The Encyclopedia of Southern History (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Encyclopedia of Southern History. Edited by David C. Roller and Robert W. Twyman. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Pp. xii, 1421. $75.00.) Roller and Twyman can take justifiable pride in their work. Here, from Abbeville to Zwaanendael, are almost 1400 pages of description, explanation , and identification of the significant persons, events, movements, institutions, and issues of southern history, prepared for an intended audience of teachers, students, scholars, and laymen. The editors define the South as the 1860 slave states plus the District of Columbia, thereby excluding Oklahoma. Articles are signed, unless written by the editors, arranged alphabetically, cross-referenced to other articles of parallel interest, and usually closed with bibliographical references. They are supplemented by thirty-six maps, seventy-two tables, and an extensive index. Unfortunately there is no listing of the 1130 contributors. Coverage is broad. For example, extended essays for each state usually embrace geography, exploration and early settlement, colonial and/or territorial history, the antebellum era, the Civil War and Reconstruction, recovery, and the twentieth century (sometimes with special note of trends since the Great Depression or World War II), and conclude with an extensive bibliography, a list of governors, and a table of population growth. Biographical sketches are also included, and a special effort was made to cover "significant figures about whom little has been written or about whom information is difficult to obtain" (p. vii), including women and blacks. There are entries for major scholars, "associations devoted to the study of the South" (p. viii), geography, linguistics, culture, literature, and natural history. Other types of entries discuss colleges and universities, families, political characteristics, political movements, churches, products, enterprises, religion, and amusements. Many users of this invaluable reference tool may feel a twinge of conscience when they examine it, because there will be a temptation to quarrel with the exclusion of some topics and the inclusion of others. However, such quibbles serve to underline the editors' problems with space limitations. There are surprisingly few unnecessary articles; it is easier to find omissions, but it is difficult to see just what could have been done to make the work more inclusive and still keep it manageable. And BOOK REVIEWS279 there are a number of entries a reader would not expect to find but is delighted to see—Humor, Local color, Minstrelsy, and Mint Julep, for example. The many historiographical discussions of individual historians and interpretations are important bonuses, as are the entries for newspapers—which often include comment on editorial policy and political loyalty—and the frequent inclusion of key court cases. This encyclopedia reflects the major concerns of American historiography in the last twenty years. There is a real effort to go beyond political, economic, and military discussions in order to reach social and cultural issues, and there is more coverage of women and blacks than would have been found in a work of this sort had it been compiled in the forties or fifties. Nevertheless, the "New History" emphasized by the current generation of younger historians is not as prominent as one might expect, both in content of articles and in authorship. The quantifiers usually get only passing mention, and even then generally not detailed enough that the layman would be aware of their distinctive approach. Although this could be taken as a sign that the New History has not yet impressed American historians, other publications, such as the major professional journals and Michael Kamman 's recent Past Before Us, seem to indicate the opposite. More likely, it is simply that a work ofthis sort does not easily lend itself to areport of the findings of the quantifiers, except in vague terms. On the other hand, The Encyclopedia of Southern History provides ample illustration of the New History's preoccupation with "history from the bottom up," as Christopher Lasch put it. Numerous articles on culture, customs, and behavior, and the discussions of institutional arrangements affecting the majority of southerners, black and white, attest to that: such entries range from Bourbon (whiskey), Clay eaters, dialects, Exodus of 1879, Folk medicine, and Galluses, to Peonage, Recreation, Shape-note songbooks, Tenant farming, Violence, Women, and Yeoman farmer. Historians of the...