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In this article, I show how the self-serving economic worldview of enslavers—and their belief that aging was a process of inexorable physical loss—motivated them to sell or abandon enslaved people as they grew older. It seeks to diversify our understanding of the exploitative character of American slavery by moving away from considering the vast profits gained by individual slavers, the systems of control or production on large plantations, and the economic value of slavery writ large, and to instead show how self-interest led antebellum slavers of low-to-middling means to offload the aged enslaved, and their stated need to avoid the obligations associated with paternalism on account of their own reduced circumstances. Rather than focus on the economic "efficiency" of slavers, or accede to their self-image as "masters"—whether of enslaved people or of the market—I emphasize their sense of insecurity and weakness when looking to rid themselves of elderly slaves. In doing so, I undermine their claims to mastery, underline how slavery was a system of exploitation enmeshed in wider social, economic, and political concerns, and provide direct evidence of the self-interest that shaped the actions of southern enslavers and the harm this caused enslaved people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1659, a mysterious people, later known as the Westos, attacked the Native American towns of central Georgia and began enslaving those it captured. These assaults marked the beginning of two decades in which Westo slave raids terrorized the region and helped trigger massive changes in the socio-political landscape of the Deep South. Yet little is known about the Westos' initial forays into the area, and why they were so successful. Most scholars believe their success hinged on their acquisition and use of firearms against bow-and-arrow cultures. This essay argues for a more nuanced and realistic interpretation of Westo power as demonstrated by the route they used to access the Deep South, the types of weapons available to them, the tactics they used, and ultimately, how the indigenous people of region interpreted the Westos' presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the ratification of the Constitution in North Carolina. The author discusses the opposing views of small-state Federalism versus southern Antifederalism, examines how Federalists saw North Carolina as an important shipping location, and explores how the Antifederalists saw North Carolina as a southern state with western holdings.

Southern United States folk music is rich in not only sound, but in voices of the past. Folk songs were created by working class individuals who described aspects of their life in connection with societal issues and events. Folk songs, now digitally archived, can serve as primary historical sources that can be used to enhance the secondary social studies U.S. history curriculum. The vast offerings of folk songs can allow students to listen, read, and analyze the lyrics to gain a deeper understanding of the U.S. South, shed the hillbilly stereotype that Southerners have been historically subjected to, understand why and how Southerners spoke out against injustices through song, and analyze the lyrics that portray the history of southern folklife. Based on the National Council for the Social Studies' Themes of Social Studies and integrating folk songs from such online sites as the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institute, curriculum implications are presented for students to reflect on the Southerners' settings, perspectives of events and issues, and methods of protest. Modern technology's preservation of folk songs that would otherwise be absent from history not only has the power to educate, but also to keep southern folk music alive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a serial runaway slave in New Orleans, Louisiana, between 1733 and 1748, known as Baptiste. The author explains that he was a 13-year-old Chickasaw Native and that his mixed-race half-sister, Marianne, also ran away repeatedly. He discusses the Capuchins, a religious order of Franciscan friars, who repeatedly returned these runaways to the merchant who owned them.

Rather than surrendering to Union forces in 1865, various bands of ex-Confederates chose Mexican exile. From generals and elite politicians to rank-and-file soldiers, the majority of these "Confederados" journeyed to French-controlled Mexico to escape punishment, to tap financial opportunities, and to observe how southern society would function post-emancipation. Still others, as represented by the cavalry officer and Quixotic newspaper editor John Newman Edwards, understood the U.S. Civil War on more international terms. To these men, Mexico constituted a new, imperially subsidized laboratory to continue the Confederate Experiment and recreate a mythic version of the Old South. Although cut short by the violent death of Emperor Maximilian I, their saga reveals not only how adaptation to Confederate defeat took different forms in the immediate postbellum period, but also the extent to which conceptions of defeat and even the purpose of the Confederacy itself had never been monolithic in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What Maine was to the New England states, Georgia was to the southern seaboard, with the difference that it was deeply touched by influences characteristically Western. Because of the traits of her leaders and the rude aggressive policies of her people, Georgia belonged as much to the West as to the South. From colonial times the Georgia settlers had been engaged in an almost incessant struggle against the savages on her border, and had the instincts of a frontier society."    —Frederick Jackson Turner 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 annual report of the Southern Historical Association is presented. It discusses how the group switched their scheduled 2020 annual conference in Memphis, Tennessee for a virtual format in response to the covid-19 pandemic, which included a graduate student lunch, book exhibit, and business meetings; also discussed are micro-grants for graduate students blog writing on the Association's website; and a copy of the financial statement for the period of January 1 through December 31, 2020.

