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A roundtable discussion on the topic of the film "The Birth of a Nation," directed by film director Nate Parker, is presented and features several scholars including Clemson University professor Vernon Burton, Suffolk University professor Kenneth S. Greenberg, and Penn State University professor John Craig Hammond. It discusses the film's portrayal of the events prior to the slave uprising led by African American slave Nat Turner in 1831, particularly focusing on the impact of slavery in the U.S. south.

The article discusses how the government of the Confederate States of America utilized the military detention facility Castle Thunder Prison in Richmond, Virginia, to reinforce the concepts of paternalism and gender roles and notions of masculinity, femininity, and nationalism during the U.S. Civil War. It also argues that Caste Run demonstrated an upset in the social order of the South.

The article discusses the putative role that African American slaves played in causing the American Civil War, with a particular focus on the Underground Railroad's role in this regard. The geographic elements related to American slavery and the concept of freedom for African Americans, including the opportunity for liberty north of the Mason-Dixon Line, are discussed. The article compares the American Northern States and Southern States, including Southern elites' perspective on the U.S. Congress' power to legislate against slavery.

The article discusses aspects of motherhood and labor in slave-owning households of the Southern States during the antebellum period. It explores how women slaves were used for both reproduction and labor, as the end of the international slave trade made an increase in the slave population more important. It considers how individual plantation owners had a large impact on the reproductive rates and infant mortality. The quality of life for enslaved mothers is explored.

This article discusses the secession of the lower southern U.S. states during the U.S. civil war. The article provides information regarding the connection between slaveholding and support for succession in lower South, analyzes the votes for secession conventions in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and investigates the nature of division between pro-Union and pro-north groups.

Focuses on the rejection by Southerners of the idea of secession as a cure for alleged Northern infringements on Southern constitutional rights. Efforts of unionists in the South in helping stave off the crisis in 1850; Congressional debate over the legitimacy of slavery's extension into the territories arising during and after the Mexican War.

The article examines the functioning of joint-stock companies, covered bonds, and municipal bonds that were utilized in order to move capital and economic value to foreign investors with the goal of dispossessing Native American groups such as the Creek Nation and Chickasaw Nation that had resided in Southern U.S. states during the early-to-mid-19th century.

This article discusses the history of teacher-student relationships in the Southern United States during the 19th century. The author comments on the state of the education system in the U.S. at the time, in which most teachers were female, and examines the rise of the importance given to the education of women, as promoted by religious institutions. Particular focus is given to teacher Maria Louisa Spear and her experiences teaching in North Carolina and Virginia.

The article discusses the issue of political sectionalism surrounding cod fisheries and cod fishermen on the U.S. Atlantic Ocean coast during the antebellum period. The impact that the political issues of fisheries had on relations between U.S. Southern and Northern (and Northeastern) states is discussed.

This study examines two southern Louisiana plantation museums: Laura and Oak Alley, using a framework that stresses the narrative power and politics of these heritage sites. Located a mile from each other along the Mississippi River, they present two similar yet different narratives of the antebellum American South. Laura places more emphasis on the enslaved who inhabited the plantation than does Oak Alley, whose narrative centers upon the opulence of the plantation home – that is, ‘the big house'. This study explores what visitors take away from their plantation tours. Specifically, it examines their thoughts about how the enslaved are represented at these two museums. The study's data come from visitors’ comments posted on the travel website TripAdvisor. The object of the study is to gain a greater understanding of what visitors learn about the history of the enslaved on these tours and how they participate, along with site managers, in the narrative construction of the plantation and negotiating the divide between tourism as amusement and tourism as memorial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the history of dirt eating in the Antebellum and early modern South. It explores the history and persistence of dirt eating, which reveals Southern views of class, race and nutrition. It looks at the importance role of dirt eating in defiining the eating habits and health of African Americans and poor whites during the period.

The article discusses the relationship between photography and physiognomy in the culture of the mid 19th century antebellum U.S. Southern States. An overview of daguerreotypes taken during the antebellum South, including middle classes families' use of daguerreotypes as status symbols and for mourning, is provided.

