The Mississippi Quarterly articles from December 1996

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from December 1996

Tobacco and the rise of writing in Colonial Maryland.(Essay)
December 22, 1996... Tobacco, as our Staple, is our all, and indeed leaves no room for anything else. It requires the attendance of all our hands, and exacts their utmost labour, the whole year round. --Governor Benedict Leonard Calvert (1729) (1) I ...

William Gilmore Simms, Woodlands, and the Freedmen's Bureau.(Four Letters (Appendix A))(Book review)
December 22, 1996... FOUR LETTERS [APPENDIX A] BY JAMES C. BEECHER, BROTHER OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE and Henry Ward Beecher, commander of the 35th United States Colored Troops and sub-assistant commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau first in Barnwell District...

The Awakening: struggles toward l'ecriture feminine *.(The Laugh of the Medusa)(Critical essay)
December 22, 1996... FRENCH FEMINIST THEORIST HELENE CIXOUS first introduced the concept of ecriture feminine--translated into English both as "feminine writing" and "women's writing"--in her influential essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" ("Le tire de la meduse"),...

Laughing over lost causes: Erskine Caldwell's quarrel with Southern humor.(Critical essay)
December 22, 1996... SINCE ITS PUBLICATION IN 1932, ERSKINE CALDWELL'S Tobacco Road has been both lionized and disparaged, described by some critics as the seminal work of an author in the "front rank of American writers" (1) and by others ridiculed as "drug-store...

The origin of Will Barrett's "exceptional states".(Critical essay)
December 22, 1996... WILL BARRETT, THE NARRATOR OF WALKER PERCY'S The Last Gentleman, (1) has obviously given considerable thought to the form of "Chapter one" (pp. 3-41), his account of an earlier crisis in his life. His planning is not apparent, however, in the...

Tragedy in the Technetronic Age: Robert Penn Warren's "New Dawn".(Critical essay)
December 22, 1996... The most obvious question concerning literature is: What subject matter is appropriate for our time?.... The question is not that of the topicality of a subject. It is that of the writer's own grounding in his time, the relation of his...

The Female Voice in To Kill a Mockingbird: narrative strategies in film and novel.(Critical essay)
December 22, 1996... Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn't supposed to be doing anything that required pants. Aunt...

Cicero's De Senectute and Warren's Night Rider.(NOTE, QUERIES, AND DOCUMENTS)(Robert Penn Warren)(Critical essay)
December 22, 1996... AS THE NIGHT RIDERS BEGIN TO FORM THEIR BANDS TO ENFORCE the tenets of the Association of Growers of Dark Fired Tobacco, I Professor Ball cites the farmer/Roman hero Cincinnatus as the ideal leader. Cincinnatus was a Roman farmer of the fifth...

Letter from O. B. Mayer to Paul Hamilton Hayne: some notes on literary relationships.(Orlando Benedict Mayer )
December 22, 1996... BETWEEN JANUARY AND MAY OF 1886, ORLANDO Benedict Mayer (1818-1891), an eminent Newberry, South Carolina, physician and a writer whose reputation was mainly local, never extending outside his native state, wrote five letters to Paul Hamilton...

A Letter to Cleanth Brooks from Robert Drake.
December 22, 1996... July 16, 1991 Dear Cleanth: It was very good to see you again and to enjoy once more your hospitality at our annual New Haven lunch. And I was very happy to see Carver [Carver Blanchard, Mrs. Brooks's nephew] also--our first meeting...

Two views of Winchell's Cleanth Brooks.(Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern, Criticism)(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern, Criticism, by Mark Royden Winchell. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1996, xiii, 510 pp. $34.95. Cleanth Brooks at Millennium's End The reader is indeed an all-important...

Good and faithful servant.(Cleanth Brooks )(Biography)
December 22, 1996... THE FIRST TIME I EVER SAW HIM, IN THE SUMMER OF 1953,just before I went off to graduate school at Yale, he said to me, "Literature is no substitute for anything else: it's no substitute for either religion or politics or life." And then,...

Religion in the South: a review of seven recent books.(Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History)(Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern, Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis)(Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690-1990)(Religion and Race: Southern Hesbyterians, 1946-1983)(Religion in Antebellum Kentucky)(Taking Up Serpents: Snake Handlers of Eastern Kentucky)(The Sanctified South: John Larkin Brasher and the Holiness Movement)(Book review)
December 22, 1996... The Sanctified South: John Larkin Brasher and the Holiness Movement, by J. Lawrence Brasher. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. 260 pp. $29.95; Appalachian Mountain Religion,, A History, by Deborah Vansau McCauley. Urbana: University...

