The South at Work: Observations from 1904

Series Editor’s Preface

Series Editor’s Preface In The South at Work: Observations from 1904, William Garrott Brown offered a travel account for a non-southern audience, initially written as a series of twenty letters for the Boston Transcript. A native southerner, graduate of Harvard University, and well-received author, Brown essentially “tells about the South.”As Bruce E. Baker explains in his helpful and insightful introduction, The South at Work is in part a searching sociological commentary on the “race problem.” That much of what Brown wrote was tainted by some unpalatable aspects of white southern progressive thinking does not, as Baker points out, dilute the clarity of many of his observations. Brown provides intelligent commentary on a variety of matters critical to the South at the time, including freedom of thought, religion, political progress, and economic development .He offers us a unique perspective on the hopes of the New South at the turn of the twentieth century. That they went largely unrequited in no way diminishes the enduring value of his trenchant observations. ...