Timothy J. Williams. Intellectual Manhood

The truism that developments in the “Old South” were marginal to the key economic, social, and cultural transformations of the early American republic has recently come under serious attack, most notably by historians of capitalism who have placed slavery at the vanguard of economic development. Timothy J. Williams offers a related reevaluation of higher education in the Old South in Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South, a creatively researched study of educational life at the nation’s oldest public university, the University of North Carolina (UNC). Given the marginal status of the South in histories of intellectual life in the early republic, it comes as no surprise that historians of education have largely dismissed institutions of higher learning in the antebellum South. Regional scholars, including Drew Gilpin Faust and Lorri Glover, have been, if anything, less enthusiastic, lambasting southern colleges as anti-intellectual finishing schools where the sons of planters learned more about honor than literature, science, or the arts, and were taught to cherish section over union.

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