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BOOK REVIEWS47 background, this volume will prove an exhilarating and rewarding experience —it is military history of an unusually high order. James L. Morrison, Jr. York College of Pennsylvania Southerners and Other Americans. By Grady McWhiney. (New York: Basic Books 1973. Pp. 206. $7.95.) In a series of some twelve loosely organized essays Professor McWhiney seeks to analyse a number of the persistent myths generally associated with southern history, myths which he contends have distorted the true picture of the South. These writings, accumulated over a twenty year period, encompass the period from ante bellum America to recent concern with black history. In his preface, which is an excellent short essay on its own, the author reveals a problem of analysis which persists throughout the collection—the question of the extent of regional differences as opposed to basic American similarities. Some of the essays which follow are excellent examples of thoughtful analysis, others fail to be convincing. The initial selection, while purporting to destroy the myth of an irrepressible conflict, contributes little that is not already widely accepted in the profession. This reviewer also finds it difficult to fit the essay on the sex life of the "Old Army" officers into the theme of the collection, despite the appeal of the topic. On the other hand, the two selections on Jefferson Davis are timely analyses of the role played by the Confederate president in precipitating the Civil War and in bungling the task of military leadership afterward. The author presents three essays on the Reconstruction period, one of which convincingly argues that the mythology associated with the Ku Klux Klan's effective use of ghostly affectations to achieve its ends is lacking in substantive proof. The other two lean too far toward economic determinism to stand the test of recent historiography of the period. The final essay in the collection is an instructive appeal for historians to refrain from propagandizing or indoctrinating under the guise of revising the past in the interest of present social justice. One may disagree with some of Professor McWhiney's counter-arguments in this essay, but his conclusions appear irrefutable. This collection of essays, some of which have been previously published , represent selections chosen by the author to develop an integrated attack on myths which envelop the South. Assuming this objective , the disparate nature of the choices and their uneven quality detract from the goal, a failing which may be inherent in a collection chosen by the author rather than by an editor. They contain significant contributions to a rather broad spectrum of American history, as one would expect from a noted scholar, but whether or not they make an appreciable dent in the persistent mythology of Southern history 48CIVIL WAR HISTORY is highly questionable. But, as has been noted by George Tindall and others, perhaps the myth is the central theme of Southern history, and possibly the answer to the historian's quest for the Southern identity lies not in attacking the myths but in understanding them. Jack B. Scroggs North Texas State University The Decline of American Gentility. By Stow Persons. (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1973. Pp. xii, 336. $11.95.) To put Stow Persons' subtle but diffuse argument briefly, a new "mass society" of mobile, democratic, but antisocial and leaderless individuals developed in the half-century after the American Revolution, although the process was not complete until after the Civil War and not fully perceived until the twentieth century. The gentry who thought themselves the legitimate heirs of what Persons calls the "powerful and self-assured ruling class" of colonial days gradually dwindled to a coterie of the merely genteel, identifiable by their college education and other "high cultural activity." They were superficially emulated by the social-economic elite of new-rich entrepreneurs who were displacing them from power; mass society affected to disdain them; and almost their only successors today are academic intellectuals, notoriously alienated from both the elite and the mass that they theorize about. Such a thesis needs a good deal of economic, social, and ideological data from the period 1776-1825, when no doubt the "major social transformation " did occur. Persons mainly relies, however...

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