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110Southern Cultures their young twin brothers; the black rake holding his sweetheart, a cigarette, and a flask. During a period when cultural divisions and suspicions fostered considerable injustice and an active Ku Klux Klan, Trlica's camera recorded the hopes and frailties common to a diverse citizenry. While most of the credit for the affecting lyrical quality of this book belongs, of course, to the photographer, certain editorial and production choices by McCandless and her publishers have provided noteworthy enhancement. First, the tenor of the photographic headings— "Childhood," "Rites of Passage," "Role Models and Guides," "Peers and the Bonds of Friendship," "Couples," "The Family," and "Roles and Characters"—reflects a thoughtful assessment of social content. Second, the book is printed on warmer paper and in a considerably warmer ink than those of the Bürgert volume. And third, while not always advisable, the decision to print the clear over-carriage of each negative, resulting in an irregular black border, here contributes appropriately to the elegiac tone. Both Equal Before the Lens and Pioneer Commercial Photography are valuable documents in the still -nascent study of early commercial photography. Their texts supply often parallel, sometimes divergent, but revealingly complementary analyses. And their images invite lingering reflection. Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War. By Drew Gilpin Faust. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. 252 pp. Cloth, $24.95. Reviewed by William L. Barney, Bowman Gray Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and specialist in nineteenth-century southern history. His latest work is Battleground for the Union. Southern Stories, a collection of ten essays published over the past fifteen years, provides a dazzling platform for the elegant skills of Professor Faust in intellectual and cultural history . Evenly balanced in their treatment of the antebellum and Civil War South and the gendered realities of men and women, the essays are united by their concern "with how members of a slaveholding society made sense out of a world that seems to us in the twentieth century to make very little sense at all." Southern whites tried to make sense of themselves and their world through the stories they told and acted out. Some of these stories were collective ones in which plots were shaped by cultural assumptions and prescriptions intended to define and legitimate socially acceptable beliefs and behavior. For example, the proslavery ideology that matured in the 1830s in response to abolitionist attacks from outside the South became a vehicle for explaining and justifying slavery to whites within the South. By insisting that both the Old and New Testaments offered irrefutable proof of God's sanctioning of slavery, proslavery ideologues transformed slavery into a positive good and slaveholding into an act of Christian benevolence. The masterslave relationship, far from being evidence of southern depravity and barbarism, was enshrined as a model of evangelical stewardship in which Christian masters provided care, protection, and religious instruction to their bondservants. Faust's other collective stories break fresh ground in the cultural history of the nineteenth-century South and reveal her remarkable ability to mine the insights of disciplines as diverse as cultural anthropology, social psychology, linguistic theory, and gender Reviews111 studies. Constructed around the concept of words as a symbolic form of social action, her analysis of the rhetoric in the agricultural addresses of antebellum South Carolina planters opens up new ways of understanding how the planter minority fashioned ideological unity and social solidarity in this most radical of all southern states. Her examination of the meaning of revivalism in Confederate armies blends military and intellectual history to reveal how religious ideas were invoked in the defense of the Confederacy. Grounded in Confederate religious literature and post-World War II studies on combat stress, "Christian Soldiers: The Meaning of Revivalism in the Confederate Army" re-creates the emotional and intellectual setting in which soldiers underwent conversion experiences. Faust's prototypical Johnny Reb was a late adolescent caught up in a frightening crisis of identity. Thrust into an alien new world of military discipline that deprived him of the very personal liberty for which he was fighting, and exposed to the horror of combat and the constant threat of death, he was...

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