Joel Williamson – författare

This landmark work provides a fundamental reinterpretation of the American South in the years since the Civil War, especially the decades after Reconstruction, from 1877 to 1920. Covering all aspects of Southern life--white and black, conservative and progressive, literary and political--it offers a new understanding of the forces that shaped the South of today.

The Crucible of Race, a major reinterpretation of black-white relations in the South, was widely acclaimed on publication and compared favorably to two of the seminal books on Southern history: Wilbur J. Cash's The Mind of the South and C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Representing 20 years of research and writing on the history of the South, The Crucible of Race explores the large topic of Southern racerelations for a span of a century and a half. Oxford is pleased to make available an abridgement of this parent volume: A Rage for Order preserves all the theme lines that were advanced in the original volume and many of the individualstories. As in Crucible of Race, Williamson here confronts the awful irony that the war to free blacks from slavery also freed racism. He examines the shift in the power base of Southern white leadership after 1850 and recounts the terrible violence done to blacks in the name of self-protection. This condensation of one of the most important interpretations of Southern history is offered as a means by which a large audience can grasp the essentials of black-white relations--a problemthat persists to this day and one with which we all must contend--North and South, black and white.

William Faulkner more than any other writer is intimately associated with the South about which he wrote. This book reveals the man and his family and the ways in which southern culture and his own life were wound around one another in his greatest works.

In Elvis Presley, one of the most admired Southern historians of our time takes on one of the greatest cultural icons of all time. The result is a masterpiece: a vivid, gripping biography, set against the rich backdrop of Southern society--indeed, American society--in the second half of the twentieth century. Author of The Crucible of Race and William Faulkner and Southern History, Joel Williamson is a renowned historian known for his matchless ability to write compelling narratives. In this tour de force biography, he captures the drama of Presley's career and offers insights into the social upheavals following World War II. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley was a contradiction, flamboyant in pegged black pants with pink stripes, yet soft-spoken, respectfully courting a decent girl from church. Then he wandered into Sun Records, and everything changed. He first went onstage in 1954. "I was scared stiff," Elvis recalled. "Everyone was hollering and I didn't know what they were hollering at." Girls did the hollering--at his snarl and swagger. Williamson calls it "the revolution of the Elvis girls." They took command, insisting on his sexually charged performances. They lived in an intense moment, this generation raised by their mothers, when men had been at war. The first Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education occurred two weeks before Elvis's first gig, turning high schools into battlegrounds of race. Explosively, white girls went wild for a white man singing a black man's songs, "wiggling" erotically. The book illuminates the zenith of Presley's career, his period of deepest creativity, which captured a legion of fans and kept them fervently loyal throughout years of army, wine, and women. Williamson shows how Elvis himself changed--and didn't. The deferential boy with downcast eyes became the bloated, demented drug addict who, despite his success, never escaped his sense of social inferiority. He bought Graceland in part to escape the judgment of his wealthy, established neighbors.Appreciative and unsparing, musically attuned and socially revealing, Elvis Presley will deepen our understanding of the man and his times.

New People is an insightful historical analysis of the miscegenation of American whites and blacks from colonial times to the present, of the ""new people"" produced by these interracial relationships, and of the myriad ways in which miscegenation has affected our national culture. Because the majority of American blacks are in fact of mixed ancestry, and because mulattoes and pure blacks ultimately combined their cultural heritages, what begins in the colonial period as mulatto history and culture ends in the twentieth century as black history and culture. Thus, understanding the history of the mulatto becomes one way of understanding something of the experience of the African American.Williamson traces the fragile lines of colour and caste that have separated mulattoes, blacks, and whites throughout history and speculates on the effect that the increasing ambiguity of those lines will have on the future of American society.