An essay is presented concerning the mobility of elite women in Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana, between 1790 and 1861. It discusses the spatial practices of urban women in Charleston and New Orleans as defined by gender, race, and social standing, the use of public spaces by elite women as political areas and how women shaped the urban South, and thus expanded their own freedom of mobility. The article also discusses the exclusion of African American women from social mobility, prostitution in Charleston and New Orleans, and the concept of respectability.

The maritime interstate trade in bondspersons illustrates the contours of United States capitalism of the early nineteenth century as it developed between 1807 and midcentury. The saltwater trade between the Chesapeake and New Orleans comprised four stages corresponding to larger economic developments. An incidental slave trade rose in the context of the US ban on imported slaves, embargoes, and the growth of domestic commerce. An essential trade followed, growing in the post-War of 1812 transatlantic market for agricultural staples. It was carried on aboard vessels plying the so-called cotton triangle and also ships carrying regionally-specific goods and commodities between domestic ports. The 1830s witnessed a vertical trade exemplified by one slaving firm that responded to the swift expansion of credit and surging demand. Following the panic of 1837, market fragmentation led to a mechanical trade, which was also dependent on robust exports of slave-produced crops. Financial technologies propelled that development, and the maritime slave trade was nearly seamlessly integrated into the broader coastal trade. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article looks at mid-19th century U.S. politics, focusing on the political career of Texas Governor and U.S. Senator Sam Houston in the context of party politics in the Southern states. It looks at how historians have assessed Houston's membership in the American Party, or Know-Nothings, and discusses Houston's views on matters including slavery, temperance, and Southern secession. The author presents a case for the view that Houston's politics reflect the legacy of the Whig party.

An essay is presented which discusses the interpersonal relationships between authors, intellectuals and editors of the U.S. Southern States and U.S. Northern States during antebellum period, including their letter exchanges. An overview of American Southerner writer William Gilmore Simms's relations with Northern authors, including in regard to literary gossip, is provided.

The Fredericksburg Iron and Steel Manufacturing Company's ironmaking facility, Catharine Furnace, had the look of a prime mover in antebellum Virginia's industrial sector when it opened in 1838. Its manager and principal owner, John Spotswood Wellford, successfully tapped into his social capital to secure military ordnance contracts, but in the process the firm became utterly dependent upon his ability to secure this work through personal connections. By failing to expand the market for its pig iron and castings in local, regional, and national markets, the firm relied upon these ordnance contracts for shot and shell for its existence. When Wellford died in 1846, the Fredericksburg Iron and Steel Manufacturing Company collapsed. A few years later, Catharine Furnace stood cold and abandoned – a severe reminder of the limited prospects of Virginia's industrial economy and the perils of relying on an individual entrepreneur's personal capital during a critical period of American industrialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

De Bow's Review was the leading magazine of the South during the antebellum period. This historical study examines the journal's meaning-making about Mexicans and reveals how the magazine, as the principal voice of the section's plantation, commercial, banking, and mining interests, promoted the image of a broken, degenerate Mexico and proclaimed that only the "Anglo-Saxon race" was capable of bringing progress amid the American project of empire-building. Though Mexicans' racial status was unresolved in the 1840s, De Bow's Review correspondents later assigned to them the status of non-masters unit to self-govern and, therefore, fit only to serve and to be ruled by their Anglo-American conquerors. The context of the correspondents' claims of Mexican inferiority suggests that they simultaneously engaged in an unspoken struggle to differentiate the South from the North by defining Mexican inferiority in relation to Southern values of bravery, honor, and dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article represents an exploration of class identity among southerners during the decade preceding the Civil War. Myriad works on class identity in the antebellum era are extant, but few have used sources by Americans living abroad. William Stiles's History of Austria shows consistent amount of sympathy for European nobles and aristocrats during the 1848 Revolution in the Austrian Empire. The book, centered on a historical event that stemmed from class inequality and nationalist thought, provides an interesting lens to address the issue of class culture and identity in the United States. Using Stiles's work, newspapers, and appropriate primary and secondary monographs, the article argues that aristocratic identity in the South remained more influential than recent historians allowed well into the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of northern teachers in the U.S. South prior to the U.S. Civil War. Particular focus is given to changes in educational attitudes as related to national identity in the antebellum South. According to the author, the rise of common schools coincided with increased tensions over the issue of slavery and perceptions of the decline of Southern political influence. It is suggested that northern teachers were suspected of inculcating Southern youth with abolitionist ideas. Other topics include textbooks, Southern secondary and higher education institutions, and education in the Confederate States of America.

