebrated the heroism framed by Kentucky s frontier wars. Spanning the period from the 1720s when Ohio River valley Indians returned to their homeland to the American defeat of the British and their Indian allies in the War of 1812, Kentucke s Frontiers examines the political, military, religious, and public memory narratives of early Kentucky. Craig Thompson Friend explains how frontier terror framed that heroism, undermining the egalitarian promise of Kentucke and transforming a trans-Appalachian region into an Old South state. From county courts and the state legislature to church tribunals and village stores, patriarchy triumphed over racial and gendered equality, creating political and economic opportunity for white men by denying it for all others. Even in remembering their frontier past, Kentuckians abandoned the egalitarianism of frontier life and elevated white males to privileged places in Kentucky history and memory."

"Will become a useful addition to our understanding of antebellum Southern families, especially in demonstrating their multiple forms, definitions, and functions."--Sally McMillen, Davidson College This collection of essays on family life in the nineteenth-century American South reevaluates the concept of family by looking at mourning practices, farming practices, tavern life, houses divided by politics, and interracial marriages. Individual essays examine cross-plantation marriages among slaves, white orphanages, childhood mortality, miscegenation and inheritance, domestic activities such as sewing, and same-sex relationships. Editors Craig Thompson Friend and Anya Jabour have collected work from a range of diverse and innovative historians. The volume uncovers more about Southern family life and values than we have previously known and raises new questions about how Southerners conceptualized family--from demographic structures, power relations, and gender roles to the relationship of family to society. In three sections, these ten essays explore the definition of family in the nineteenth-century South, examine the economics of family life, both rural and urban, and ultimately answer the question "what did family mean in the Old South?"

This book covers topics from Cherokee chiefs to womanless weddings. The follow-up to the critically acclaimed collection ""Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South"" (Georgia, 2004), ""Southern Masculinity"" explores the contours of southern male identity from Reconstruction to the present. Twelve case studies document the changing definitions of southern masculine identity as understood in conjunction with identities based on race, gender, age, sexuality, and geography.After the Civil War, southern men crafted notions of manhood in opposition to northern ideals of masculinity and as counterpoint to southern womanhood. At the same time, manliness in the South - as understood by individuals and within communities - retained and transformed antebellum conceptions of honor and mastery. This collection examines masculinity with respect to Reconstruction, the New South, racism, southern womanhood, the Sunbelt, gay rights, and the rise of the Christian Right. Familiar figures such as Arthur Ashe are investigated from fresh angles, while other essays plumb new areas such as the womanless wedding and Cherokee masculinity.

This new book consists of mini-biographies of 15 Americans who lived during the Antebellum period in American history. Part of The Human Tradition in America series, the anthology paints vivid portraits of the lives of lesser-known Americans. Raising new questions from fresh perspectives, this volume contributes to a broader understanding of the dynamic forces that shaped the political, economic, social, and institutional changes that characterized the antebellum period. Moving beyond the older, outdated historical narratives of political institutions and the great men who shaped them, these biographies offer revealing insights on gender roles and relations, working-class experiences, race, and local economic change and its effect on society and politics. The voices of these ordinary individuals-African Americans, women, ethnic groups, and workers-have until recently often been silent in history texts. At the same time, these biographies also reveal the major themes that were part of the history of the early republic and antebellum era, including the politics of the Jacksonian era, the democratization of politics and society, party formation, market revolution, territorial expansion, the removal of Indians from their territory, religious freedom, and slavery. Accessible and fascinating, these biographies present a vivid picture of the richly varied character of American life in the first half of the nineteenth century. This book is ideal for courses on the Early National period, U.S. history survey, and American social and cultural history.