Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War - Hardcover

Faust, Drew Gilpin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826208657 ISBN 13: 9780826208651

Publisher: Univ of Missouri Pr, 1992

Synopsis

"We all live within the stories we tell," writes Drew Faust, "for these tales fashion a coherent direction and identity out of the discontinuities of our past, present, and future." Forging an identity was an extraordinary task for white southerners of the late antebellum and Civil War era. Seeking to explain and justify their individual lives and their slave society, they told stories about themselves and their world - in diaries and letters, sermons and songs, novels and paintings - which reveal the foundations of power, meaning, and personal identity in the Old South.
In a series of eloquent essays, Faust investigates the experiences of wealthy planters, common soldiers, intellectuals, and Confederate women. She breaks especially fresh ground in her attention to southern thought and belief, to southern society and culture during the Civil War, and to the role of gender relations within the Confederate South.
Sometimes southern stories were collective, as in the case of the antebellum proslavery argument or Confederate discourses about women. Sometimes they were personal, as in the private writings of figures such as Lizzie Neblett, Mary Chesnut, Thornton Stringfellow, or James Henry Hammond. These men and women regularly employed their pens to create coherence and order amid the tangled circumstances of their particular lives and within a context of social prescriptions and expectations.
Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War represents some of the most interesting work in southern history of the past two decades. Faust's approach reveals a society so involved in defining itself and its legitimacy that it became embroiled in a war of words and ideas long before the onset of armed conflict. By exploring the cultural, moral, and personal dilemmas that confronted white southerners, Faust has made an important contribution to our understanding of southern culture, both before and after the Civil War.

About this title

About the Author:

Drew Gilpin Faust is the author of A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery, and The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South. She is Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Review:

"Southern Stories is an excellent collection of essays that illustrates all Faust's own storytelling genius that has made her one of the most widely read and insightful southern historians of our age."--Georgia Historical Quarterly

"As with her treatment of male slaveholders in peace, Faust's portraits of Confederate women in wartime illustrate the interplay between ideas and reality and place the slaveholders securely in the context of their own society. The result is a historically grounded and intellectually sophisticated approach that is rarely adversarial or dismissive of differing viewpoints."--Reviews in American History

"No neoconfederate she. Drew Faust writes about the South with affectionate understanding, but always with a sharp, critical eye. In these excellent essays, these stories, she remembers that, within the Confederacy, there were, along with the galloping white males, not only black men, but also black and white women who had their own idea of things."--William S. McFeely

"Her style of writing is equal to the quality of her research and the ingenuity of her insights. . . . One hasn't enjoyed the Civil War through a woman's eyes as much as in this book since Mrs. Chesnut's diary and Margaret Mitchell's novel."
--Southern Seen

"The book gives a vivid picture of people's thoughts and deeds as they were involved in various situations brought on by the war. An excellent book for any Civil War or southern culture collection."-- Library Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ of Missouri Pr
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0826208657
• ISBN 13: 9780826208651
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 252