A Companion to the American South.

Edited by John B. Boles. Blackwell Companions to American History. (Malden, Mass., and Oxford, Eng.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Pp. xii, 524. $124.95, ISBN 0-631-21319-8.)

"Southern history is thriving as a field of study," John B. Boles reminds us in the preface to this collection of twenty-nine historiographical essays, "and there are many venues for reading it, hearing it, and publishing it" (p. xi). Newcomers to the field and veteran historians alike will find this observation confirmed in what is a most welcome addition to the two previous standard guides to southern history.

Over a generation ago, southern historians considered the seventeen essays in Arthur S. Link and Rembert W. Patrick, editors, Writing Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1965) essential to understanding the historical literature pertaining to the South. Twenty-two years later, as southern history became increasingly popular as a serious research field, and as the number of scholarly works skyrocketed, Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen edited Interpreting Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1987), which included thirteen essays that assessed the state of the literature since the publication of Link and Patrick's collection.

Now, only fifteen years later, the volume of scholarship has mushroomed to such a degree that Boles has assembled another collection of essays written by a new generation of experts in their respective subfields. "The authors were asked to imagine readers either new to the topic or wanting to update their understanding," he explains, "then tell them about the essential scholarship, with some attention to older, classic books but emphasizing more recent scholarship of the last two decades or so" (p. x). Boles divides A Companion to the American South into five chronologically arranged parts. Instead of footnotes or endnotes, each chapter contains in-text citations and a bibliography.

Five essays examine works on the colonial South. Amy Turner Bushnell looks at "the first southerners," Native Americans, while Paul E. Hoffman traces Spanish and French exploration and colonization. Cynthia A. Kierner, Betty Wood, and Ira D. Gruber, respectively, analyze English settlements in the South to 1750, the origins of slavery, 1619-1808, and the South in the Revolutionary period, 1750-1789.

Coverage of the antebellum period consists of eight articles. Daniel S. Dupre examines the South in the new nation, and Daniel W. Crofts canvasses politics in the Old South. Mark M. Smith studies the plantation economy, while Stephanie J. Shaw focuses on the maturation of slave society and culture. Other thematic chapters include Samuel C. Hyde Jr. (plain folk), Randy J. Sparks (religion), Sally G. McMillen (women), and David Moltke-Hansen (intellectual and cultural history).

Scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction occupies five essays. Mary A. DeCredico appraises sectionalism and secession. George C. Rable assesses military, political, social, and religious aspects of the war, along with gender and race relations. Laura F. Edwards, Michael W. Fitzgerald, and Joseph P. Reidy, respectively, review emancipation, the politics of Reconstruction, and the economic consequences of the war and its aftermath.

Five articles treat recent research on the first New South. Samuel L. Webb evaluates southern politics during the Populist-Progressive period. James Beeby and Donald G. Nieman appraise the rise of segregation, 1880-1920, and Elizabeth Hayes Turner examines southern women in the post-Civil War South. John C. Inscoe charts the development of scholarship on Appalachia, and Paul Harvey gauges southern religious history since the Civil War.

The final six essays assess scholarly work on the modern South. Mart A. Stewart examines southern environmental history. Daniel Letwin focuses on labor relations, and David R. Goldfield evaluates work on southern urbanization and industrialization. Pamela Tyler assesses the impact of the New Deal and World War II, while Charles W. Eagles and Wayne Flynt, respectively, discuss the civil rights movement and the transformation of southern politics since 1954.

Though the sheer comprehensiveness, scope, and sophistication of the works analyzed in this book defy simple categorization, several of the authors nonetheless draw conclusions that apply to the entire corpus of recent southern historiography. In general, scholarship in the field requires more comparative analysis and less emphasis on southern exceptionalism. "To study more carefully overlooked areas and topics, while at the same time imagining broader and more creative answers to both old and new questions, will remain the challenge," writes Rable (p. 266). According to Fitzgerald, the history of black and white southerners needs to be more integrated. He favors "a renewed interest in nuances within the black community, rather than exclusive stress on the stark racial divide" (p. 300). "The greatest challenge facing historians," Reidy concludes, "is to develop a vocabulary that will be sufficiently general to describe the whole while at the same time not obliterating variations across time, space, and other particular circumstances" (p. 315).

Southern historians, especially graduate students, will benefit from A Companion to the American South. One hopes that its publisher will issue the book in a paperback edition so that those most likely to use it can afford to have the book at their fingertips.

JOHN DAVID SMITH 

North Carolina State University