Bruce Clayton – författare

One might argue as to whether `the South is another land' or only a separate verse in the American song. There should be little argument over the usefulness of this collection of ten essays. They find their common ground in a loose schema--the 20th-century South with subsections on politics, `the world of work,' religious affairs, and the `search for the South.' All the work is most competently done. It may appear to some that the essays on the southern politicians are generic stories now thrice told; however, they show the individual differences and the uniqueness of personality that always make the biographical approach worthwhile. For sheer relevance to contemporary concerns it would be hard to surpass Willard B. Gatewood's `After Scopes: Evolution in the South.' The expected questions of the southern nature, character, identity, and mind make their due appearances. Full notes with each essay, and a useful bibliographical essay on the major works. There is something here for professor, student, and general reader; university, college, and public libraries should have this volume. ChoiceThe South is another land--different from the rest of the nation in its identity and its self-perception. This was the conclusion reached by ten outstanding historians after completing the research collected in this essay collection. Every recognized topic of importance in Southern and American history--politics, race, religion, women's role, social, economic, and intellectual history--is incorporated in this collection of essays.

This book reflects the best of contemporary scholarship on the history of the American South. Each contributor is an authority—one a Pulitzer Prize winner. The essays examine what life was like for the slaves; for the victims of terror and lynchings; for workers who dared strike and demand fairness; and for dissenters who challenged the accepted truths. The essays are grouped around three major research areas: history and the social sciences, history and biography, and the new labor history.This is a unique collection of essays by some of the world's leading historians of the South, together with work by younger scholars. All contributors, however, are working at the cutting edge of their particular methodological approaches. The book, for example, includes both an essay by Pulitzer Prize winner Rhys Isaac, and one by Rutgers University graduate student Beth Hale. Yet, both have a common concern to explore the reaches of the Southern past through the dimension of ethnography.The essays in the book are grouped according to theme. The largest section, the social sciences and Southern history, includes essays drawing heavily on the insights of anthropology of ethnography and of statistical analysis. Each essay in the second section is designed to illustrate how life history can be used to illuminate much larger histoical themes and processes. The essays in the last section on labor in the new South all illustrate, among other things, the importance of drawing on the insights of historians of women in order to redress the masculinist presuppositons of labor historians. All the essays in the book, in fact, reflect current concerns with gender and race in the re-interpretation of the Southern past.