Old lights, new lights.(The Future of Southern Letters)(Book review)
December 22, 1996... The Future of Southern Letters, edited by Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). FOR A REGION, AND ITS CADRE OF WRITERS, OBSESSED AS IF by definition with its Past--toting the Past as a burden, not...

The Three Erskine Caldwells.(Erskine Caldwell: A Biography)(Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road)(People's Writer: Erskine Caldwell and the South)(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Erskine Caldwell: A Biography, by Harvey L. Klevar. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. 483 pp. $37.95; Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road, by Dan B. Miller. New York: Knopf, 1995. 459 pp. $30.00; The People's Writer:...

Letters to a friend--third edition.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham (1940-1965), edited by Donald Windham. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. xvi, 336 pp. $19.95 paper. IN HIS MEMOIRS, TENNESSEE WILLIAMS INCLUDED AN OLD PICTURE of a handsome young...

Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892, by Frances Smith Foster. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 206 pp. $12.95 paper. THIS WORK'S SUBTITLE INDICATES ITS SUBSTANTIAL CONTRIBUTION to...

The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Southern Fiction.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Southern, Fiction, by Susan Ketchin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. xix, 408 pp. $16.95 paper. IN THE MIDDLE OF A RAMBLING, MOSTLY INCOHERENT, BUT BRILLIANT interview...

The Craft of Peter Taylor.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... The Craft of Peter Taylor, edited by C. Ralph Stephens and Lynda B. Salamon. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 1995. 168 pp. $29.95. SADDENED AS WE ALL ARE AT THE RECENT DEATH OF Peter Taylor, our sorrow is deepened by...

Ellen Glasgow: A Women's Tradition.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Ellen Glasgow: A Women's Tradition by Pamela Matthews. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. 272 pp. $29.50. PAMELA MATTHEWS'S ELLEN GLASGOW: A WOMAN'S TRADITION performs a valuable service in bringing the role that female...

The Mississippi Delta and the World: The Memoirs of David L. Cohn.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... The Mississippi Delta and the World: The Memoirs of David L. Cohn, edited by James C. Cobb. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. $24.95. NOTED SOUTHERN HISTORIAN JAMES C. COBB discovered the unpublished...

New Essays on Wise Blood.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... New Essays on Wise Blood, edited by Michael Kreyling. The American Novel Series 31. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 124 pp. $27.95. THIS LATEST VOLUME IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL SERIES OFFERS critical views which not only challenge...

The Life and Letters of Jesse Hill Ford, Southern Writer.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... The Life and Letters of Jesse Hill Ford, Southern Writer, by Anne Cheney. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. 479 pp. $119.95. THIS EVALUATION OF THE LIFE AND WORK OF JESSE HILL FORD, appearing as it does just months before...

Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write, edited with an introduction by Catherine Hobbs. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995. xv, 343 pp. $47.50. With the ongoing publication of so many diaries, letters, essays,...

Slavery in North Carolina.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775, by Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. xv, 402 pp. $45.00. LESS THAN THIRTY YEARS AGO, HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP ABOUT chattel...

Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph, by Ruthe Winegarten. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. 427 pp., $24.95 paper. Index. Preface. Selected Bibliography. LIKE SO MANY HISTORIES OF WOMEN AND ESPECIALLY WOMEN OF COLOR,...

The African American Heritage of Florida.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... The African American Heritage of Florida, edited by David R. Colburn and Jane L. Landers. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995. x, 392 pp. Illustrations. $49.95, cloth; $19.95, paper. RESEARCH ON THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY OF...

Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana, by Judith Kelleher Schafel, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1994, xix, 389 pp. $35.00 IN THIS MASTERFUL STUDY OF SLAVERY AND THE CIVIL LAW OF LOUISIANA, Judith Kelleher...

The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement, by Otto Scott. Murphys, California: Uncommon Books, 1993. IN A FAIRLY WELL-WRITTEN, FAST-PACED BOOK, OTTO SCOTT immediately establishes himself as the debunker of the abolitionist...

Masters and Lords: Mid-Nineteenth-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Masters & Lords: Mid-Nineteenth-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers, by Shearer Davis Bowman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, ix, 357 pp. $45. Masters & Lords is a testimony to Shearer Davis Bowman's experience in reading...

Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, by John Egerton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Photographs, bibliography. 676 pp. $35.00 cloth. SOMETIME BETWEEN TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1932, AND...