The article discusses the practice of barring out, in which schoolchildren barricaded the school against the entry of their teacher until he granted them treats or holidays, among yeoman farming communities in the antebellum southern U.S. According to the author, the practice allowed schoolchildren to imitate the political activities of their dissenting parents. Details on the origins of the practice in Great Britain and its history in the U.S. are presented. Topics discussed include political theater, honor, and social class.

A literary criticism is presented which discusses the reception of the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, which is highly critical of slavery in the U.S., in the Southern U.S. following its publication in 1852. The author argues that while many in the South disliked the novel due to pro-slavery sympathies, reactions were not homogenous, with many demonstrating antislavery beliefs. Reviews from authors such as Louisa S. McCord, Mary Boykin Chestnut, and John R. Thompson are discussed.

The article discusses the role of German-American Charles Frederick Gunther during the U.S. Civil War. It examines Gunther's service to the Confederacy during the war following his being located in Memphis, Tennessee, when the U.S. southern states seceded from the union. The article states that Gunther worked as a purchasing agent aboard the steamship "Rose Douglas" that ferried men and material to the Confederate forces along the Mississippi River. The article also discusses the contents of Gunther's extensive diaries that he kept during the war. According to the article, Gunther endowed the Chicago History Museum with most of its U.S. Civil War collection and served as an alderman and city treasurer in Chicago in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

The article discusses race, class and the schools of the U.S South states during the Antebellum period. Particular focus is given to the University of North Carolina president Rev. Joseph Caldwell's campaign for railroad development and public education. North Carolina Superintendent of Common Schools Calvin Henderson Wiley's ambivalent views on racial and social inequality, including the disparity between his private convictions and his political actions, are presented. Perspectives on U.S. primary education and the inclusion of blacks within it are also presented.

The article presents a case study of Kentucky editor and U.S. Democratic Party political operative George Nicholas Sanders. It examines his career and its connections between the Southern U.S. and Europe in the 1840s and 1850s, U.S. Civil War-era internationalism in the South, and the concept of nationalism. The article also examines his relationship with Hungarian rebel Lajos (Louis) Kossuth. The author argues that Sanders is an understudied figure in the history of the Southern states.

When the Crimean War, which pitted Russia against Turkey, Britain, and France, erupted in the mid-nineteenth century, the Southern section (the states of the future Confederacy) of the United States followed the battles and military maneuvers of the conflict intently. Generals, heroes, and tactics of all the belligerents were subjects of speculation. Poems, parodies, and articles were rife in Southern newspapers about the war. The South bemoaned what it considered a lack of action, and enjoyed comparing it with America's previous war, naturally to the advantage of the U.S. As the war ran its course, the bulk of Southern sympathy lay with the Russians, possibly because of a similar labor system—serfdom in Russia and slavery in the South. The heroic stand of Sebastopol, the last great Russian bastion, was lauded by the South and, when it finally fell, its loss was bemoaned. Not only the South, but all America was interested in the war and future Civil War Northern generals McClellan and Hallack, along with other military personnel, were sent to the Crimea as observers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A literary criticism of the book "Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery" by Henry Goings is presented. It analyzes the book's observations and attempts to interpret the narrative as a geopolitical commentary on slavery and planter migration within the context of the African American experience in southern states.

This article considers the life of Sarah Hicks, a young middle class woman born and raised in the cultural milieu of antebellum New York, who, in 1853, married Benjamin F. Williams, a physician and slaveholder from Greene County North Carolina. The article traces her literal journey across the Mason-Dixon line where she encountered southern ways of life that were, in the first instance, bewildering to her. Gender forms the primary focus of the article as Sarah moved from a northern gender ideal of true womanhood to that of the plantation mistress. Her search for a sense of belonging as a southerner suggests a period of transition in her life as she reconfigured what it meant to a woman, wife, and mother in the antebellum world of the slaveholding South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the popular memory and celebration of the civilization of the Southern States during the 19th-century through examining the characteristics of plantation museums. The authors suggest that these museums tend to become ahistorical, fetishized depictions of Southern White affluence and not proper sites of historical education on the problems of African American slavery. The use of critical race theory and narrative/counter-narrative analysis of oral history is then presented as a means of defetishizing the historical memorial of slavery in Southern plantations.