The article presents a literary criticism focused on this history of incarceration within the southern states, with a review of the books "Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance," edited by Robert T. Chase, and "Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South," edited by Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring.

The article focuses on British historians who have written about the American South. The author discusses the presence of British scholars at the Southern Historical Association conferences, explores the social identity of Southern historians as compared to British historians, and examines the relationship between Southern history, national history, and international history.

In 2015 there emerged a nationwide campaign to remove all Confederate memorials commemorating white supremacy of "the old South" from public parks and city centers in the United States. Given that fighting racism and fascism is not equivalent to fighting monuments, one can ask if an attack on dead slaveholders and famous American Confederate generals is worth a large-scale cleansing of the American cultural landscape. Questioning some of the rationales of the campaign is not about defending these statues. If people democratically so decide, they may well get rid of any historical memorials they find ethically offensive. This essay deals with the issue as it pertains to the American cultural landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

W. E. B. Du Bois wrote extensively about African-American cotton growers and the Southern Black Belt, beginning with the sociological studies he conducted while at Atlanta University. Over time, his approach to these subjects became increasingly literary and experimental. He made the region—and specifically its dirt—a medium for analyzing the history and dynamics of racial capitalism, and for imagining forms of value not grounded in the violent extraction and mystification of black labor power. In doing so Du Bois countered the blame narrative developed by white southerners like Alfred Holt Stone, who attributed soil exhaustion and economic stagnation to the "monstrocity" of self-possessed black labor. He dismantles racist figures of black encumbrance, nomadism, and decay in which antebellum theories of climate determinism were retooled to promote new forms of racial exploitation. This essay analyzes Du Bois's dirt poetics in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). Drawing from Ernesto Laclau's work on the rhetoricity of Marxist social movements, it examines the revolutionary forms of radical contingency that Du Bois discovers at the intersection of linguistic and economic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the relationship between Cherokee and Creek Native Americans during the 18th century. The author explores the relations between Cherokee Kings and Creek Kings within the region of Georgia, examines their intra-Indigenous connections and interactions, and explores how these relationships were viewed by Europeans.

Although common schooling began to take off in the northern United States around the 1830s, it did not gain great momentum in the South until the postbellum period. Spanning this lengthy Common School era, this article explores the role white supremacy played in both the development and the impediment of schooling for the masses in the southern United States. Through analysis of archival and other primary and secondary data sources, the ways in which white supremacist ideology and actions shape-shifted throughout this time in history are mapped and expounded upon. This includes the rhetorical strategies and actions carried out by southern school reformers and opponents within their speeches, editorials, sermons, and addresses to maintain or amplify white power. Prominent Common School figures who held residency within the former Confederate States of America such as William Henry Ruffner and J.L.M. Curry, as well as lesser-known educational advocates and opponents of education are highlighted. This article begins with some of the arguments that were made both for and against education of slaves, for or against common schooling of white children, and proceeds into many of the large-scale schooling efforts of the postbellum period, all analyzed through the lens of white supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Military prostitution has been a staple of US-Korea relations since the 1940s, contained in the so-called camptown communities surrounding US military bases in South Korea. But during the 1970s, as the US military steadily reduced its troop presence in Asia, camptowns were thrown into a chaotic state. Facing tremendous social disorder and economic upheaval, establishments that depended upon GI patronage began sending their madams and sex workers to domestic military sites through brokered marriages with US servicemen. These women arrived in the US South, a region housing the vast majority of America's military. Consequently, southern bases like Fort Bragg in Fayetteville (NC), Fort Campbell in Clarksville (TN), and Fort Hood in Killeen (TX) saw the proliferation of military prostitution, which took form in illicit massage businesses catering to the sexual needs of local troop populations. By the 1980s, the Korean American sex trade would spread from these southern military towns to elsewhere in the United States. Highlighting the transpacific circuits among camptowns in South Korea and military bases in the United States since 1945, this article develops a portrait of the US South as a transnational militarized terrain, the camptown as a transpacific phenomenon, and Korean immigrant community formation as deeply intertwined with the happenings of US militarism abroad. In doing so, it explains how the proliferation of illicit massage businesses witnessed by southern military communities in the 1970s was a transnational outgrowth of military prostitution encouraged by the US military in South Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is provided which discusses the issue's theme on the history of immigration to the U.S. Southern States and the concept of Southern exceptionalism with topics, including Latina cigar workers in Tampa, Florida, military bases in the South and dismantling Jim Crow.

