Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections.

Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections. Edited by John B. Boles. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2004. Pp. x, 334. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8203-2475-2; cloth, $54.95, ISBN 0-8203-2474-4.)

I have always contended that you do not have to scratch a historian very deep to find a gossip. We have entered our chosen profession for varied reasons, many of which are explored in Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections. However, somewhere in all of us is the desire to understand other people and tell stories about them and their worlds. Consequently, these short career-oriented autobiographies of eminent southern historians work on many levels. The book offers, as John B. Boles says in his preface, "the raw material for scholars in the future who will write the intellectual history of modern southern historiography" (p. viii). But it also provides insights into the civil rights movement, the art of memory, and the teaching of history. For us gossips, the book is a delightful foray into the lives of fifteen people, a set of stories that together present an eclectic selection of roads taken.

Annette Atkins, a western historian, recently said that, if someone looked at her three major projects, they would be baffled as to how she moved from one to the other. Inside her head, though, she could clearly see the path that led, sometimes circuitously, between them. Most of the historians in this collection delineate the paths that led them to southern history--all highly personal. For native southerners, like Pete Daniel and Vernon Burton, studying the history of their region gave them a way to understand and remain in contact with their personal past--a way, as Burton says, "that makes sense out of the past" (p. 276). At the other extreme, Anthony Badger, an Englishman, became a southern historian because of undergraduate demands at his first job at Newcastle University. Both Anne Firor Scott and Suzanne Lebsock's feminism led them into southern history, whereas for Bill Malone and Charles Joyner southern music provided a vital motivation.

If these historians gravitated to the history of the South for very different reasons, the one influence about which most of the authors talk is the civil rights movement. For many of them, the movement affected their choice of career. As Charles Joyner articulates, "As a young southerner during the Civil Rights movement, I considered it a moral imperative to reexamine the history of my region" (p. 151). For others, it proved central to their lives and work. From John Hope Franklin's story about being given his own office in the North Carolina state archives so that the reading room could remain segregated to Dan T. Carter's recollection of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka making him a member of the "in a tribal sense: the white South" (p. 121), the book reverberates with memories of the struggle to end racial injustice. As such, it represents both a valuable set of liberal reflection of the movement and an interesting time capsule for historians and the discipline. What, I wonder, will play such a vivid part in the communal memory of today's graduate students in southern history in thirty years' time?

Shapers of Southern History also investigates memory, at times more consciously than at others. Boles introduces the problem by saying that "remembering is primarily an activity of the present," and many of the autobiographies discuss it further, often looking at the specific dilemma of memory and historians (p. vii). Especially captivating is Drew Gilpin Faust's story of retrieving a letter she remembered having written as a child to President Dwight D. Eisenhower protesting her school's segregation after the Brown decision, basing her argument on reason and innocence. After obtaining a copy of the letter from the presidential archive, she discovered that not only had she written it three years after the Brown decision but also her argument had been largely religious in content. Thus we all continually reinterpret our lives, and as historians we have the skills, if not always the opportunities, to test our memories against primary sources.

In some ways, this collection offers a nice foil against the inaccuracies of the present as well as those of the remembered past. Like many other teachers, I have been heard to lament the paucity of today's expectations of undergraduates--in my day, we had to work hard to get a degree. Yet as Jack P. Greene points out, when he was a history major at the University of North Carolina in the 1940s, he never wrote a paper! Anne Firor Scott claims, no doubt too modestly, that her "dissertation ... would not pass muster in today's graduate program" (p. 55). Gently, we are reminded that our hand-wringing over our students reflects our reinterpretation of our own education as much as it does their inadequacies.

This book, with its varied authors and multiple perspectives, presents much more to its readers than I can hope to encompass in this review. I have already assigned Scott's piece to several ambitious young female undergraduates and photocopied Darlene Clark Hine's remembrance for a student researching the Kent State University shootings. Its mutilayered offerings make it as flexible for classroom use as it is readable for pleasure. My only regret is that John Boles did not add his own personal reflections to the mix.

CLAIRE STROM

North Dakota State University