The essay discusses personal experiences of settlement in the U.S. Southern frontier during the years of the early republic. The author utilizes travel narratives, diaries, and letters composed by migrants to describe individual encounters with migration and the formation of a national myth regrading the pristine character of the Southern frontier. Emphasis is given to settlement in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Other topics discussed include family life, land acquisition, and commercial activity.

The article focuses on the practice of Antebellum slaveowners in the Southern States to arrange for fights between their male slaves as a form of entertainment. Using slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, the author explores matters of the identity of African American slaves, their views on masculinity, and how such wrestling and boxing matches fostered a sense of social solidarity among men. The article also provides an overview of the historiography of slave studies, especially gendered studies.

This article explores slave mortgages from the 18th and 19th-century public records of Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana and considers both the economic and social impact that mortgages had on enslaved people in the Southern States during the period. Some of the subjects considered include the velocity of money, both Colonial and Antebellum policies towards collateral-based issuance of credit based on slaves, both American and British banks and banking practices, international business relations, and the impact of foreclosures on slave families.

Traditionally scholars have downplayed the importance of southern calls to reopen the transatlantic slave trade in the 1850s. Those who have paid serious attention to this effort see it as another endeavor by aristocratic planters to enshrine their social, economic, and political power in the antebellum South. The advocates were, as one puts it, 'no champions of the common white man.' Two Irish-American leaders who supported the reopening, John Mitchel and Andrew Gordon Magrath, complicate this view of the attempt as just a planters' plot. Their actions and opinions indicate that some proponents did see importing African slaves as something that would benefit all whites and not just the elite, and, as a result, protect the overall 'interests' of the South. Mitchel and Magrath's support of Ireland and Irish immigrants and their opposition to British power influenced their positions on the matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an in-depth exploration into the research and academic accomplishments of the Southern U.S. historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips on the history of slavery and the antebellum Southern States in the 1930s. Phillips' work on the developments leading up to secession are particularly discussed. The connections shared between Phillips and the North Carolina State Literary and Historical Association are also described, noting several lectures and papers he printed through the society. Analysis is also provided evaluating his reception by historians in contemporary and following generations and his own views of the role of slavery and the region's politics during the period.

The article discusses the social impact of the return of fugitive slave Anthony Burns to master Charles Suttle in Virginia according to a court proceeding in Boston, Massachusetts. Emphasis is given to editorials and criticism from Southerners such as George Fitzhugh in support of slavery and the way of life in the U.S. South. Other topics include the influence of abolitionist rhetoric, southern rights of property, and slave commissioner Edward Greely Loring.

In this paper I review risk management and horticultural production among the Muscogee Creek of southeastern North America (1715-1825) in an attempt to understand decisions about land use. The z-score model and the marginal value theorem are developed, incorporating the effects of population growth among consumers and confounding variables that result from long-term resource consumption. The study calculated the annual productivity of horticultural fields of the Muscogee town of Cussetuh between 1715 and 1825 and found that the native people were not maximizing long-term average maize yield. The Cussetuh ceased using their horticultural fields sooner than a marginal value model would predict, which is consistent with the z-score model of a risk-sensitive consumer. I discuss implications of the finding that the Southeastern Native Americans were risk sensitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates patterns of socioeconomic difference in the wartime morbidity and mortality of black Union soldiers during the American Civil War. Among the factors that contributed to lower probabilities of contracting and dying of disease were lighter skin color, a nonfield occupation, residence on a large plantation, and residence in a rural area prior to enlistment. Patterns of disease-specific mortality and timing of death suggest that the differences in the development of immunity to disease and in nutritional status prior to enlistment were responsible for the observed socioeconomic differences in wartime health. For example, the advantages of light-skinned soldiers over dark-skinned and of enlisted men formerly engaged in nonfield occupations over field hands resulted from differences in nutritional status. The lower wartime mortality of ex-slaves from large plantations can be explained by their better-developed immunity and superior nutritional status. The results of this article suggest that there were substantial disparities in the health of the slave population on the eve of the Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented discussing the emergence of a 19th century professional and commercial southern middle class that incorporated support for slavery with a desire for industrialization, urbanization, and cultural progress. The need to reconsider class as a central category of historical analysis of the South through a study of its literature, race, gender, cultural transmission, and intellectual life is discussed. The challenge of defining the term middle-class in the 19th century South is addressed.

