The Historian behind the History: Conversations with Southern Historians ed. by Megan L. Bever, Scott A. Suarez (review)

The suggestion that historians might lurk somewhere behind the history they write seems a little jarring in an era when members of the younger set advertise their presence within it, littering conference papers with “my work” and “I argue.” Odd title aside, this valuable volume draws together ten interviews that appeared between 2005 and 2014 in Southern Historian, a journal written and edited by graduate students. The subjects—William W. Freehling, Laura F. Edwards, James M. McPherson, Gary W. Gallagher, Richard J. M. Blackett, J. Mills Thornton III, Dan T. Carter, Theodore Rosengarten, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Pete Daniel—are “southern historians” in the sense of being scholars of the American South. But they are evenly divided between those born or brought up in the South and those raised elsewhere. Nativity seems not really to matter in most respects though. Every one of them has changed our minds about the South’s struggles and the struggles of southerners. None appears inclined by their origins either to be more gentle or more fierce in approaching their subjects. But, not surprisingly, the native southerners seem to have had a more visceral introduction to their subjects. For example, Thornton grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott, learning early that local events participated in a broader history, one he became determined to track. “It was very clear to me that the world was being changed by folks I passed on the sidewalk every day,” he said (p. 121). Gilmore, who said she was “raised as a white supremacist,” saw the sit-in movement erupt in her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina, and thought, “Everything that I thought was true and forever was under siege” (p. 166). Carter had his epiphany at age twelve, seeing a young African American girl bawled out by a white bus driver for sitting up front. The nonsoutherners, by contrast, seem to have arrived at their lives’ work by more roundabout routes.

The interviewers ask questions about subject matter and craft that any of us might pose. How did Freehling light upon the subject of nullification? How did Rosengarten get along with the family of Ned Cobb, the protagonist of his epic book All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York, 1974)? How did Daniel put together an exhibit at the Smithsonian? Such questions elicit both consensus—most of the interviewees agree that historians need to reach beyond the academy to a wider audience—and interesting contrasts. While Edwards suggests the experience of the “marginalized” is more representative of an America in which adult, free, white men represented a decided minority, Gallagher insists that, given the distribution of authority in the Civil War era, historians can hardly get away with not studying “powerful white guys” (pp. 35, 73).

But what is distinctive about this volume is that because graduate students conducted the interviews, the book also focuses on these historians’ experiences as graduate students and with graduate students. The responses are admirably free of sugarcoating. Some are plainly heartbroken by the difficulties young scholars face securing tenure-track employment. Daniel has qualms about the future of museum work, citing “the decline of curatorial authority and donor intrusion” (p. 192). The women (oddly, only two are interviewed in this volume) are a bit more upbeat, Edwards believing an imperfect meritocracy still exists and Gilmore anticipating a wave of retirements within ten years that will expand opportunity considerably (sadly, she was interviewed in 2008, and little has changed). Few of these scholars show much patience for graduate training that consists chiefly of students sitting around seminar rooms eviscerating their elders’ work. Most of them seem grateful to have been mentored with a light touch, though it is not clear that they all mentor quite so gently. “Be a glad-hander on the...