Notes
Notes Introduction Epigraph: Sallie Colvin, speaking to a Louisiana county fair, 1907; quoted in Ted Ownby, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 167. 1. Two excellent recent histories of southern uses of the past and southern identity generally are James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). In studying the turn-of-the-century South, I have been influenced by the definition of culture provided by Clifford Geertz, who writes: “The concept of culture I espouse . . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.” Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973; reprint, New York: Basic Books, 2000), 5. 2. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, “The Creed of the Old South,” in Maurice Garland Fulton, Southern Life in Southern Literature: Selections of Representative Prose and Poetry (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1917), 377–88; quote at 387. On the other hand, literary critic William P. Trent argued: “A ‘Solid South’ would seem to presuppose a homogeneous Southern people . . . but to draw this inference would be to make a mistake.” Even so, Trent speaks throughout his essay of “the Southern people,” “Southern civilization,” and “Southern brethren.” Further, Trent repeats the familiar argument that the civilization of the South was Cavalier, while that of the North was Puritan, and admits that “the institution of slavery gave a more or less uniform patriarchal tone to society in every Southern state.” William P. Trent, “The Diversity Among Southerners,” in Fulton, Southern Life in Southern Literature, 389–98; quote at 389. Black southerners do not figure as southerners in either scholar’s account of the South. In thinking of the blood ties that constituted the South, Gildersleeve referred of course only to the acknowledged, legitimate blood ties. 3. In the past two decades historians have written extensively on whiteness as a racial category in the United States. This book draws on that scholarship, while recognizing that “whiteness studies” is a fluid, evolving field of inquiry. Below I indicate works I have found particularly helpful. On whiteness in a broad Western context, see Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997). For excellent general works on whiteness in America, see the anthology Critical White Studies: Looking Beyond the Mirror, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); and Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998). The best study of whiteness in the American South is Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998). Pioneering works on American whiteness, dealing 162 Notes to Pages xvi–xvii principally with the nineteenth century, are those of David R. Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, and Alexander Saxton. See Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), and Toward the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History (London: Verso, 1994); Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990). For a useful attempt to define more rigorously whiteness studies, see Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray, ed., The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). For an attempt to complicate explorations of whiteness, see Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, ed., White Trash: Race and Class in America (New York: Routledge, 1997). Some historians have proved skeptical of this scholarship, criticizing it as ahistorical or insufficiently rigorously defined. See Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 2–32. On public skepticism of whiteness studies, see Darryl Fears, “Hue and Cry on ‘Whiteness Studies,’” Washington Post 20 June 2003; thanks to Marc Kilmer for bringing this story to my attention. I share most scholars’ conviction that the idea of race has a...
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