The article looks at the evolution of sport and recreation in Georgia and South Carolina during the early National and Colonial period. Social changes in the lowcountry during the 18th century which brought people to change their perceptions of traditions are discussed, including the creation and adoption of new American social standards and contempt for customs that were too closely associated with England. The author also considers the influences of the expansion of slavery as an aspect of society.

The article discusses the social processes involved in making slavery an acceptable institution in the Southern U.S. The article examines the efforts of politicians, intellectuals, and opinion makers in order to explore the complex and diverse forces that formed white society in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Topics discussed include anti-abolitionist efforts in the 1830s, the formation of the Articles of Confederation and its relation to the slave trade, southern efforts towards emancipation, slave insurrections, and the effect of the Louisiana Purchase on the expansion of slavery. Details are provided regarding the social aspects of the cotton trade and its effect on the slave market, along with the political work of politicians Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason.

An essay is presented on the use of journal writing by male students at the University of North Carolina before the U.S. Civil War to cope with their coming of age. The author discusses how diary entries of students such as James Lawrence Dusenbery reveal how student attitudes toward sex were influenced by literature and writing. A story written by Dusenbery depicting students leaving campus to meet with prostitutes is discussed.

This article discusses the colonial history of the southern states of the United States and its contextualization within North America and the network of countries bordering the Atlantic ocean. The author states that scholars find "the South" difficult to deal with as a separate entity from these contexts. The author contends that only in relation to this broader context can "the South" be properly understood.

Southern hospitality first existed as a narrowly defined body of social practices among the antebellum planter classes, but it also exists as discourse, as a meaning-making story continually told and re-told about the South. This discourse has its own historicity divorced from historical origins and social practice. The 1964 exploitation film Two Thousand Maniacs is examined to illustrate how far this discourse has traveled from its origins and to reveal the inherent tension between the ethical ideals of hospitality and the discourse of southern hospitality. Gesturing toward an idealised image of the past, the discourse of southern hospitality has been one of the main tropes through which non-southerners have imagined their relationship with the region, and at the same time, it has been an important vehicle for self-definition among southerners. The film's ironic re-signification of southern hospitality suggests this discourse merely masks a legacy of thus-far unresolved regional conflicts and resentments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In re-mapping the United States South, it is important to pay attention to the economic force that established the region as a global presence – cotton: its growth, its processing and its international market value. The international cotton market informs southern writer William Faulkner's work, especially his essay ‘Mississippi,’ both materially and metaphorically as a powerful political, economic and ecological presence that simultaneously establishes the South's exceptionalness while also inscribing it on national and international political maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a literary criticism of William Faulkner's novel "The Reivers," and its depiction of horse racing and its symbolism to the Southern United States culture. Faulkner's own experiences and views on horses are discussed along with its metaphorical associations of nostalgia, gentry, and the traditional pre-modern lifestyle of the South.

This article presents the social conditions and daily lives of free African Americans in the urban South in the U.S. from 1800-1850. Patters of free African American occupations which can be used to understanding their economic status; Activities that free African Americans could not do which include selling liquor; Property ownership by free African Americans.

Henry Laurens's political career ranks among the South's crucial contributions to the Revolution and American nationhood, contributions that historians have largely neglected. This article attempts to estimate this Southern role through an examination of Laurens's life and letters, and the political culture of his home state, South Carolina. Laurens and others in the South, despite an incongruous commitment to slavery, gave the emerging nation a distinctly Southern stamp by advocating state federalism, the sovereignty of the people through democratic legislature, and a strong executive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies the quality of male friendship in the southern part of the United States during the early 1800s, through the letters exchanged between politician William Wirt and his friends. Importance of friendship in all stages of life; Link between patronage and friendship; Effect of professional mentorship on friendship; Importance of the exchange of letters to male friendship; Erotic overtones in the letters.