An essay is presented which explores the connection of the University of Mississippi to the history of slavery, racial injustice, and white nationalism in U.S. Southern States. Topics discussed include a brief background of the Chancellor's Advisory Committee on History and Context (CACHC) where the author was appointed, the contextualization plaque of the Confederate monument located at the university campus, and the involvement of slave artisans in the construction of the university.

My recent article offered a model by which to better classify feasts by distinguishing between archaeological correlates of group size and sociopolitical competition. Applying this model to remains from a precontact mound site, I highlighted feasting's role in promoting group solidarity in the American South. Hayden's comment argues that my scheme does not accommodate certain types of events, and it questions my noncompetitive interpretation. I address both critiques here by citing further data from the Southeast, emphasizing the importance of interpreting feasts within their cultural and historical contexts, and highlighting Hayden's continued reliance on long-standing assumptions about feasting and monumental architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Americans today believe slavery caused the American Civil War, but adherents of the Lost Cause narrative advance the idea that southerners fought the war for honor, state's rights, and in defense of their homeland which was invaded by the northerners. A similar Armenian Lost Cause narrative has evolved which centers on the idea that 1.5 million Ottoman-Armenians were killed deliberately and systematically in 1915 during an Armenian Genocide. Moreover, the narrative insists that the Ottoman-Armenians were essentially innocent victims and the Ottoman state, represented in situ by Muslim Turks, killed them for economic and racially prejudiced reasons. Like the Confederate Lost Cause the Armenian Lost Cause mythology has generated an entire literature supporting the narrative and a similar cult-like passion to its orthodoxy. This article compares the construction and effects of Lost Cause narratives and suggests revisions to the Armenian Lost Cause narrative based on the inclusion of authentic archival holdings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

W.E.B. Du Bois fought passionately fo r fu ll civil rights, increased political representation, and a purposeful education fo r Black Americans based on theoretical models and philosophies that were aligned with and responsive to the most pressing needs of the Black community. This discussion provides an overview of the educational philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois, specifically as it relates to his belief in the civic mission of higher education and its purpose to uplift the Black community. It examines the ways Du Bois ' educational philosophy, social activism, and life's work spoke to the public purpose of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the history, present, and future of radiocarbon dating in the American Southeast. We point out some of the past and present flaws related to archaeological research and dating. Our approach to this review is rooted in the perspective that each radiocarbon date collectively adds to our knowledge of the region and not just a particular site. Based on our observations, we suggest some “good” practices with respect to certain aspects of radiocarbon dating. Our concluding discussion considers Bayesian chronological analysis and the growing contribution of chronological modeling to the Southeast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents a history of "The Journal of Southern History." He mentions the founding of the journal, the range of material covering the history of the Southern States, and his work as editor of the periodical.

When private incentives are insufficient, a big push by government may lead to industrialization. This article uses mobilization for WWII to test the big push hypothesis in the context of postwar industrialization in the American South. Specifically, I investigate the role of capital deepening at the county level using newly assembled data on the location and value of wartime investment. Despite a boom in manufacturing activity during the war, the evidence is not consistent with differential postwar growth in counties that received more investment. This does not rule out positive effects of mobilization on firms or sectors, but a decisive role for wartime capital deepening in the South's postwar industrial development should be viewed more skeptically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on social conditions of middle class or poor white people in 19th century Southern society, discussing Georgia governor George W. Towns' proclamation for arrest of William H. Sterling for the murder of Jonathan Glanton in Upson County in 1848. Topics include Frank L. Owsley's study "Plain Folk of the Old South", historian F. N. Boney's works on Georgia's poor whites and Daniel Hundley's study "Social Relations in our Southern States".

The article focuses on works on the southern intellectual history, discussing role and contribution of historian Micheal O'Brien. It discusses O'Brien's works on South's intellectual life including his book "Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860". It discusses the need for historians to revive American South's literary culture.

The author reflects on her personal experience of working with historian Micheal O'Brien and discusses O'Brien's book "An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827-67". She discusses his works on the 19th century southern intellectual history, O'Brien's approach to historical intellectual studies and his consideration of readers in the making of the text.

The article focuses on Micheal O'Brien's works on the 19th century southern intellectual history. It discusses his books "Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860" and "Henry Adams and the Southern Question". Topics include O'Brien's approach to historical intellectual studies and his views on slavery, economy, education and politics in Southern states.

The article profiles life and works of historian Michael O' Brien, discussing his focus on antebellum Southern states. It discusses his works including books "The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941" and "Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860" and his cosmopolitan mode toward historical inquiry.

