Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Here is an important and idiosyncratic book. The book is important because Wyatt-Brown has offered a new synthesis of antebellum Southern history that forces us to reconsider the very nature of that society. He argues that honor, properly understood, provided the cultural glue of the Old South, Honor, a fragile system of values in which one's reputation takes precedence over other ways of determining an individual's worth, explains—for Wyatt-Brown at least—virtually everything about white Southerners. As the discoverers of new historical syntheses are prone (and perhaps entitled) to do, Wyatt-Brown seems to exaggerate the ubiquity and power of honor in the South. In this book, honor runs roughshod over adversaries that offered much more resistance to honor than the author admits. Evangelical Christianity and a faith in America's republican government of laws, in particular, qualified honor, weakened honor in the antebellum South much more than this book admits. Nevertheless, students of the South will long stand indebted to Bertram Wyatt-Brown." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
"Students who have rad it for reports Love it! Seriously considering it as a secondary text."--Harvey W. Jackson, Jacksonville State Univ.
"The most original, creative, and provocative study of social relationships in the Old South since W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South."--Lawrence Friedman, Bowling Green State University
"A remarkable achievement--a re-creation of the living reality of the antebellum South from thousands of bits and pieces of the dead past."--Walker Percy