The Mississippi Quarterly articles from September 1994

The Mississippi Quarterly archives from September 1994

Some unrecorded English reviews of W.G. Simms. (Southern author William Gilmore Simms)
September 22, 1994... The international reputation of Southern author William Gilmore Sireins (1806-1870) has never been studied adequately. A first step in this direction is locating the reviews and notices of his books in European journals. The following list is a...

The origin of the Regulation in North Carolina.
September 22, 1994... representatives and his government generally. . . . " Saunders, Colonial Records, VII, xiv-xxxiv; VIII, xiv-xlii, quotation in VIII, xx. 31 Robert H. Woody, "John Spencer Bassett," Powell, Dictionary, I, 107-108. Bassett, "Regulators," pp. 142,...

An interview with Elizabeth Spencer. (fiction author) (Interview)
September 22, 1994... On the rainy afternoon of February 19, 1993, Elizabeth Spencer kindly allowed me to come to her home to ask some questions about her work. Especially valuable were her comments on The Night Travellers, which has been written about and discussed...

Revisioning The Fall: Walker Percy and Lancelot. (novelist Walker Percy)
September 22, 1994... . . . this incalculable fall before the image of what we are . . . . The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus In conversations and interviews Walker Percy frequently acknowledged the influence of Albert Camus on his thought and art. Specifically, when...

Charles Sealsfield (1793-1864): German and American novelist of the nineteenth century.
September 22, 1994... In 1844 the American reading public became aware of the novelist Charles Sealsfield when the Boston Daily Advertiser joined in the then-current discussion "of our young national literature." On March 20 the journal printed an appraisal of...

Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920-1945.
September 22, 1994... The years between the World Wars seemed to many American intellectuals and artists a period of cultural dissolution and crisis. Any number of prominent individuals, of all political stripes, decried the dismantling of traditional American culture...

O. Henry: A Study of the Short Fiction.
September 22, 1994... The old Federal Penitentiary is easily the ugliest building in Columbus, Ohio. It was surely never attractive, but now that it is no longer used and is starting to decay, it is taking on the air of a ruined castle that might become picturesque in...

How Am I To Be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith.
September 22, 1994... "I am a writer, a woman, a southerner who due to birth experienced in early childhood the ordeals, the psychic and spiritual ordeals, and the intellectual ordeals of a life lived in a culture split and broken, full of abysses and not many towers,...

Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture.
September 22, 1994... Long denigrated for their "scribbling" style and simplistic plots, nineteenth-century domestic novelists merit reconsideration by twentieth-century scholars. These authors were extremely popular with the American reading public, and their works...

Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book.
September 22, 1994... Scholarly attention to works of contemporary literature has become a major area of inquiry over the past fifty years, in part the result of the New Criticism. Where once the newspapers and general periodicals contained the bulk of commentary,...

A History of Blacks in Kentucky, vol. 2, In Pursuit of Equality.
September 22, 1994... In 1978 the Kentucky General Assembly recognized the impact of the civil rights movement as well as the expanding study of African-American history by mandating and partially funding extensive research in the black experience in that state. The...

Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age.
September 22, 1994... In this important book, Sylvia Frey discusses the role of slavery in the Revolutionary War and the period of American history to about 1825. She notes that historians of this era long have recognized the importance of slavery. At the same time,...

The American Dream of Captain John Smith.
September 22, 1994... Was Captain John Smith a liar? Did Pocahontas save his life? J. A. Leo Lemay answers these questions: Smith told the truth, and the young Indian princess interceded to spare the captain's neck. Although Smith should not be dismissed simply as a...

Patriots, Pistols and Petticoats: "Poor Sinful Charles Town" During the American Revolution, 2d ed.
September 22, 1994... Jay Fraser, professor of history at Georgia Southern College, first published Patriots, Pistols and Petticoats in 1975 for the Charleston County Bicentennial Committee in response to the need for a short, popular account of the American...

Benevolence Among Slaveholders: Assisting the Poor in Charleston, 1670-1860.
September 22, 1994... In recent years historians have paid increasing attention to all aspects of life in the South Carolina lowcountry. These two books, one a reprint edition of a rice planter's memoir, the other a scholarly account of poor relief in Charleston, are...

Free Men in an Age of Servitude: Three Generations of a Black Family.
September 22, 1994... This slender volume stands as ample evidence that Lee H. Warner is an imaginative, resourceful, and tenacious researcher. Confronted by the absence of personal papers and a paucity of other traditional sources, he has performed the role of...

