The Urban South: A History (review)

180CIVIL WAR HISTORY No single oustanding leader emerges in this story. Although the regiment was commanded by colonels named White (Julius, the first commander , a former member of the Wisconsin legislature) and Black (John Charles of Danville, Illinois), its composition was rather more gray. The regiment's officers were factionalized and politicized because of the promotion system in which a vote of the officers usually determined promotions, although the governor and the adjutant-general often became involved. Officers who perceived that they were in the minority faction frequently received their promotions by volunteering to serve in newly recruited black regiments. Likewise, post-war egocentricity appears to have motivated the four winners of the Medals of Honor since none of the medals were awarded until application was made in the 1890s. The use of quotations from Sergeant Ketzle's memoirs greatly enriches this volume. When the men were denied both pay and proper supplies, he wryly commented, "We done the best we could by stealing corn out of horses and mules nosebags. ..." When the fraternization between the Union and Confederate troops involved in the siege of Vicksburg ended abruptly, Ketzle reported that the "cry along the front was 'hunt your holes.'" After Blacks had proven themselves in combat, Ketzle observed "the scales dropped from the eyes of some of the most rabid nigger-haters, and they had to acknowledge that a negro was just as good for soldiering." About forty percent of the pages of this book are used to include a complete roster of the regiment, copious endnotes, an impressive bibliography , and a useful index. Thus the length of the text (326 pages) is not so foreboding. The customized maps represent an improvement over the usual reproduced maps, although there are a few mistakes, such as extending the South(ern) Pacific Railroad into Indian Territory in spite of the correct assertion in the text that the terminus was at Rolla, Missouri. The author rather modestly asserts that his "regiment contributed its fair share to the preservation of the Union." One might add that the author has contributed his fair share to the preservation and enhancement of the history of the war for the Union. Mark Plummer Illinois State University The Urban South: A History. By Lawrence H. Larsen. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990. Pp. xiii, 199. $23.00.) Several years ago, Lawrence Larsen, a professor of history at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, announced his intention to complete studies of urbanization for every region of the United States. He began this commendably ambitious project with The Urban West at the End of the Nineteenth Century (1978). This monograph was followed by The BOOK REVIEWS181 Rise of the Urban South (1985). Why he has chosen to abandon perhaps only temporarily his larger goal for yet another study on southern urbanization is not explained anywhere in the book reviewed here. His first volume was at best a mediocre study and his purpose may have simply been to answer his critics and produce a better work. If that was his goal, he has succeeded to some extent. This second book is much better organized and is clear at least about its chronological coverage. It deals with southern urbanization from its beginnings in the colonial era and covers that topic through the 1980s. Yet, unfortunately, it lacks the kind of historiographical perspectives that one appreciates in a mostly synthetic study. This cannot be explained solely by its brevity (only 160 pages of text). It is also due to neglect of the current "big issues" (e.g., the process of suburbanization, the urban underclass, and the evolution of networks of cities) in urban historiography. Any reader looking for the innovative thinking, say, of Eric Monkkonen's America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities & Towns, 1790-1980 (1988), will be sorely disappointed. In the preface to this study, Larsen states that "this book deals less with the question of how cities fit into the southern experience . . . than with the history of southern cities" (xii). Translated, this means the author has avoided dealing with both questions about the differences between northern and southern cities and the imaginative approach to regionalism used by David...