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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I was so rushed that I could barely maintain my balance. The struggle to pull pantyhose over my tired feet, newly liberated from a pair of running shoes that had pounded the streets of Charleston all day, was about to get the best of me. It was a memorable ordeal: pantyhose don't exactly make a regular appearance in my wardrobe. But that wasn't the most remarkable thing about that moment. It was where I was changing my clothes, and why. There I was, in the bathroom at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, slipping into a ball gown for a gala to celebrate the 150th anniversary of South Carolina's secession from the United States in 1860. For the next five hours, I would rub elbows with hundreds of revelers dressed in hoop skirts and militia uniforms, men and women who believed the Old South was the apex of civilization and mourned its destruction. Yet I was getting dressed in Emanuel. This was the congregation to which Denmark Vesey, executed in 1822 for plotting a slave rebellion in Charleston, had belonged. This was the congregation in which the black revolutionary had developed a theology of liberation that ended in a plot to undermine the foundation of the Old South. In 1822, Vesey had hoped to free slaves from the very group of people the costumed gala-goers were assembling to honor at the secession ball almost two centuries later. (1) How did I get here? It's hard to say exactly when and where my road to the secession ball began, but Charleston itself--in June 2005--is probably as good a place as any. That month, just two weeks before we were to marry, my fiance and I had driven from Chapel Hill to Charleston to look for an apartment. We would be moving in the fall to start our careers as professional historians. I had accepted a job at The Citadel. Ethan had earned a postdoctoral fellowship at the Avery Research Center, an African American institute affiliated with the College of Charleston. We knew we wanted to live downtown, in the heart of what is known as "Historic Charleston," and we hoped to find what everybody wants when they move to the city: hardwood floors, high ceilings, exposed brick. Yet these quaint fantasies began to recede near Manning, South Carolina, as our formerly reliable Mazda started sputtering. We had to stop. After locating a mechanic, who told us the repairs would take three hours, I phoned the woman with whom we had made our first appointment to tell her we would be late to view her apartment. Car trouble, I explained. Later that afternoon, we rang the bell of a beautiful antebellum home in Charleston. The owner, who lived in the top two floors and rented out the bottom, answered the door. Margaret, we'll call her, was not the kind of woman who knew people with cars that broke down. The meticulously restored basement apartment, updated with a sparkling kitchen and custom-made window treatments, appeared ready for a Southern Living photo shoot. As she ushered us through the rooms, we asked about the home. Did she know much about its construction? What about previous owners, or how the various floors and rooms had originally been used? Like many Charlestonians who spend their days surrounded by the relics of the past, our prospective landlady had done her research, sort-of. The house had been built around 1840 by the Toomers, a wealthy family that included two physicians. Up until the Civil War, she informed us, the apartment we were considering had been the workspace of the servants. "Of the slaves," I instinctively replied. They were "servants," Margaret countered. There's no evidence in the historical records, she continued, that the Toomers didn't pay them. It was quite a double negative, the logic of which we have spent years pondering. (As we suspected that day--and later confirmed--plenty of evidence exists that enslaved people lived and worked in the Toomer household.) In terms of an introduction to Charleston, the exchange could not have been more revealing, though we didn't fully appreciate this fact at that moment. …

In August 1937 the tobacco warehouses in Wilson, North Carolina, opened their doors to area tobacco farmers, just as they had each year since 1895. But that summer there was a new attraction in town--the first ever Wilson Tobacco Queen, a young woman recently crowned to reign over the annual tobacco marketing season. Though beautiful and radiant, the Wilson queen was hardly unique. At the height of the Great Depression, tobacco queens had suddenly become all the rage. Danville, Virginia, had sponsored its first tobacco-queen contest in 1934; South Boston, Virginia, followed in 1935. In the mid to late 1950s, nearly a dozen brightleaf-tobacco market towns in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia inaugurated queen competitions, and a curious new icon of rural white womanhood took root in the agrarian landscape. Across the Brightleaf Belt, tobacco queens ruled. It is tempting to dismiss these beauty queens as quaint symbols of rural life, but they were far more than decorative additions to southern tobacco communities. The brightleaf tobacco queens that rose to prominence in the thirties and forties were a shrewd response to the economic problems the tobacco industry faced during the Depression. The tobacco-queen contest was a local cure with the same underlying goal as the programmatic solutions of the New Deal: to shore up agrarian commerce. In the case of the tobacco-queen contest, however, it was the white female body, and white female sexuality, that provided the fix. Invoking and altering rituals of rural life that had been familiar to white southerners for decades, sponsors of tobacco-queen contests made women central to the recovery of local brightleaf economies. Viewing these queens in the context of the Depression-era Southeast offers insights into the unusual range of remedies southerners undertook to resuscitate farming and industry. It also shows us one of the avenues by which beauty contests made inroads in the region, a development that, surprising as it may be to many southerners today, was not a forgone conclusion at the time. Finally, the tobacco-queen contests of the 1930s and 1940s reveal the complicated meanings of beauty and beauty contests in rural southern women's lives. Women were undeniably commodified during these commodity crop competitions, yet these contests represented unexpected--and sometimes welcome--changes for rural women of the era. THE BATHING-BEAUTY REVUE The tobacco-queen contests of the Depression years were novel events in the Southeast, but several rituals anticipated their arrival. One precursor was the beauty contest itself, an eclectic amalgam, as historian of beauty Lois Banner has noted, of high- and low-brow entertainments. (1) Many of the high-brow precursors were eighteenth- and nineteenth-century adaptations of Old World chivalry and fertility rituals. May Day celebrations at girls' schools, for example, welcomed the arrival of spring with the crowning of a queen and continued to be held at some institutions well into the twentieth century. The burgeoning world of commercial and leisure activities in the mid- to late-nineteenth century provided the lowbrow forums for showcasing feminine beauty. Among these, bathing-beauty revues, sponsored by beachside resorts to boost tourism, proved the most popular. In 1920 businessmen in Galveston, Texas, sponsored one of the earliest bathing-beauty revues in order to promote the coastal city. For the next several years, young women traveled from all over the United States to participate in the contest. Their local papers published photos of the beauties and publicized the resort as a result. A few years later, organizers cast an even wider net and invited foreign women to enter the contest, rechristened the "International Pageant of Pulchritude." Atlantic City joined the trend in 1921, staging the first Miss America Contest. Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, sponsored its first bathing-beauty revue four years later. …