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This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of Simkins's eccentric behavior and major scholarly accomplishments. It then considers his concerns over the collapse of white supremacy and the emergence of black equality. The chapter also sets out the purpose of the book, which is to illuminate the inner workings of a scholar considered eccentric and even inscrutable by those who knew him. It tries to make sense of an individual who possessed a powerful intellect coupled with a host of personal demons, and analyzes how his chaotic personal life influenced his writing. Finally, this study strives to determine the impact of Simkins's work on southern historiography and the larger public issues, especially those associated with race, that dominated his world.

In the fall of 1948, Francis Simkins arrived on the campus of Louisiana State University to begin a one-year appointment as visiting professor of history, a temporary replacement for Bell I. Wiley, the head of the history department, who was going on leave. His new job would allow him to teach again, if only briefly, at a major research university. Simkins had a stable marriage, a son who was growing up, and a challenging teaching job. The positive reviews of his college textbook, The South, Old and New, were also happy developments. In the late 1940s a need existed for a book such as Simkins's one-volume work on southern history. The field Simkins worked in as an academic discipline had grown markedly in the early twentieth century, and, as a result, southern history courses abounded in higher education. Several thousand university and college students enrolled in southern history courses around the country. Simkins thus stood to gain in notoriety as a historian while making a considerable amount of money.

This chapter explores how “two of the South's ablest interpreters, William Faulker and C. Vann Woodward, may have complemented, supplemented, or contradicted each other as they examined a common time and place ” Both struggled, for instance, to give African American figures the same historical weight and agency attributed to whites, and both at times cast a sympathetic eye on the antebellum planter class. Moreover, Woodward drew directly on Faulkner in developing his account of what he called the “burden of southern history”: a historical experience and consciousness among southerners that he nominated as an alternative to white supremacy as the basis of a distinctive regional identity and the central theme of a distinctive regional history.

This chapter discusses the past, present, and future of southern religious history and suggests how much of Charles Reagan Wilson's academic lifetime of work has foreshadowed, shaped, and developed work in the field over the last generation. Scholars of Wilson's generation tried to understand the origins and dominance of evangelicalism. The present and future of historical writing in this field is about incorporating a diversity of southern religious stories, ranging from the Powhatan Confederacy in early Virginia, to Moravians in North Carolina, Spiritualists in New Orleans and elsewhere, and Catholics throughout the region. Another major theme of southern religious history is the centrality and constant interplay of the revolutionary and the revivalist traditions in southern history, and a parallel interplay between racialized particularity and Christian universalism in southern religious thought and practice.

This chapter uses historicist criticism of William Faulkner to suggest a limit to even the best approaches to this deeply historical writer. Attending to what his novels cannot say—or—see about history and racial understanding, I draw on Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy of language to show the category error that scholars make when assuming that Faulkner’s texts yield the historical secret lodged in the imagined structures and complicated texts Absalom, Absalom! and Light and August, each of which bore the title “Dark House” in manuscript form. The chapter shows the more meaningful aporias and lacunae surrounding race and racial meaning in each novel and the U.S. south—problems attendant on language and the effort to name. It offers a model for historical knowledge drawn from Blanchot and from film theory of fascination, a spellbound, rapt sense of wonder before traumatic events, one that elements of Absalom evoke in readers and posits in Quentin Compson.

This chapter investigates the ways in which the Civil War dead appeared in nineteenth-century histories of the war. As the practice and philosophy of history both evolved, the dead provided a means of navigating the crisis of historical representation precipitated by the conflict. On one hand, they are routinely depersonalized, reduced to “objective” data, so as to contain the unexampled carnage of the war and to demarcate, by contrast, a more enlightened postwar modernity. On the other, the dead are revered as sacred relics that provide a sense of stabilizing connection to a common history. Ultimately, the tension between these modes of historical consciousneᶊ is resolved by a teleological narrative of national self-creation. This narrative, linked to the rise of American imperialism, tended to subsume, without fully negating, the social alienation that wayward attachments to the dead, in both Southern history and African American counter-history, could nourish.

This afterword looks at a few of the features of Charles Reagan Wilson's scholarship that led so many people to gather to talk about southern religion and southern culture. Of the several ways Wilson's scholarship was doing work that later gained a name of a scholarly movement, one stands out. Wilson was studying historical memory before the field of memory studies existed. To be more specific, Wilson linked the study of memory to the study of religion. A great deal of Wilson's work analyzed roles religion played throughout southern history, especially beyond the churches and religious organizations. That willingness to learn and think well beyond one's specialties has characterized much of Wilson's work.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited in the National Park system and showcases how the landscape and even southern history were manipulated to develop a particular experience for tourists. Richard D. Starnes’s essay offers an instructive overview of how decisions by park leaders led to an interpretive program focused on the primitive white settlers of the region in the nineteenth century. They did so, he argues, to the exclusion of Native American history, in effect creating an image of the Smokies as a “place in the tourist imagination.”

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book challenges northern-centric perspectives on American Jewish history by looking south to uncover the roots of Jewish benevolent traditions and to explore the ways in which region shaped a minoritized people's pursuit of belonging. It shows how Jewish southerners instituted a sophisticated network of social uplift organizations to ensure that their poorest coreligionists did not endanger collective Jewish prosperity and belonging. It also contributes to contemporary ethnic studies scholarship by exploring a minoritized people's efforts to gain access to the benefits of full citizenship. Drawing from recent work on “cultural citizenship,” this book explores how collectively shared values, ideals, and practices shape historical actors' authenticity as members of a community.

During the four decades since Francis Simkins's death in the 1960s, the writing of southern history has undergone immense changes. Gender theory and a greater focus on minorities have blossomed in the late twentieth century as the most important approaches to the study of this region. Compared to these perspectives, Simkins's writing seems dated and even naïve. In fact, though, his work provided inspiration and insight for modern scholars, who built upon many of Simkins's historical ideas outlined in his work. Simkins was a pioneer in the field of southern history. His writing often focused on minorities, blacks during Reconstruction, and women who lived during the Civil War era. He belonged to a small group of liberal thinkers in the early twentieth century who promoted the interests of blacks through recognition of their humanity and an illumination of the abuses they suffered in a racial system designed specifically to subjugate them. Simkins deserves to be ranked high among scholars of his generation. The reactionary stance he adopted in the last two decades of his life dims, but does not eclipse, his earlier contributions to these fields.

William Alexander Percy's Mississippi Delta in 1910 was a world of sprawling cotton plantations, a disproportionately large black population, and a political system run by white people and by Democrats. Percy later wrote stories of Reconstruction, the main act on the stage of southern history. The central theme in these stories was that of southern men defending their honor and their homes.