The Martinsville Seven: Race, Rape, and Capital Punishment.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... The Martinsville Seven: Race, Rape, and Capital Punishment, by Eric W. Rise. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995. x, 205 pp. $27.95. IN JANUARY 1949 SEVEN BLACK MEN RAPED A WHITE WOMAN IN A predominantly black...

The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist, by Andrew Burstein. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1995. xv, 334 pp. $29.95. HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE TO HAVE coffee or a glass of wine...

James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter, by William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996. xv, 237 pp. $35. THE PRINCIPAL PROBLEM WITH BIOGRAPHY COMES FROM the biographer's...

The Papers of Henry Laurens, July 7, 1778-December 9, 1778, vol. 14.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... The Papers of Henry Laurens. Volume Fourteen: July 7, 1778-December 9, 1778, edited by David R. Chesnutt, C. James Taylor, and Peggy J. Clark. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994. xxxii, 701 pp. $49.95. HENRY LAURENS'S NAME...

Shrouds of Glory: From Atlanta to Nashville: The Last Great Campaign of the Civil War.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Shrouds of Glory: From Atlanta to Nashville: The Last Great Campaign of the Civil War, by Winston Groom. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995. xii, 308 pp. $23.00, cloth. IN A WAY, CONFEDERATE GENERAL JOHN BELL HOOD'S PROGRESS through...

The "Confederados": Old South Immigrants in Brazil.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... The "Confederados": Old South Immigrants in Brazil, edited by Cyrus B. Dawsey and James M. Dawsey. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press. 1995. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Annotated Bibliography. Index. xiii, 273 pp. $34.95. ...

Southern State Party Organizations and Activists.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Southern State Party Organizations and Activists, edited by Charles D. Hadley and Lewis Bowman. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1995. xvii, 248 pp. $55.00. THIS VOLUME OF ESSAYS BY SPECIALISTS COVERING THE STATES OF the Old Confederacy...

Prisons That Could Not Hold.(Book review)
December 22, 1996... Prisons That Could Not Hold, by Barbara Deming; edited by Sky Vanderlinde. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995. xix, 230 pp. Illustration. I HAD NEVER HEARD OF BARBARA DEMING. SHE DOES NOT APPEAR in standard histories of...

Tobacco and the rise of writing in colonial Maryland.
December 22, 1996... Maryland was established in 1634, by Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, the first "Lord Proprietor," and a Roman Catholic. At its inception and for several decades Maryland's acceptance of Catholicism distinguished it from the other...

William Gilmore Simms, woodlands, and the Freedmen's Bureau.
December 22, 1996... Four letters [Appendix A] by James C. Beecher, Brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, commander of the 35th United States Colored Troops and sub-assistant commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau first in Barnwell District...

'The Awakening': struggles toward l'ecriture feminine.
December 22, 1996... French feminist theorist Helene Cixous first introduced the concept of ecriture feminine -- translated into English both as "feminine writing" and "women's writing" -- in her influential essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" ("Le rire de la meduse"),...

Laughing over lost causes: Erskine Caldwell's quarrel with Southern humor.
December 22, 1996... Since its publication in 1932, Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road has been both lionized and disparaged, described by some critics as the seminal work of an author in the "front rank of American writers"(1) and by others ridiculed as "drug-store...

The origin of Will Barrett's "exceptional states."
December 22, 1996... Will Barrett, the narrator of Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman,(1) has obviously given considerable thought to the form of "Chapter one" (pp. 3-41), his account of an earlier crisis in his life. His planning is not apparent, however, in the...

Tragedy in the technetronic age: Robert Penn Warren's "New Dawn."
December 22, 1996... The most obvious question concerning literature is: What subject matter is appropriate for our time?.... The question is not that of the topicality of a subject. It is that of the writer's own grounding in his time, the ...

The female voice in 'To Kill a Mockingbird': narrative strategies in film and novel.
December 22, 1996... Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn't supposed to be doing anything that required ...

Cicero's 'De Senectute' and Warren's 'Night Rider.' (Robert Penn Warren)
December 22, 1996... As the night riders begin to from their bands to enforce the tenets of the Association of Growers of Dark Fired Tobacco,(1) Professor Ball cites the farmer/Roman hero Cincinnatus as the ideal leader. Cincinnatus was a Roman farmer of the fifth...

Letter from O.B. Mayer to Paul Hamilton Hayne: some notes on literary relationships.
December 22, 1996... Between January and May of 1886, Orlando Benedict Mayer (1818-1891), an eminent Newberry, South Carolina, physician and a writer whose reputation was mainly local, never extending outside his native state, wrote five letters to Paul Hamilton...

