Southern Crucible: The Making of an American Region by William A. Link (review)

For college instructors seeking a comprehensive narrative text capturing the entirety of southern history, William A. Link’s Southern Crucible: The Making of an American Region serves as the finest survey produced to date. The breadth of coverage, analytical depth, historiographical relevance, and lucid but concise prose make for a superb volume accessible to undergraduates of all levels as well as to general readers. Southern Crucible successfully integrates the social, political, cultural, and economic history of the South and deftly places the region within its national context.

Released as either two separate volumes divided chronologically at the end of Reconstruction, or as in the case under review, a combined and complete text, Southern Crucible takes readers from before European contact to the present. Beginning with a discussion of the demographic origins and environmental context of human settlement in the South, Link incorporates both Native American civilizations as well as Spanish and French coastal settlements in places that became part of the American South. From there the story proceeds with the development of a slave plantation system and British (and British-descended) settlers forcibly expanding that system into the Old Southwest. Taking in much of the latest scholarship on the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction, Link provides as good a depiction of the war experience as any to be found in a survey text.

The real strength of the book lies in the second half, as Link’s expertise in the transformation of the New South shines through. The emergence of the Jim Crow system, continued impoverishment of the region, textile-based industrialization, and mass migration characterize the story from the 1880s to the 1920s. Chapters on the mid-twentieth century incorporate technological and social changes associated with World War II as the South simultaneously experienced the black freedom movement and the growth of Sun Belt suburbs. Link concludes by remarking how the modern South has remade America as a whole by assuming a greater degree of cultural, economic, and political power than at any other time since the Civil War.

If there is a single, overarching argument driving the narrative it is the centrality of race and the “clash of identities” that gave shape to the plantation system and to the post–Civil War social order (p. xii). Link is careful to identify the instability of racial ideology, however, especially when emancipation, the Populist movement, the Great Depression, and the collapse of legal segregation briefly imperiled the class structure. But the long scope of coverage, ranging from the rise, sustenance, and decline of the plantation system to the adjustments to post–World War II modernity, underscores the persistence of race as a marker of social and political power in the South, even more than in the rest of the country.

The transformation of southern evangelicalism receives less attention than expected. To be sure, Link discusses the early proliferation of evangelical revivalism in the early-nineteenth-century South, the rise of fundamentalism after World War I, and the ascendancy of the Christian Right in the 1980s. But these developments appear more as episodic interjections in the larger course of southern history than they do as markers of southern identity over time.

Geographic coverage of the South is a bit uneven. Spanish and French cultural influences along the Gulf Coast garner extensive and welcome treatment, while southern Appalachia and the Ohio and Missouri River Valleys barely intrude on the narrative. Considering how often Appalachia and the border South exemplified the flashpoints of slavery’s extension, labor struggle, the limits of urbanization, and environmental destruction, the narrative would have been enriched by more thorough coverage of those regions.

The book occasionally suffers from distracting editing errors that could easily confuse undergraduates relying on Southern Crucible as a course text. The sacking of Lawrence, Kansas, for example, is described as occurring two months after the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision...