Author: Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199886717
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 640
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Book Description
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, hailed in The Washington Post as "a work of enormous imagination and enterprise" and in The New York Times as "an important, original book," Southern Honor revolutionized our understanding of the antebellum South, revealing how Southern men adopted an ancient honor code that shaped their society from top to bottom. Using legal documents, letters, diaries, and newspaper columns, Wyatt-Brown offers fascinating examples to illuminate the dynamics of Southern life throughout the antebellum period. He describes how Southern whites, living chiefly in small, rural, agrarian surroundings, in which everyone knew everyone else, established the local hierarchy of kinfolk and neighbors according to their individual and familial reputation. By claiming honor and dreading shame, they controlled their slaves, ruled their households, established the social rankings of themselves, kinfolk, and neighbors, and responded ferociously against perceived threats. The shamed and shameless sometimes suffered grievously for defying community norms. Wyatt-Brown further explains how a Southern elite refined the ethic. Learning, gentlemanly behavior, and deliberate rather than reckless resort to arms softened the cruder form, which the author calls "primal honor." In either case, honor required men to demonstrate their prowess and engage in fierce defense of individual, family, community, and regional reputation by duel, physical encounter, or war. Subordination of African-Americans was uppermost in this Southern ethic. Any threat, whether from the slaves themselves or from outside agitation, had to be met forcefully. Slavery was the root cause of the Civil War, but, according to Wyatt-Brown, honor pulled the trigger. Featuring a new introduction by the author, this anniversary edition of a classic work offers readers a compelling view of Southern culture before the Civil War.
Author: Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195033106
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 632
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Book Description
"First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1983"--T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references and index. Access is available to the Yale community.
Author: Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195042429
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Hailed as a classic by reviewers and historians, Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor now appears in abridged form under the title Honor and Violence in the Old South. Winner of a Phi Alpha Theta Book Award and a Jefferson Davis Memorial Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, this is the first major reinterpretation of Southern life and custom since W.J, Cash's The Mind of the South. It explores the meaning and expression of the ancient code of honor as whites—both slaveholders and non-slaveholders—applied it to their lives. Wyatt-Brown ranges widely—covering topics such as childbearing, marital patterns, duelling, slave discipline, and lynch-law—to discover the role of honor in the psyche of white Southerners.
Author: Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 9780807849125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
Extending his investigation into the ethical life of the white American South beyond what he wrote in Southern Honor (1982), Bertram Wyatt-Brown explores three major themes in southern history: the political aspects of the South's code of honor, th
Author: Kenneth S. Greenberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691214093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
The "honorable men" who ruled the Old South had a language all their own, one comprised of many apparently outlandish features yet revealing much about the lives of masters and the nature of slavery. When we examine Jefferson Davis's explanation as to why he was wearing women's clothing when caught by Union soldiers, or when we consider the story of Virginian statesman John Randolph, who stood on his doorstep declaring to an unwanted dinner guest that he was "not at home," we see that conveying empirical truths was not the goal of their speech. Kenneth Greenberg so skillfully demonstrates, the language of honor embraced a complex system of phrases, gestures, and behaviors that centered on deep-rooted values: asserting authority and maintaining respect. How these values were encoded in such acts as nose-pulling, outright lying, dueling, and gift-giving is a matter that Greenberg takes up in a fascinating and original way. The author looks at a range of situations when the words and gestures of honor came into play, and he re-creates the contexts and associations that once made them comprehensible. We understand, for example, the insult a navy lieutenant leveled at President Andrew Jackson when he pulls his nose, once we understand how a gentleman valued his face, especially his nose, as the symbol of his public image. Greenberg probes the lieutenant's motivations by explaining what it meant to perceive oneself as dishonored and how such a perception seemed comparable to being treated as a slave. When John Randolph lavished gifts on his friends and enemies as he calmly faced the prospect of death in a duel with Secretary of State Henry Clay, his generosity had a paternalistic meaning echoed by the master-slave relationship and reflected in the pro-slavery argument. These acts, together with the way a gentleman chose to lend money, drink with strangers, go hunting, and die, all formed a language of control, a vision of what it meant to live as a courageous free man. In reconstructing the language of honor in the Old South, Greenberg reconstructs the world.
Author: Lisa Tendrich Frank
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813036908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
"Essays examining the character of the Southern gentleman, representing the works of historian Bert Wyatt-Brown and stressing the plural--not monolithic--nature of the South"--
Author: Richard E Nisbett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429980779
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
This book focuses on a singular cause of male violence—the perpetrator's sense of threat to one of his most valued possessions, namely, his reputation for strength and toughness. The theme of this book is that the Southern United States had—and has—a type of culture of honor.
Author: Craig Bruce Smith
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469638843
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
The American Revolution was not only a revolution for liberty and freedom, it was also a revolution of ethics, reshaping what colonial Americans understood as "honor" and "virtue." As Craig Bruce Smith demonstrates, these concepts were crucial aspects of Revolutionary Americans' ideological break from Europe and shared by all ranks of society. Focusing his study primarily on prominent Americans who came of age before and during the Revolution—notably John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington—Smith shows how a colonial ethical transformation caused and became inseparable from the American Revolution, creating an ethical ideology that still remains. By also interweaving individuals and groups that have historically been excluded from the discussion of honor—such as female thinkers, women patriots, slaves, and free African Americans—Smith makes a broad and significant argument about how the Revolutionary era witnessed a fundamental shift in ethical ideas. This thoughtful work sheds new light on a forgotten cause of the Revolution and on the ideological foundation of the United States.
Author: James C. Klotter
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807131589
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
When attorney John Jay Cornelison severely beat Kentucky Superior Court judge Richard Reid in public on April 16, 1884, for allegedly injuring his honor, the event became front-page news. Would Reid react as a Christian gentleman, a man of the law, and let the legal system take its course, or would he follow the manly dictates of the code of honor and challenge his assailant? James C. Klotter crafts a detective story, using historical, medical, legal, and psychological clues to piece together answers to the tragedy that followed. “This book is a gem. . . . Klotter’s astute organization and gripping narrative add to the book’s appeal. . . . [He] has written a fascinating book that will be of interest to a wide audience.” —American Historical Review “A moving story well told, it does force the reader to reflect on our own era and consider whether we value leaders who respect the rule of law or those who believe that honor demands swift and bloody vengeance no matter the costs.” —Ohio Valley History “A rich and compelling work that offers fresh insights into the tense interplay among religion, law, and honor in the American South.” —Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
Author: Christine Leigh Heyrman
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307829731
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 492
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Book Description
In an astonishing history, a work of strikingly original research and interpretation, Heyrman shows how the evangelical Protestants of the late-18th century affronted the Southern Baptist majority of the day, not only by their opposition to slaveholding, war, and class privilege, but also by their espousal of the rights of the poor and their encouragement of women's public involvement in the church.
