This study examines the gender ideals of black, white, and Native American college students in the South from 1820 to 1900. Higher education was an increasingly common experience in the nineteenth century and offers a unique opportunity to observe how men thought about masculinity and manhood. Immersed in a youth culture away from home, young students had to wrestle with the meaning of adulthood and manliness. Through examining student writings at the University of North Carolina, the University of Virginia, Washington College, and the Virginia Military Institute, this work traces the rise of a more restrained, evangelical masculinity in the white elite by the 1840s that began to supplant the older, more bellicose masculinity in which insults frequently precipitated violent retribution. Restrained masculinity developed from the increasing reach of the market, urbanization, and evangelical religion. During the Civil War, even restrained manhood became more violent, shaped by the pro-war rhetoric of professors and campus chaplains by spring 1861.
Spanning the era from the American Revolution to the Civil War, these nine pathbreaking 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 in 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.
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.
From antebellum readers avidly consuming stories featuring white southern men as benevolent patriarchs, hell-raising frontiersmen, and callous plantation owners to post--Civil War southern writers seeking to advance a model of southern manhood and male authority as honorable, dignified, and admirable, the idea of a distinctly southern masculinity has reflected the broad regional differences between North and South. In the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, the media have helped to shape modern models of white manhood, not only for southerners but for the rest of the nation and the world. In White Masculinity in the Recent South, thirteen scholars of history, literature, film, and environmental studies examine modern white masculinity, including such stereotypes as the good old boy, the redneck, and the southern gentleman. With topics ranging from southern Protestant churches to the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd, this cutting-edge volume seeks to do what no other single work has done: to explore the ways in which white southern manhood has been experienced and represented since World War II. Using a variety of approaches -- cultural and social history, close readings of literature and music, interviews, and personal stories -- the contributors explore some of the ways in which white men have acted in response to their own and their culture's conceptions of white manhood. Topics include neo-Confederates, the novels of William Faulkner, gay southern men, football coaching, deer hunting, church camps, college fraternities, and white men's responses to the civil rights movement. Taken together, these engaging pieces show how white southern men are shaped by regional as well as broader American ideas of what they ought to do and be. White men themselves, the contributors explain, view the idea of southern manhood in two seemingly contradictory ways -- as something natural and as something learned through rites of initiation and passage -- and believe it must be lived and displayed to one's peers and others in order to be fully realized. While economic and social conditions of the South changed dramatically in the twentieth century, white manhood as it is expressed in the contemporary South is still a complex, contingent, historicized matter, and broadly shared -- or at least broadly recognized -- notions of white southern manhood continue to be central to southern culture. Representing some of the best recent scholarship in southern gender studies, this bold collection invites further explorations into twenty-first-century white southern masculinity.
" Today, Thomas Dixon is perhaps best known as the author of the best-selling early twentieth-century trilogy that included the novel The Clansman (1905), which provided the core narrative for D.W. Griffith's groundbreaking and still-controversial film The Birth of a Nation . It was The Sins of the Father , however, that Dixon regarded as the most aesthetically satisfying child of his Ku Klux Klan saga. In this novel he telescopes the trilogy's sprawling historical canvas into one tightly scripted narrative. A best-seller in 1912, the novel's themes of interracial sex and incest outraged many upon its publication. Nearly a century later, Dixon's work is undergoing a critical reevaluation. A new introduction by Steven Weisenburger lends a valuable historical and critical perspective to this important and divisive classic of American literature. Thomas Dixon (1864-1946) was born in Shelby, North Carolina. He is also the author of The Clansman and The Flaming Sword. Steven Weisenburger, Mossiker Chair in Humanities at Southern Methodist University, is the author of several books, including Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child- murder from the Old South.
East Texans Love To Talk is a collection from over a lifetime of listening to his relatives, friends, and residents of East Texas. The stories are sometimes humorous, sometimes factual, and sometimes sentimental. Their value is that they reflect what native East Texans believe to be, or perhaps want to be, the truth about their heritage. In some instances, the tales are told to correct what the narrators believe to be the misleading or false information printed and taught about East Texas by politically correct historians. Some of the stories simply spring from Bonnet´s imagination, and are told to reflect something real about the East Texas and East Texans he has known.
John H. Reagan was one of the most important figures in Texas history; this was the first biography of him to be published. Reagan, who was born in Sevier County, Tennessee, in 1818, came to Texas twenty-one years later—while Texas was still a republic—and stayed to play many major roles in its later economic and political development. In this excellent biography, Ben H. Procter not only re-creates for us the character of the man, with his forthright integrity and his boundless desire for knowledge, but also places him against the background of the time in which he lived. In vivid language Procter portrays the violence and vigor of pioneer life, the excitement of frontier politics, the dedication, devotion, enthusiasm, and—ultimately—despair of the Civil War, and the bitterness of the struggle with the railroad tycoons and their gargantuan monopolies. Spanning as it does the Republic of Texas, early statehood, the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and the era of the "robber barons," the story of John H. Reagan encompasses a panoramic sweep of mid- to late-nineteenth-century United States history. Throughout his long life, respect came to Reagan almost as a matter of course. The forceful strength of his personality made an impression few people could ignore. From the day when Colonel Durst hired the young Reagan as a tutor for his children, exclaiming, "This man is a scholar," until the day some fifty years later when Governor Hogg persuaded him to leave the U.S. Senate to become chairman of the new Railroad Commission because the Commission "must be above reproach," his extraordinary character and ability were recognized. In fact, the perceptive intelligence that made him examine all aspects of a situation, and the sturdy integrity and courage that made it impossible for him to abandon a position he believed to be right simply because it was for the moment unpopular, frequently gave him the appearance of a prophet. Although this "prophetic gift" occasionally led to interludes of public disfavor, Reagan was accorded honor, even in his own land—and in later years veneration—that any prophet might envy.
