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...

Founder of the American Negro Academy, Alexander Crummell (1819-1898) played a pivotal role in later nineteenth-century debates over race and black intellect. Yet compared with the work of Du Bois and Washington, his speeches and publications have remained relatively inaccessible until now. Here are eighteen texts, along with a thorough biography and valuable source list. As this collection makes clear, Crummell's writings speak of a transitional figure who bridged two radically different worlds separated by the bloodshed and upheaval of the Civil War.

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...

One of America's greatest classical scholars, Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924) was also a Civil War journalist. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, and a self-described -southerner beyond dispute, - he received his doctorate in Germany and returned to America an enthusiastic advocate of Greek scholarship. Like every male member of his immediate family (including his father). Gildersleeve enlisted after Fort Sumter, but he continued to teach at the University of Virginia during the winters. Frequenting Richmond during the war, this young intellectual and passionate partisan who found...

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 mother writes to her faraway daughter: "I keep all your letters. Someday you might want to do something with them." Those words foretold "Shared Histories," although neither woman would live to see the book. This is the first known published collection of letters to include correspondence between civilian family members on both sides of the Atlantic during World War II. Separated for most of their adult lives, Virginia Dickinson Reynolds and her daughter, Virginia Potter, wrote to each other for nearly forty years. This selection from their long exchange is filled with unguarded...