A letter to Cleanth Brooks from Robert Drake.(Transcript)
December 22, 1996... July 16, 1991 Dear Cleanth: It was very good to see you again and to enjoy once more your hospitality at our annual New Haven lunch. And I was very happy to see Carver [Carver Blanchard, Mrs. Brooks's nephew] also -- our first meeting in...

Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism.
December 22, 1996... The reader is indeed an all-important part of the literary transaction, but it is willful of him to try to take the place of the author. -- Cleanth Brooks, "The Primacy of the Linguistic Medium" I remember a conversation with...

The Sanctified South: John Larkin Brasher and the Holiness Movement.
December 22, 1996... Three of these volumes: The Sanctified South, Appalachian Mountain Religion, and Taking up Serpents are closely related in that each devotes attention to the Holiness movement in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia,...

Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History.
December 22, 1996... Three of these volumes: The Sanctified South, Appalachian Mountain Religion, and Taking up Serpents are closely related in that each devotes attention to the Holiness movement in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia,...

Taking Up Serpents: Snake Handlers of Eastern Kentucky.
December 22, 1996... Taking/Up Serpents: Snake Handlers of Eastern Kentucky, by David L. Kimbrough. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 232 pp. $34.95; The volume by David Kimbrough, Taking Up Serpents, is an intimate account of one faction...

Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690-1990.
December 22, 1996... Three of these volumes: The Sanctified South, Appalachian Mountain Religion, and Taking up Serpents are closely related in that each devotes attention to the Holiness movement in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia,...

Religion and Race: Southern Presbyterians, 1946-1983.
December 22, 1996... Three of these volumes: The Sanctified South, Appalachian Mountain Religion, and Taking up Serpents are closely related in that each devotes attention to the Holiness movement in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia,...

Religion in Antebellum Kentucky.
December 22, 1996... Three of these volumes: The Sanctified South, Appalachian Mountain Religion, and Taking up Serpents are closely related in that each devotes attention to the Holiness movement in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia,...

Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis.
December 22, 1996... Three of these volumes: The Sanctified South, Appalachian Mountain Religion, and Taking up Serpents are closely related in that each devotes attention to the Holiness movement in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia,...

The Future of Southern Letters.
December 22, 1996... For a region, and its cadre of writers, obsessed as if by definition with its Past -- toting the Past as a burden, not hating the Past, sensing the Past in the Present -- Southerners seem addicted to the future of the South. This fascination has...

Erskine Caldwell: A Biography.
December 22, 1996... The effort to revive Erskine Caldwell in the consciousness of readers and scholars has been lurching along for over two decades now. It started slowly, in 1974, when William A. Sutton, after abandoning a proposed biography of the writer,...

Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road.
December 22, 1996... The effort to revive Erskine Caldwell in the consciousness of readers and scholars has been lurching along for over two decades now. It started slowly, in 1974, when William A. Sutton, after abandoning a proposed biography of the writer,...

The People's Writer: Erskine Caldwell and the South.
December 22, 1996... The effort to revive Erskine Caldwell in the consciousness of readers and scholars has been lurching along for over two decades now. It started slowly, in 1974, when William A. Sutton, after abandoning a proposed biography of the writer,...

Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham: 1940-1965.
December 22, 1996... In his Memoirs, Tennessee Williams included an old picture of a handsome young Donald Windham, with a caption that read: "Donald Windham, my collaborator on You Touched Me! in 1946, and an early friend in New York, whose present disaffection I...

Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892.
December 22, 1996... This work's subtitle indicates its substantial contribution to African-American studies and women's studies. Written by Herself offers the first synthetic analysis of the trove of materials made widely available in the Schomburg Library of...

The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Southern Fiction.
December 22, 1996... In the middle of a rambling, mostly incoherent, but brilliant interview included in Susan Ketchin's The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Southern, Fiction, Harry Crews claims that God is dead "because this is a secular world that we...

The Craft of Peter Taylor.
December 22, 1996... Saddened as we all are at the recent death of Peter Taylor, our sorrow is deepened by the thought that the writer was at the time in the midst of a second creative flowering. After several volumes in the 1950s, his career seemed to hesitate...

Ellen Glasgow: A Women's Tradition.
December 22, 1996... Pamela Matthew's Ellen Glasgow: A Woman's Tradition performs a valuable service in bringing the role that female friendship played in Glasgow's life and work to the foreground of Glasgow criticism. Matthews artfully connects Glasgow's previously...

