The Mind of the Master Class

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is Eléonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities at Emory University, where she was founding director of Women's Studies. She is Editor of The Journal of The Historical Society and serves on the Governing Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities (2002–2008). In 2003 President George Bush honored her with a National Humanities Medal, and the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars honored her with its Cardinal Wright Award. Among her books and published lectures are: The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France; Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South; and Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism. Eugene D. Genovese, a retired professor of history, served as first president of The Historical Society. Among his books are Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made; The Slaveholders' Dilemma: Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860; and A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South. Fox-Genovese and Genovese serve on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals and are co-authors of Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism. In 2004 The Intercollegiate Studies Institute presented them jointly with its Gerhard Niemeyer Award for Distinguished Contributions to Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

'Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese have given us a masterpiece of the historian's art. Every serious student of the American South and of American intellectual life must read it - now and for many years to come' The Times Literary Supplement

• Part I. Cradled in the Storms of Revolution: 1. 'That Terrible Tragedy'; 2. The age of revolution through slaveholding eyes; 3. 'The Purest Sons of Freedom'; Entr'Acte: the bonds of slavery; Part II. The Inescapable Past: 4. History as moral and political instruction; 5. The slaveholders' quest for a history of the common people; 6. World history and the politics of slavery; 7. History as the story of freedom; Part III. Ancient Legacies, Medieval Sensibility, Modern Men: 8. In the shadow of antiquity; 9. Coming to terms with the Middle Ages; 10. The chivalry; 11. Chivalric slave masters; 12. Chivalric politics: Southern ladies take their stand; Part IV. A Christian People Defend the Faith: 13. A Christian people; 14. Unity and diversity among the faithful; 15. War over the Good Book; 16. Slavery: proceeding from the Lord; 17. The Holy Spirit in the word of God; 18. Jerusalem and Athens - against Paris; 19. Serpent in the garden: liberal theology in the South; 20. Theopolitics: golden rule, higher law, and slavery; Coda: St. John of Pottawatamie; Part V. At the Rubicon: 21. Between individualism and corporatism: from the reformation to the war for Southern Independence; 22. Past and future Caesars; Epilogue: King Solomon's dilemma.