After the Civil War, the South faced a problem that was almost entirely new in the United States: a racially diverse and geographically integrated citizenry. In one fell swoop with emancipation, millions of former slaves were now citizens. The old system of plantation localism, built largely on the feudal control of the black population by wealthy white planters, was no longer viable. The urgent question facing both those who sought to reform and those who sought to preserve the "Old South" was: What should local government look like after emancipation? This Article tells the story of the struggle over the answer to that question. At the center of that struggle is an untold legal history of local government reform during Reconstruction. In the years immediately after the Civil War, idealistic Yankee reformers went south with the explicit aim of remaking the "fabric of southern culture" by rebuilding the South in the image of their northern homes. Specifically, in North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina, these reformers rewrote state constitutions to replace the plantation and county court with townships modeled on the New England town. Southern conservatives resisted the new townships, understanding them as foreign impositions targeted to destroy their old way of life. Within a decade they had dismantled the new townships and built the foundations of a new Jim Crow local order rooted in the county and approximating a return to the plantation. By telling this new history, this Article contributes to present scholarship in at least two ways. First, the story highlights a binary struggle between "communitarian" localism embodied in the civic participation of the New England town and "proprietary" localism embodied in the private power of the plantation owner. This struggle was framed with crystal clarity during Reconstruction, but it remains a powerful analytic tool for understanding today's debates and struggles over local government. Second and relatedly, this history reveals the extent to which racial anxiety shaped and continues to shape local institutions. The communitarian township experiment was fueled by a vision of racial equality--and the white supremacist response to it was fueled by resentment and resistance to that vision. When we think about localism and racial inequality, we tend to think about the responses to school desegregation in the mid-twentieth century when racial resentment and fear during the "Second Reconstruction" drove white flight and contributed to resegregation through suburbanization. This Article shows that we may be looking at the wrong Reconstruction. In fact, the pathologies of local government, racial segregation, democracy, and protection of property were framed after the Civil War, in the crucible of a direct conflict between utopian racial egalitarianism and white supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long-standing historiography that the plantation system of the American South and the British West Indies was inimical to urbanization. If we focus on towns in the Lower South and the West Indies, however, rather than the Chesapeake, we see urbanization as central to plantation development. The slave trade was vital to this urbanization, forming the dynamic trade that allowed for entrepreneurial decision making. It allowed towns like Kingston, Charleston, and Bridgetown to become more than shipping points. They became places of deep linkages between different economic sectors. In addition, they had an independent, autonomous existence in which growth was endogenous and in which people found multiple opportunities for wealth creation and the pursuit of pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nostalgia created by and within postbellum plantation memoirs and reminiscences has been little explored. Through scrutinizing the usefulness of nostalgia as a lens through which to focus critical thinking on the construction, uses, and maintenance of individual and collective memory, this article uses this genre of autobiographical life writing to outline assumptions about the Old South plantation imaginary, its kitchens and cooks, as well as the presentation of food and its preparation. By exploring the ways in which memories of food and happy childhood days were used to codify nostalgic forms of the antebellum era, the article contends that food played an important symbolic role in framing and reflecting power relations and patriarchal authority as the Old South gave way to the New. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries proved transformative for Cherokee people. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, Cherokees lived in towns and nurtured strong regional affiliations that were overlaid with the sacred obligations associated with membership in one of seven matrilineal clans. But all this changed. The encroaching Anglo settler frontier from the east and pressure from the Spanish, the French, and hostile Native warriors from the north all prompted changes in how Cherokee people represented themselves to outsiders. This article draws on colonial archives, missionary records, ethnographic travel writing, and the written and oral traditions of the Cherokee people to explore the importance of friendship among Cherokees in the Native South. What did friendship mean to Cherokees? How did Cherokees represent friendship? And how was friendship performed (and those performances interpreted) in diplomatic, social, and cultural contexts? These questions frame this essay's analysis as it seeks to enrich our understanding of friendship in Cherokee history and to highlight what Cherokee Chiefs meant when they declared "Our Hands and Hearts are Joined Together". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers news related to the organization Southern Historical Association (SHA) as of May 2017. The November 8-11, 2018 annual meeting of the SHA in Birmingham, Alabama is announced. An obituary for historian Raymond Gavins is presented. Historian Jeff Forret has won the 2016 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his book "Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South."

The article provides an overview of several historians' views on the works of historian C. Vann Woodward, highlighting his importance to the historiography of Southern U.S. These historians include Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Joel Williamson, and T. Harry Williams. It profiles Vann Woodward who challenged misconceptions about Southern civil rights issues after the Civil War Reconstruction period.

The article discusses the history of Gospel singing schools in the Southern U.S. Topics discussed include gospel singing schools melding the two traditions of shape notes and the singing school, the history of singing schools dating back to early-eighteenth-century New England, and the survival and revival of singing schools in the twenty-first century in the South.

