A NEW HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH

Scholars of Southern history come together to create a fresh narrative of the region.

As editor Brundage writes in the introduction, this is the 21st century’s “first, collaborative effort to tell the history of the American South.” More significantly, it serves as an example of how the story of Southern, as well as American, history has been transformed over the last 50 years. Previously, Southern history was the tale, beginning in the early 1600s, of sharply differentiated Black and White races, chattel slavery, distinctive race-based, all-male politics, and a kind of unchanging continuity of the region’s life—a portrait permeated with gauzy camellias and nonsense about enslaved people content with their status. In this largely seamless presentation of the South’s past as historians now see it, those subjects and emphases are greatly diminished in coverage. Assuming larger roles in the story are Native Americans, women, and social, cultural, and economic trends. Racism is still front and center, of course, but the contributors also highlight multiethnic and other relevant, previously omitted elements. Most of the book’s contributors brilliantly integrate the contents of their separate chapters, each on a distinct era, into a taut, analytical narrative. Throughout, their voices and styles cohere in striking fashion. It’s only when the narrative reaches the 20th century that it briefly stumbles, with two contributors focusing on select individuals rather than the South as a whole. The result is to make these people somehow representative of an entire region, while the rest of the book argues against the existence of an undifferentiated part of the country known as “The South.” Nevertheless, to learn of the South’s past as it is viewed today by leading historians, this is the book to read. Contributors include Martha S. Jones, Kate Masur, James Rice, and a host of other distinguished scholars.

An important book for anyone interested in Southern history.