From Slave to Statesman: The Legacy of Joshua Houston, Servant to Sam Houston.
September 22, 1994... The history of slavery in the United States is so often portrayed as a nameless, faceless compound of moral wrong and racial ignorance. Unmasking the hidden faces of those who were enslaved is a daunting task because so few records exist that can...

Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery and Emancipation.
September 22, 1994... This book is derived from the black abolitionist Papers Project, which has already provided the basis for the five-volume series The Black Abolitionist Papers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985-92). With the exception of six...

Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography.
September 22, 1994... A few days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, the Garrisonian abolitionist Lydia Maria Child observed that she did not "feel blood-thirsty toward any of the rebels." Despite her pacifism she had supported the Union war effort. But four years of...

The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900.
September 22, 1994... In recent years scholars have devoted considerable energy and imagination to the analysis of the "Lost Cause" ideology by means of which the South came to terms with defeat after the Civil War. In this intriguing volume Professor Nina Silber...

The First New South: 1865-1920.
September 22, 1994... In this brief book intended for an undergraduate audience, Howard N. Rabinowitz addresses the evolution of what he and other scholars have characterized as the "first" New South that emerged during the generation following the Civil War. As...

Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930.
September 22, 1994... Images of lynchings - black victims hanged and burned, with white mobs collecting pieces of their bodies for souvenirs - have haunted Southern history and literature. W. Fitzhugh Brundage brings to the study of this important phenomenon both an...

The Politics of Despair: Power and Resistance in the Tobacco Wars.
September 22, 1994... During my childhood my grandfather, a Kentucky burley tobacco farmer born in 1877, told me many stories. Along with ghost and other "hant" tales, he described his excitement at hearing William Jennings Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech in...

The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama.
September 22, 1994... I may have read a better history than Culpepper Clark's The Schoolhouse Door during the past decade, but if so I don't remember it. Here is the historian/craftsman at his best. There is an important and dramatic story to tell, the decade-long...

The Lonely Days were Sundays: Reflections of a Jewish Southerner.
September 22, 1994... Eli Evans is living proof that while you can take the boy out of the South, you can't take the South out of the boy. In fact, I think he would bristle at any suggestion that this son of North Carolina, despite having lived in New York for more...

What Happened to the Southern Baptist Convention? A Memoir of the Controversy.
September 22, 1994... This volume traces, in considerable detail and by an insider who was on the scene, the account of the destruction of one of the major denominations in American protestantism. Cothen begins with an account of the founding of the Southern Baptist...

Paving Over the Past: A History and Guide to Civil War Battlefield Preservation.
September 22, 1994... This eloquent plea for preservation of Civil War battlefields, undertaken initially as a senior thesis at Princeton University, was inspired by the "third battle of Manassas." That conflict, with roots extending back to 1986, was settled (with a...

In Search of Buddy Bolden, First Man of Jazz.
September 22, 1994... Charles "Buddy" Bolden (1877-1931) was probably the most important pioneer of jazz; however, he wasn't always recognized for his contributions to that complex and varied musical genre. From 1895 to 1906, Bolden played his cornet all over New...

Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on "Huckleberry Finn."
September 22, 1994... These are two significant and stimulating additions to the growing library of commentary on racial issues in Mark Twain's writings. Actually Twain studies are in good shape in general, and Twain's canonical status - should "canons" survive at all...

Roughing It.
September 22, 1994... This is the kind of scholarly production that could potentially reignite controversies about publicly funded editorial projects. Here is a massively annotated edition of a famous American author's travel narrative that is already available in...

Robert Penn Warren: A Study of the Short Fiction.
September 22, 1994... As "a critical introduction and overview for both the new and experienced reader" (p. xii), Joseph R. Millichap's Robert Penn Warren: A Study of the Short Fiction succeeds fairly well. In Part 1, Millichap argues convincingly that Warren's only...

More Conversations with Walker Percy.
September 22, 1994... What does the interviewee do? Having achieved considerable success as a novelist and cultural critic, having already talked at great length about his life, works, philosophy, the South, the state of society - and still being importuned to say...

Plight in Common: Hawthorne and Percy.
September 22, 1994... Affinities between nineteenth-century New England writers and writers of the modern South have long been a subject of scholarly examination, most brilliantly by Lewis P. Simpson. Elzbieta Oleksy's comparative study of Hawthorne and Percy is an...

Inheritance of Night: Early Drafts of "Lie Down in Darkness."
September 22, 1994... When Williams Styron's Lie Down in Darkness first appeared in 1951 reviewers were eager to highlight the novel's Faulknerian qualities. Malcolm Cowley's laudatory New Republic review was entitled "The Faulkner Pattern," and Robert Gorham Davis,...