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Highland Heritage
Each year, tens of thousands of people flock to Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, and to more than two hundred other locations across the country to attend Scottish Highland Games and Gatherings. There, kilt-wearing participants compete in athletics, Highland dancing, and bagpiping, while others join clan societies in celebration of a Scottish heritage. As Celeste Ray notes, however, the Scottish affiliation that Americans claim today is a Highland Gaelic identity that did not come to characterize that nation until long after the ancestors of many Scottish Americans had left Scotland. Ray explores how Highland Scottish themes and lore merge with southern regional myths and identities to produce a unique style of commemoration and a complex sense of identity for Scottish Americans in the South. Blending the objectivity of the anthropologist with respect for the people she studies, she asks how and why we use memories of our ancestral pasts to provide a sense of identity and community in the present. In so doing, she offers an original and insightful examination of what it means to be Scottish in America.
The Romance of Reunion
The reconciliation of North and South following the Civil War depended as much on cultural imagination as on the politics of Reconstruction. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Nina Silber documents the transformation from hostile sectionalism to sentimental reunion rhetoric. Northern culture created a notion of reconciliation that romanticized and feminized southern society. In tourist accounts, novels, minstrel shows, and popular magazines, northerners contributed to a mythic and nostalgic picture of the South that served to counter their anxieties regarding the breakdown of class and gender roles in Gilded Age America. Indeed, for many Yankees, the ultimate symbol of the reunion process, ...
Andersonvilles of the North
This study argues that the image of Union prison officials as negligent and cruel to Confederate prisoners is severely flawed. It explains how Confederate prisoners' suffering and death were due to a number of factors, but it would seem that Yankee apathy and malice were rarely among them.
Reclaiming Democracy
Meta Mendel-Reyes provides a critical look at our fascination with the sixties, discusses the ways in which democratic participation was at the heart of sixties politics, and explores the interrelationship between the history and memory of the sixties and contemporary democratic politics. Mendel-Reyes stresses that if told properly, the story of the sixties could help open our eyes to the possibility that ordinary people can take democratic action and do have the ability to make a difference in nineties politics. In a time of cynicism about the American government's ability to solve the crises of inequality, poverty and racism, Mendel-Reyes puts the decline of political participation in historical context and provides hope for the coming decades.
Baptized in Blood
Charles Reagan Wilson documents that for over half a century there existed not one, but two civil religions in the United States, the second not dedicated to honoring the American nation. Extensively researched in primary sources, Baptized in Blood is a significant and well-written study of the South’s civil religion, one of two public faiths in America. In his comparison, Wilson finds the Lost Cause offered defeated Southerners a sense of meaning and purpose and special identity as a precarious but distinct culture. Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a separate political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbo...
Restructured Resistance
In the spring of 1960, unprecedented public hearings were held on segregation and the future of public education. These hearings, held by John Sibley and the Georgia General Assembly Committee on Schools, offered a rare glimpse into the reactions of southerners--black and white--to the changes wrought by the civil rights movement. Restructured Resistance uses newly opened private papers, public records, newspaper reports, and oral history interviews to examine how the desegregation of public schools in Georgia reflected the evolution of southern society, economics, and politics. In the midst of crisis over segregation as a symbol of southern distinctiveness, the state legislature accepted the inevitable, adopted the Sibley Commission's proposals, and created a deliberate and more utilitarian form of defiance--a restructured resistance--rooted in contemporary practicality and corporate pragmatism.
Across the Divide
"Ramold disputes the old argument that citizen-soldiers in the Union Army differed little from civilians. He shows how a chasm of mutual distrust grew between soldiers and civilians during four years of fighting that led many Democratic soldiers to…build the groundwork for the postwar Republican Party. Filled with gripping anecdotes, this book makes for fascinating reading." —Scott Reynolds Nelson, College of William & Mary Union soldiers left home in 1861 with expectations that the conflict would be short, the purpose of the war was clear, and public support back home was universal. As the war continued, however, Union soldiers noticed growing disparities between their own expectations ...
Black Women in New South Literature and Culture
Using the "the Negro Problem" in African American literature as a point of departure, this book focuses on the profound impact that racism had on the literary imagination of black Americans, specifically those in the South. Although the South has been one of the most enduring sites of criticism in American Studies and in American literary history, Johnson argues that it is impossible to consider what the "South" and what "southernness" mean as cultural references without looking at how black women have contributed to and contested any unified definition of that region. Johnson challenges the homogeneity of a "white" South and southern cultural identity by recognizing how fictional and historical black women are underacknowledged agents of cultural change. Johnson regards the South as a cultural region that (re)constructs black womanhood, but she also considers how black womanhood have transformed the South. Specialists in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature will find this book a necessary addition, as will scholars of African American Literature and History.
Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause
In the late 1800s, Southern evangelicals believed contemporary troubles—everything from poverty to political corruption to violence between African Americans and whites—sprang from the bottles of "demon rum" regularly consumed in the South. Though temperance quickly gained support in the antebellum North, Southerners cast a skeptical eye on the movement, because of its ties with antislavery efforts. Postwar evangelicals quickly realized they had to make temperance appealing to the South by transforming the Yankee moral reform movement into something compatible with southern values and culture. In Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Moveme...
Keywords for Southern Studies
"In Keywords for Southern Studies, the editors have compiled an eclectic collection of essays which address the fluidity and ever-changing nature of southern studies by adopting a transnational, interdisciplinary focus. This book is termed 'critical' because the essays in it are pertinent to modern life beyond the world of 'southern studies.' The non-binary, non-traditional approach of Keywords unmasks and refuses the binary thinking -- First World/Third World, self/other -- that postcolonial studies has taught us is the worst rhetorical structure of empire. Keywords promotes a holistic way of thinking that starts with southern studies but extends even further"--
