Two Alabama Historians Write Alabama History: Honoring Robert David Ward (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 158 break new ground but summarizes an arcane ritual ably in lively prose. She traces the racial politics of Mardi Gras and illuminates the rituals of class and genealogy that underpin the debutantes’ experience. George Bernard Shaw once observed that “the great secret” did not lie in having either good or bad manners, “but having the same manner for all human souls; in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.” By this definition, no reader of these essays will ever confuse the American South with Heaven. PAMELA TYLER University of Southern Mississippi Two Alabama Historians Write Alabama History: Honoring Robert David Ward. Edited by William Warren Rogers. Tallahassee, Fl.: Sentry Press, 2008. xiv, 134 pp. $20.00. ISBN 978-1-889574-32-5. In 2006, Alabama lost one of its eminent historians, Robert David Ward, a native of Montevallo who spent his entire professional life at Georgia Southern University. Over the course of these years, Professor Ward often collaborated with his friend, historian Bill Rogers, who spent his teaching years at Florida State University. The two had met in graduate school at Auburn University (then the Alabama Polytechnic Institute ) in September 1950. Beyond American history, they had much in common—including being avid tennis players. Their close friendship lasted until David’s death. Their attempt at coauthoring articles began with a weekly column in the Auburn student newspaper, The Plainsman. Ward and Rogers both pursued their doctoral studies in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—David studying twentiethcentury American history and Bill working in southern history, specializing in the post–Civil War and Reconstruction periods. Over the next half century, the two historians worked on research projects that resulted in six books and ten articles. This volume contains six of the essays they coauthored and one that Ward wrote alone. All have appeared in print except the one essay they were working on when Ward died in April 2006. That essay was about a personal quarrel between Alabama historian John Witherspoon DuBose and William O. Robbins, the warden of the state penitentiary at Wetumpka. There was a bitter and unusual feud, a little gem of history that Ward and Rogers discovered during research for their book on Alabama’s response to the penitentiary movement, 1829–1865. A P R I L 2 0 0 9 159 The essays in Two Alabama Historians are eclectic, with the only thread being the collaboration of Rogers and Ward. The essays cover topics as varied as Oscar’s Wilde’s 1882 visit to Alabama, a Civil War era story of Mississippi prisoners in the Alabama penitentiary, and two essays that deal with convict leasing in Alabama coal mines. One of their most in- fluential essays was on Jack Turner that appeared in the October 1972 Journal of Negro History. This introduction to Turner (“‘Jack Turnerism’: A Political Phenomenon of the Deep South”) was followed by a wellreceived book, August Reckoning: Jack Turner and Racism in Post–Civil War Alabama (Baton Rouge, 1973). David Ward had a special skill and a talent for writing and selecting the precise and best word, a result of having a mother who was an English professor at the University of Montevallo. He was at his best writing broad and general introductions or summations that captured the essence and the nuances of any topic. One of his finest was the short essay “Alabama Past and Future” that was the final chapter of Alabama: The History of a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa, 1994). It is fitting that this essay concludes the chapters in this volume, and David Ward’s sole authorship is recognized publicly for the first time. This volume allows one interested in Alabama history to have quick and easy access to a small collection of essays that are significant to the interpretation of the state’s past, and permits those who have followed the writing contributions of Rogers and Ward to read and review some of their finest work. LEAH RAWLS...