The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Agriculture and Industry (review)

A P R I L 2 0 1 0 153 moral guardians of their families, took responsibility upon themselves to encourage and promote personal piety in their family through their own actions and example. In every area of their lives, from courtship and marriage to childbirth and death, the belief that God held a plan for their lives provided many southern women with reassurance and with the belief that their life had purpose. Indeed, their domestic devotion in many ways became an active expression of their piety and promoted the spread of evangelicalism throughout the antebellum South. Thus the emphasis of evangelicalism upon personal piety and the importance of family led women to play a “central role in both the construction and the maintenance of the Bible Belt” (p. 3). This thoroughly researched and well-written book provides insightful analysis of the role women played in the spread of evangelicalism throughout the South. Historians of the antebellum South will find this book particularly useful and interesting. JENNIFER NEWMAN TREVIÑO University of Texas-Pan American The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Agriculture and Industry. Edited by Melissa Walker and James C. Cobb. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xviii, 354 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8078-32400 . $19.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8078-5909-4. In 1989 the University of North Carolina Press, together with the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture (CSSC), published the much anticipated Encyclopedia of Southern Culture to considerable acclaim. Believing that “the extent of changes in the American South and in Southern Studies” over the past two decades has made “the need for a new edition of that work . . . clear,” UNC Press and the CSSC have released “a new edition of the Encyclopedia that will remain relevant to a changing region” (pp. xiv, xii). In contrast to its forebearer, a single volume that ran to more than 1,600 pages, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture is divided into twenty-four individual volumes, with the intent of facilitating “the use of the Encyclopedia in academic courses” and offering a measure of convenience “for readers with more focused interests within the larger context of southern culture” (p. xiv). The eleventh volume of the New Encyclopedia takes up the topics of agriculture and industry, which fell under separate sections in 1989 but have now been combined “to provide a connected story of how southerners have made a living” (p. xvii). This ambitious aim was aided by T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 154 the selection of two prominent and exceptionally capable scholars to edit the volume: Melissa Walker and James Cobb, whose introductions to the agriculture and industry sections respectively are ably crafted and thought-provoking. Both sections are divided roughly in half, with thematic entries constituting the first portion and topical ones the second. Predictably, the thematic essays (Rural Life and Globalization, for instance) are generally, though not invariably, longer than topical entries such as Horses and Mules or Naval Stores. While a reader might object to the incorporation of an entry or two into one category rather than the other—why, for instance , are Garden Patches and Country Stores considered thematic and Home Extension Services topical?—the volume is tightly and coherently organized. Not surprisingly, the entries cover a remarkably broad diversity of subjects and include brief bibliographies. And, as promised, they reflect the transformations wrought in the South over the past two decades, with entries on aquaculture, Research Triangle Park, and Wal-Mart, for example . As with any work of this sort, there is a degree of unevenness in the entries, but the editors have ensured that each entry is capably done. Although none of the entries in this volume are superfluous, there are some curious absences. Thomas M. Campbell, for example, an Alabamian of signal importance in African American agricultural education in the South, does not so much as appear in the index. Nor, for that matter, does Noah B. Cloud, another Alabamian and one of the most influential advocates of agricultural reform and industrial development in the antebellum South...