Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation - Hardcover

Glover, Lorri

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801884985 ISBN 13: 9780801884986

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Between the generations of Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, the culture of white Southerners experienced significant changes, including the establishment of a normative male identity that exuded confidence, independence, and power. Southern Sons, the first work in masculinity studies to concentrate on the early South, explores how young men of the southern gentry came of age between the 1790s and the 1820s. Lorri Glover examines how standards for manhood came about, how young men experienced them in the early South, and how those values transformed many American sons into southern nationalists who ultimately would conspire to tear apart the republic they had been raised to lead.

This was the first generation of boys raised to conceive of themselves as Americans, as well as the first cohort of self-defined southern men. They grew up believing that the fate of the American experiment in self-government depended on their ability to put away personal predispositions and perform prescribed roles. Because men faced demanding gender norms, boys had to pass exacting tests of manhood―in education, refinement, courting, careers, and slave mastery. Only then could they join the ranks of the elite and claim power in society.

Revealing the complex interplay of nationalism and regionalism in the lives of southern men, Glover brings new insight to the question of what led the South toward sectionalism and civil war.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Southern Sons, the first work in masculinity studies to concentrate on the early South, explores how young men of the southern gentry came of age between the 1790s and the 1820s. Lorri Glover examines how standards for manhood came about, how young men experienced them in the early South, and how those values transformed many American sons into southern nationalists who ultimately would conspire to tear apart the republic they had been raised to lead.

This was the first generation of boys raised to conceive of themselves as Americans, as well as the first cohort of self-defined southern men. They had to pass exacting tests of manhood―in education, refinement, courting, careers, and slave mastery. Only then could they join the ranks of the elite and claim power in society.

"Glover's new study of southern elite manhood in the new nation is an important contribution to southern history as well as to gender history."―William and Mary Quarterly

"Southern Sons is an impressive work, certain to influence―and perhaps even reshape―Southern social and cultural history for years to come, as well as the history of American masculinities."―The Historian

"We read about young men who exhibited a lifelong negotiation with authority, with society's expectations, with one another, and eventually with the North... Well written, meticulously researched."―Journal of the Early Republic

Lorri Glover is the John Francis Bannon Professor in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. She is the author of All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds among the Early South Carolina Gentry, also published by Johns Hopkins, and coauthor with Daniel Blake Smith of The Shipwreck That Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America.

About the Author:

Lorri Glover is the John Francis Bannon Professor in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. She is the author of All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds among the Early South Carolina Gentry, also published by Johns Hopkins, and coauthor with Daniel Blake Smith of The Shipwreck That Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America.

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0801884985
• ISBN 13: 9780801884986
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264