Warm Ashes: Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century

Selected from papers presented at the 2000 Citadel Conference on the South, this collection of essays casts additional light on the southern experience and illuminates some of the directions its formal study may take in the new century. Emory Thomas opens the collection with a meditation on the shortcomings of the historical literature on the Civil War era. Essays by James McMillin, Kirsten Wood, and Patrick Breen revise estimates about the volume of the African slave trade, reveal how white widows embraced paternalism, and explore new ramifications of the fear of slave insurrection. Essays by Christopher Phillips on the birth of southern identity and by Brian Dirck and Christopher Waldrep on the key role language played in waging and in resolving the Civil War round out the discussion of the ""Old South."" Turning to the ""New South,"" the next groups of essays examine religion and race relations during the Jim Crow era. Paul Harvey, Joan Marie Johnson, James O. Farmer Jr., and William Glass show how the beliefs of various Protestant churches - Pentecostal, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Methodist - produced surprising episodes of racial interaction, gave rise to at least one vocal champion of women's rights, and facilitated a slow healing of denominational schisms between North and South. John Wertheimer, Michael Daly, and Peter Wallenstein then document unusual twists in the rise and fall of segregation in North Carolina, while Rod Andrew Jr. and Alexander S. Macaulay Jr. do the same for southern military colleges. The final essays survey patterns in southern self-understanding. W. Fitzhugh Brundage traces how a black historical memory rose to challenge its white counterpart's view of the first Reconstruction. Glenn Eskew discusses how the ways in which both blacks and whites remembered the Second Reconstruction sometimes impeded progress toward the very objectives it sought. Such ironies, Sheldon Hackney argues in the volume's concluding essay, are proof of the South's ability to change and, simultaneously, to remain distinctive.