A book that will greatly enhance understanding of the situation of single women in the nineteenth-century South, An Evening When Alone presents the journals of four very different women who, although their lives were worlds apart, each lived and wrote in the South during the years 1827-67. Intimate and revealing, these journals provide refreshing insight into the joys and travails of -ordinary- single women in the nineteenth century South: courtship, disappointed love, illness, the gratifications and pains of female friendship, the grief of the Civil War, the ambivalences of family life,...

Louisa Susanna McCrod (1810-1879) was one of the most remarkable figures in the intellectual history of antebellum America. A conservative intellectual, she broke the confines of Southern gender roles; she supported laissez-faire political economy and slavery, argues for woman's separate sphere, opposed Harriet Beecher Stowe, abhorred socialism, was a secessionist, and believed in the superiority of the white race. This volume includes her essays on slavery, secession, women's role, and political economy, fully annotated, along with an Introduction by Michael O'Brien, Chair of the...

Louisa Susanna Cheves McCord (1810-1879) was one of the most remarkable figures in the intellectual history of antebellum America. A conservative intellectual, she broke the confines of Southern gender roles. Over the past decade historians have begun to pay attention to McCord and find her indespensible to understanding American culture. Among Southerners before the Civil War, she is ranked with Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, James Madison, Sarah Grimke, John C. Calhoun, George Fitzhugh, and Frederick Douglass.

This volume collects all of her poetry, drama, and correspondence, her...

As a physician practicing in the rural South in the years leading up to and through the Civil War, Charles Arnould Hentz (1827-1894) lived in the midst of enormous changes in southern society and medicine.

A Southern Practice includes the diary that Hentz kept for more than twenty years, beginning with the river journey his family took from Ohio to Alabama when Charles was eighteen. This vividly depicted trip--people, places, and sensory details--sets the stage for Hentz's record of his life through middle age: his apprenticeship and decision to pursue a medical career while a youth...

Scholars frequently assume that the Southern Agrarian movement was limited to the philosophy laid out in the landmark 1930 book I'll Take My Stand. Yet that work consisted mainly of a philosophical critique of a nation that valued -progress- above spirituality.

Were it not for the Agrarians' angry reaction to criticism of their book--and for a dramatic transformation of the American political and economic landscape--Agrarianism would have died in 1930. But with the worsening of the Great Depression, and then Franklin D. Roosevelt's election and implementation of the New Deal, the...

Long considered a leading literary figure of the Old South, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) wrote letters, novels, short fiction, drama, essays, and poetry in his prolific career. Born in Charleston to an old South Carolina family of modest means and raised by a grandmother with whom his father left him after his mother's death, Simms felt a simultaneous sense of loyalty to and alienation from his native region. He was a major intellectual figure on the East Coast before the Civil War but saw his New York publishers abandon him after secession, of which he was a vocal...

The private and public writings in this volume reveal the early relationship between renowned Civil War diarist Sarah Morgan (1842-1909) and her future husband, Francis Warrington Dawson (1840-1889). Gathered here is a selection of their letters along with various articles that Morgan wrote anonymously for the "Charleston News and Courier," which Dawson owned and edited.

In January 1873 Morgan met Frank Dawson, an English expatriate, Confederate veteran, and newspaperman. By then Morgan had left her native Louisiana and was living near Columbia, South Carolina, with her younger brother,...

A rogue, a megalomaniac, a plodder, and a depressive: the men whose previously unpublished diaries are collected in this volume were four very different characters. But they had much in common too. All were from the Deep South. All were young, between seventeen and twenty-five. All had a connection to cotton and slaves. Most obviously, all were diarists, enduring night upon night of cramped hands and candle bugs to write out their lives.

Down the furrows of their fathers' farms, through the thickets of their local woods, past the familiar haunts of their youth, Harry Dixon, Henry...

This volume gathers nearly half of some 300 letters written by Mary Telfair of Savannah to her best friend, Mary Few of New York. Telfair was born in 1790 to a wealthy, prominent, slaveholding Savannah family. Few, born in 1790 into equally affluent circumstances, moved with her family from Savannah to New York in 1799. Self-exiled because of their strong antislavery views, the Fews never returned to Georgia, yet they remained close to the Telfairs.

The close friendship between Telfair and Few ended only with their deaths in the 1870s. Regular travelers, they met on many occasions....