A Sphinx on the American Land

The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective

Dados Bibliográficos

ID9397384
AutoresManisha Sinha (0000-0003-0539-4152, autor correspondente), Peter Kolchin
Ano2004
Volume63
Fascículo3
Páginas325-325
Data de publicação2004-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe Arkansas Historical Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0004-1823 • E-ISSN: 2327-1213
EditoraArkansas Historical Association (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/40038279
OpenAlexW1999195664
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas14

A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective. By Peter Kolchin. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. ix, 124. Cloth, $22.95.)Peter Kolchin was the invited speaker for the sixty-second Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History at Louisiana State University in 2000, a signal and well-deserved honor for a historian whose first book illuminated the experiences of emancipated slaves in Alabama, who then turned his analytical skills to a comparison of American slavery with Russian serfdom in a second book that won multiple prizes, and followed that up with a third book that was a brief, balanced, much-respected general history of slavery in the American South. Those who are familiar with the field also will know that Kolchin has authored a steady stream of articles, review essays, and meaty book reviews. Clearly his scholarship and his accomplishments attracted the attention of the historians at Louisiana State University, and the lecture invitation, and this book, are the result.The Fleming Lectures, the most distinguished such series in southern history, have covered a wide range of topics, and most of those that have been published have represented either the distillation of a career of work or a precisely defined subject based on intensive research in primary sources. John Richard Alden's The First South (1968) and Drew Gilpin Faust's The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (1988) illustrate the range of previously published volumes. The present volume is unlike either of these; rather, it is primarily historiographical, with only the final chapter drawing substantially from the author's prior scholarship. To my mind, the book falls between two stools, and I am uncertain who the intended audience is. Anyone well grounded in the scholarship of southern history will find the historiographical material familiar and the characterization of the literature unsurprising, and the fresh insights from Kolchin's own ample storehouse of knowledge are disappointingly few. However, for the novice to the field of southern history or to one wondering how historians frame their questions, the book would prove quite useful.In his three chapters, Kolchin demonstrates three ways that southern history has been and should be comparative in perspective. Reminiscent of the man who was surprised to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life, Kolchin argues in the first chapter that practically all scholarship on the South, even the least theorized, implicitly if not explicitly compares the region to the situation in the North. Sometimes this is done quite self-consciously, but anytime a historian writes that southerners were unreflective or violent or religious, for example, the implicit comparison is with the inhabitants of the northern portion of the nation. And of course, to the extent that southerners have conceived themselves or their region to be distinctive, that conception is grounded in a comparison to the North, against which they measure their distinctiveness. While Kolchin discusses a number of factors, like slavery, that did set the region apart, he helps us to understand the degree to which the North as other helped define regional self-consciousness, with all that meant for the course of southern history

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