The Mississippi Delta and the World: the Memoirs of David L. Cohn.
December 22, 1996... Noted Southern Historian James C. Cobb discovered the unpublished manuscript of David L. Cohn's memoirs at the University of Mississippi. Believing that this memoir of a Southern businessman, writer, friend and supporter of prominent Democratic...

New Essays on 'Wise Blood.'
December 22, 1996... This latest volume in the American Novel series offers critical views which not only challenge the long-accepted New Critical analyses, but also provide interpretive insights that press the limits of postmodernism as well. Michael Kreyling's...

The Life and Letters of Jesse Hill Ford: Southern Writer.
December 22, 1996... This evaluation of the life and work of Jesse Hill Ford, appearing as it does just months before Ford took his own life on June 1, 1996, offers readers he first glimpse into his somewhat controversial world. That it does so largely through his...

Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write.
December 22, 1996... With the ongoing publication of so many diaries, letters, essays, and autobiograpies by hitherto unknown women, including such Southerners, as Ada W. Bacot and Belle Edmondson, one would expect scholars eventually to ask the fundamental...

Slavery in North Carolina: 1748-1775.
December 22, 1996... Less than thirty years ago, historical scholarship about chattel slavery in the Southern United States remained focused almost exclusively on the final years of the institution, from about 1830 through its end in the 1860s. This concentration in...

Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph.
December 22, 1996... Like so many histories of women and especially women of color, Black Texas Women. grew out of Ruthe Winegarten's fear -- the fear that unless an effort was made to collect the historical accounts hidden away in antique trunks or in the oral...

The African American Heritage of Florida.
December 22, 1996... Research on the African-American history of Florida has lagged behind similar research on the rest of the American South, writes David Colburn in his introduction. While he posits that a generation of scholars' hard work will be required to...

Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana.
December 22, 1996... In this masterful study of slavery and the civil law of Louisiana, Judith Kelleher Schafer not only reveals the central tendencies in one state's slave law but illuminates developments in Louisiana society from its earliest days as a territory to...

The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement.
December 22, 1996... In a fairly well-written, fast-paced book, Otto Scott immediately establishes himself as the debunker of the abolitionist hero myth. Now in its third printing, The Secret Six asserts that John Brown and six privileged and mostly wealthy men --...

Masters and Lords: Mid-Nineteenth-Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers.
December 22, 1996... Masters & Lords is a testimony to Shearer Davis Bowman's experience in reading and research. Merely to list the historians he has quoted would require several single-spaced pages. One-hundred-twenty-four pages, a third of the book, are...

Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South.
December 22, 1996... Sometime between Tuesday, November 8, 1932, and Monday, May 17, 1954, the author of this splendid book believes, "the South left Yesterday and entered Tomorrow." It did so reluctantly, its shameless political demagogues ranting "nigger" and...

The Martinsville Seven: Race, Rape, and Capital Punishment.
December 22, 1996... In January 1949 seven black men raped a white woman in a predominantly black section of Martinsville, Virginia. By May 1949 six separate juries had sentenced them to death and in February 1951 all seven were electrocuted. Eric Rise tells the...

The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist.
December 22, 1996... Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have coffee or a glass of wine with one of our Founding Fathers? For many years now I have joked about such an "event" with students in my American biography course, telling them how they would need...

James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter.
December 22, 1996... The principal problem with biography comes from the biographer's natural inclination to exaggerate the importance of his subject. Lengthy work in the papers of great men typically persuades a researcher that his or her man or woman must have been...

The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 14: July 7, 1778-December 9, 1778.
December 22, 1996... Henry Laurens's name is not one that readily comes to mind when one thinks of the nation's founders and the heroes and heroines of the American Revolution. The most notable events in the life of this South Carolina businessman and politician were...

Shrouds of Glory: From Atlanta to Nashville, The Last Great Campaign of the Civil War.
December 22, 1996... In a way, Confederate general John Bell Hood's progress through the war paralleled that of the Confederacy. At the beginning, Hood was tall, handsome, and brimming with confidence and sure that the Southerners would win their independence within...

The "Confederados": Old South Immigrants in Brazil.
December 22, 1996... Various tidbits have long been commonly known about the "Confederados," and from time to time the popular press has given them some mention (although all too often the accounts were distorted or in error). Scholars with any interest, sometimes...

Southern State Party Organizations and Activists.
December 22, 1996... This volume of essays by specialists covering the states of the Old Confederacy results from the Southern Grassroots Activists project, a study of party organization and activism based on a uniform questionnaire of chairs and members of...