The Native South

We judge the contributions of fellow historians to the advancement of the discipline by multiple standards. Most often, and most obviously, we look at the body of work produced by the scholars, but time, circumstance, committee meetings, and basic human frailty ensure that even the most productive among us cannot claim more than a handful of signature works. Whether we train future historians, or future teachers, nurses, or pilots, any professor's greatest legacy is her or his students. In The Native South the editors Tim Alan Garrison and Greg O'Brien have assembled the students of Theda Perdue and the late Mike Green to prove this point forcefully and beautifully. There are not too many Festschriften in southern Indian history. This speaks to the field's small size, the too-recent recognition of its significance, and concomitant placement of its elite scholars at Ph.D.-granting institutions. As such, The Native South presents a rare, perhaps unique, opportunity, and the editors and contributors do not waste it. The collection begins with a lengthy and insightful interview of Perdue and Green conducted by O'Brien. The interview is warm, genial, and incisive (not unlike the experience of having Perdue and Green engage one's work; my personal experience bears this out), and gives readers a feel for the eminent scholars' careers and the themes that drove their scholarship—most notably kinship, gender, sovereignty, and an insistence on placing the Native American South at the vital heart of American history

Elite · Genealogy · Media studies · Native american · Native American studies · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Scholarship · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law