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326 JON L. WAKELYN’S CONTRIBUTION Jane Turner Censer and Rosemarie Zagarri J on Wakelyn’s impact on the field of history extends beyond his scholarly research, writing, and editing. Like a stone dropped in a pond, his contributions have radiated outward to influence a much larger circle of students and colleagues whom he touched in various ways over the course of years. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1966 from Rice University, where he studied under Frank E. Vandiver, Wakelyn taught briefly at Washington College in Chestertown , Maryland. In 1970, he came to the History Department at the Catholic University of America, where he quickly rose from assistant professor to associate professor. In recognition of his scholarly merit, he was appointed ordinary (full) professor in 1977. Over the years, he assumed a number of administrative posts, serving as CUA’s associate dean of the School of Arts and Sciences from April 1975 to September 1978 and as department chair from September 1987 to August 1993. For two semesters in the early 1990s, he took his expertise abroad as a visiting professor at St. Patrick’s College in Maynooth, Ireland. Then after more than a quarter-century at Catholic University, Wakelyn moved to Kent State University, where he served first as department chair and then as professor of history until his retirement in 2006. Because of the breadth of Wakelyn’s vision, it has sometimes been difficult to categorize his scholarly field. A major unifying aspect of his academic career has been its focus on the South, especially the South of the early nineteenth century and the Confederacy. There he has concentrated on ideas and activities , most often of the educated and politically active. Whether political slogans, literary creations, or religious credos, the important ideas shaping life in the nineteenth-century South have drawn Wakelyn’s close scrutiny. As a scholar XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 327 Jon L. Wakelyn’s Contribution of the South, Wakelyn has been sympathetic to but critical of its people and their actions. This view is apparent in much of his writing, but the collection of his essays that appeared in 2002, Confederates against the Confederacy: Essays on Leadership and Loyalty, most clearly reveals these aspects and in many ways sums up his scholarly interests and rounds out his contribution to southern history. Jon Wakelyn’s first years in the historical profession hinted at the role he would play as a chronicler of the southern mind, especially the radical South Carolinian ideology that culminated in secession. At Rice University, Frank Vandiver, a scholar widely known for his expertise in military history, supervised Wakelyn’s dissertation, which focused on William Gilmore Simms, one of the nineteenth-century South’s best-known poets and writers. In the book that emerged from the dissertation, The Politics of a Literary Man: William Gilmore Simms, Wakelyn found a fresh new angle. Rather than examine why Simms did not write the great American novel, Wakelyn considered the Carolinian’s career as a political newspaperman and politician. In particular, Wakelyn scrutinized how Simms, a Unionist in the 1820s and 1830s, hurled himself across the political spectrum to join those who advocated secession and an independent southern nation. While chronicling Simms’s ill-starred career as a political newspaperman and his short stints as a state representative, Wakelyn dwelt on Simms as a public intellectual. Here in addition to the newspaper work, Wakelyn followed Simms’s social criticism, explored themes in the Carolinian’s fiction, and examined his role in literary Charleston and beyond.1 This wide-ranging examination of Simms offered a new view of his political evolution. Wakelyn emphasized the popularity that the author gained in South Carolina for his diatribes against English travel writers Frances Trollope’s and Harriet Martineau’s antislavery observations. The 1832 review in which Simms blasted Trollope in some ways foreshadowed the longer, more intense review of Martineau that he wrote in 1837. In both accounts, the southern author stalwartly defended slavery in ways that later became commonplace among southern partisans. “Realizing that the best defense was a good offense,” Wakelyn pointed out, “Simms centered his attack on Miss Martineau’s book around her avoidance of the many Northern social problems, including the position of the free Negro and the white laborer in Northern society.”2 Wakelyn’s study provided modern scholars with a helpful new interpretation of a thwarted Old South thinker as well as the manner in which intellectuals in the Old South [18.191...

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