The article discusses the history of the Cobb family of the U.S. South. Topics discussed include Ambrose Cobbs' descendants being the first Cobbs to settle in Georgia, Howell Cobb who married Mary Ann Lamar, one of the richest woman in Georgia at the time, and Howell's financial troubles which occurred due to his intention to honor his father's debts.

The South has a long and sordid history of resisting school desegregation. Yet after a long and vigorous legal fight, by the mid-1980s, schools in the South became among the most desegregated in the country. An important but often underappreciated tool that aided in the fight to desegregate schools in the South was the conventional and strategic use of school district boundary lines. Many school systems in the South deliberately eschewed drawing school district boundary lines around municipalities and instead drew them around counties. The resulting county-based system of school districts allowed for the introduction of school assignment plans that crossed racially and economically segregated municipal boundary lines. Some affluent and predominantly white suburban municipalities in the South are threatening to reverse this progress. They are doing so by seceding from racially diverse county-based school districts and forming their own predominately white and middle-class school districts. The secessions are grounded in the race-neutral language of localism, or the preference for decentralized governance structures. However, localism in this context is threatening to do what Brown v. Board of Education outlawed: return schools to the days of separate and unequal with the imprimatur of state law. This Article is the first to examine Southern municipal school district secessions and the localism arguments that their supporters advance to justify them. It argues that localism is being used as a race-neutral proxy to create segregated school systems that are immune from legal challenge. It concludes by introducing a normative framework to evaluate the legitimacy of the localism justification for Southern school district secessions specifically and decentralized public education governance structures more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical institution of slavery is unevenly memorialized across the US's cultural landscape. This unevenness is particularly noticeable in ‘Deep South’ states such as Mississippi and Louisiana, where cotton and sugar cane plantations once required vast numbers of slaves to economically succeed. While many antebellum plantation sites now function as tourist attractions complete with ‘Big House’ tours, they often ignore or annihilate the memory of slavery from plantation history. However, not all plantations and museums disregard slavery, and the owners and workers at these sites intentionally employ slavery counter-narratives to evoke empathy in visitors and create a more socially just cultural landscape. This paper examines three sites along and beyond River Road that employ counter-narrative techniques: the Natchez Museum of African-American History and Culture, Frogmore Cotton Plantation, and Whitney Plantation. The paper includes a discussion of each site's narrative tactics and how they stand out from other plantation sites in their representation of slavery. Engaging in growing conversations on the possibilities of empathetic responses to counter-narrative spaces, this paper argues that empathy – while important and possible for many visitors and consumers at these sites of memory – may preclude important political activism and greater solidarity between racial groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers a review of the book "Jimmy Carter: Citizen of the South," by Kaye Lanning Minchew, as well as a bibliography of books received.

The article discusses various aspects of U.S. Civil War documents and archives containing information about the former Confederate States of America (Confederate) Army as of 2016, and it mentions the Southern Historical Society organization's efforts to collect and preserve historical documents which explain the Confederate's version of the war. "The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies" documents compilation and sectional reconciliation are assessed.

The article discusses the depiction of Spartan women as the symbol of ideal female citizenship in the U.S. North and South prior to the U.S. Civil War as reflected in the publication of several 19th century essays by U.S. writers and educators. The article also discusses the significance of classical education in the curriculum of U.S. schools, particularly in Southern states, the education of females in the U.S., and gender roles in the U.S. during the 19th century.

The article discusses the history of America's southern states in relation to the concept of dysplacement which involves the loss of a sense of identification with other people through a shared connection to a geographical location. Author Mark Vanhoenacker's book "Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot" is assessed, along with the phrase place lag which is used to describe a sense of disorientation at being removed from a place or home country. Urban renewal and social re-engineering are assessed.

The article looks into the importance of regional distinctions in matters of southern literary studies in the U.S. It states that the study of early southern literature serves to expand American literary studies, and that other areas of the world share the historical, political, and economic patterns of the South. It concludes that Southern literature refers to the historical, material, cultural, and artistic patterns that emerge from southern literature and culture.

Thinking about the approach and scholarship called the New Southern Studies takes me back to the first years in my position in southern studies and history at the University of Mississippi. When I started that job in 1988, I had a great deal to learn, especially about the recent and contemporary South. So I turned to the best scholarly books I could find, especially those by my fellow historians and also by social scientists, literary scholars, music scholars, and folklorists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented which discusses the articles within the issue on the theme of photography of the U.S. Southern States from the antebellum period through the early 21st century with topics, including daguerreotypes, the documentary photographer Ed Wheeler and African American Mardi Gras celebration in Lafayette, Louisiana.