The Human Tradition in the Old South.

The Human Tradition in the Old South. Edited by James C. Klotter. The Human Tradition in America, no. 15. (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2003. Pp. xviii, 225. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8420-2978-8; cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-8420-2977-X.)

Portraits of African American Life since 1865. Edited by Nina Mjagkij. The Human Tradition in America, no. 16. (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2003. Pp. xxviii, 252. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8420-2967-2; cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-8420-2966-4.)

The Human Tradition in America series, edited by Charles W. Calhoun of East Carolina University, is based on "modern notions that see the lives of all kinds of people, high and low, powerful and weak, known and unknown, as part of the mosaic of human history ..." (p. i). Volumes 15 and 16 of this series feature a variety of men and women, but few are "low," "weak," or "unknown." James C. Klotter, editor of The Human Tradition in the Old South, has selected a diverse group of subjects: one Spaniard, one American Indian, two African Americans, three women, supporters of the Confederacy, and individuals who either questioned or opposed disunion. In Portraits of African American Life since 1865, editor Nina Mjagkij features six female and nine male subjects as representatives of African Americans since 1865.

One theme found in the sketches presented by Mjagkij is the tension between African Americans who sought to join mainstream American culture and those who either sought or were driven to separate themselves from that dominant culture. This theme reflects Ira Berlin's thesis, presented in Many Thousands Gone (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), that African American culture grew out of eighteenth-century conflicts and compromises between descendants of the "charter generation," who sought to adopt European American culture, and the "plantation generations," who shunned things European. Gary R. Entz's essay, "Benjamin 'Pap' Singleton, Father of the Kansas Exodus," describes an African American leader who first sought inclusion in mainstream American culture but whose rejection drove him to adopt exclusion.

Another theme that emerges in these vignettes is the experience of female African Americans. Black women had to struggle with the issues of accommodation or black separatism; most simultaneously fought for equality of women while advocating ethnic equality. Anna Julia Cooper's career illustrates the complicated role thrust upon African American women. Cooper taught and later became principal at the M Street High School in Washington, D.C. In 1892 she published A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, one of the first written expressions of black feminist thought. Cooper was forced to resign as principal when she became embroiled in the contest between Booker T. Washington's accommodationist position and W. E. B. Du Bois's more radical approach to race relations. Cooper's was an intellectual view that saw value in both positions, but she suffered the consequences of supporting Du Bois when Washington's advocates gained control of the school.

In The Human Tradition in the Old South, John Mayfield's sketch of George Washington Harris, a diligent middle-class urban Victorian from East Tennessee, illustrates the tensions in the personalities of many southerners. Harris, a strict Presbyterian and devoted family man, was also an aspiring slave owner constantly in debt because his dreams exceeded his means. Harris wrote a number of short stories in which he created a classic fool, Sut Lovingood. Sut mocked both squires and clergy with his bawdy rating of unmarried women; as Mayfield writes, for Lovingood "Young girls were fine, and old maids could be tamed, but widows were best" (p. 148). Mayfield shows that Harris "lived in the borderland between two worlds, two sets of values, two elaborate codes of behavior" (p. 145). Mayfield's exploration of Sut the fool reveals Harris's bifurcated personality that, in turn, sheds light on the fissures in the antebellum society of East Tennessee.

Carol Reardon's sketch of David Emmons Johnston introduces the reader to a young Virginia Confederate from a county with very few slaves. Johnston enlisted because, as he himself says, "'I lived in the South, among a southern people in thought, feeling, and sentiment ... their interests were my interests, their assailants and aggressors were equally mine, their country my country ... the dews which moistened the graves of my ancestors fell from a southern sky ...'" (p. 170). Reardon's selection demonstrates that one must separate the cause of the war (slavery) from each combatant's personal motivations.

Certainly any serious historian of the African American experience or of the Old South will question the inclusion or omission of particular individuals. Both works may suffer from a dearth of "weak" and "unknown" subjects, but most of the characters portrayed in these volumes are nevertheless extraordinary men and women. Each contribution is followed by a brief list of suggested readings that gives any reader whose curiosity is piqued guidance in finding additional information. Though many of the entries have excellent lists that present contemporary research, a few are weaker because of insufficient bibliographies. Some selections have a rich variety of sources; others are merely summaries of journals or diaries. The latter approach is certainly acceptable, however, in a work written to introduce readers to the colonial and antebellum South or to provide classroom reading assignments.

JAMES W. GETTYS

Erskine College