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  • Cited by 1
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2014
Print publication year:
2014
Online ISBN:
9781316018880

Book description

This rich collection of original essays illuminates the causes and consequences of the South's defining experiences with death. Employing a wide range of perspectives, while concentrating on discrete episodes in the region's past, the authors explore topics from the seventeenth century to the present, from the death traps that emerged during colonization to the bloody backlash against emancipation and civil rights to recent canny efforts to commemorate - and capitalize on - the region's deadly past. Some authors capture their subjects in the most intimate of moments: killing and dying, grieving and remembering, and believing and despairing. Others uncover the intentional efforts of Southerners to publicly commemorate their losses through death rituals and memorialization campaigns. Together, these poignantly told Southern stories reveal profound truths about the past of a region marked by death and unable, perhaps unwilling, to escape the ghosts of its history.

Reviews

'Death has always held high revel in the South, where malaria, Indian wars, the brutality of slavery, national defeat and a host of gray ghosts paved the way for today's high rates of gun ownership, obesity, diabetes, and capital punishment. The authors of these excellent essays cannot exorcise these Southern haunts, but they do explore with dark beauty how Southerners have made meaning in the teeth of often meaningless (and self-inflicted) pain. This is another five-star collection from the team of Friend and Glover.'

Stephen Berry - Gregory Chair in the Civil War Era, University of Georgia

'Death and the American South is a tenacious study - comprehensive, intuitive, and most importantly, provocative. Tightly argued chapters cover a wide array of phenomena, from experiences of collective sorrow and racial violence to issues of psychological control. The contributors interrogate historic memory in powerful ways. This is a highly absorbing book.'

Andrew Burstein - Charles P. Manship Professor of History, Louisiana State University

'Scholars have long awaited a volume like Death and the American South. While remaining attentive to the universal aspects of deathways, this impressive collection makes a strong case that the South had - and has - a distinctive culture of death. The result is a powerful, coherent collection of original essays.'

Erik R. Seeman - State University of New York, Buffalo

'Craig Thompson Friend's essay on scalping, Lorri Glover's study of founding father deaths, and Andrew Denson's reflection on the battle over Cherokee graves all show the region and one essential experience of life in new ways. For any student of Southern history this collection makes a valuable companion to the scholarship of Randy Sparks, Drew Gilpin Faust, Philip Dray, and others.'

R. Blakeslee Gilpin Source: The Journal of American History

'… the eleven chapters that comprise Death and the American South are replete with intellectually stimulating and thorough research about everything from the specific ways by which colonists killed each other and displayed bodies in the early South to the conflicting strategies that the tourist trade has adopted to exploit the deaths of Native Americans. There are no weak links … The great strength of the collection is that each chapter contextualizes death in its own way.'

Ted Ownby Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

'The essays cover a sweeping chronological period from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and that broad lens makes it possible to trace important themes across the region’s history, especially those themes involving the complex function of race in shaping southern attitudes toward death, dying, and the body.'

Randy J. Sparks Source: North Carolina Historical Review

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Contents

  • 6 - Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
    pp 131-152
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Corpses as victims of war, enslavement, famine, and disease haunted the early South. As three peoples (red, white, and black) came together in the early South, two forms of death took a prominent place on the landscape: scalpings and beheadings. Both beheadings and scalpings targeted the head as a site of spiritual and cultural significance, and both relied on the corporeal materiality of the head for its power. Real-life dismemberment, particularly scalpings and beheadings, were also often used to symbolize political transformations. Although death concluded the victim's corporeal life, however, the corpse, in the form of a scalp with hair, retained the victim's spiritual being. To Native Americans, apparently, it was the hair and not the flesh that mattered, and this was because hair was central to the scalp's animation as a living specter. Europeans were familiar with the symbolism and practice of destroying identity through bodily mutilation.
  • 7 - “Cumberer of the Earth”: Suffering and Suicide among the Faithful in the Civil War South
    pp 153-180
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines historical understanding of dying in the early South by emphasizing its local context. The setting is Archibald Simpson's two Lowcountry parishes, Indian Land and Saltcatcher, circa 1770. In the very public setting of the funeral service, Anglican and evangelical practices frequently clashed, exposing some of the deepest fault lines in the community. The politics of dying made it important to craft and control these stories to block or advance personal, social, and political agendas. Although evangelical and Anglican funerals had some common rituals and drew from many of the same scriptural texts, the similarities ended there. Evangelical funerals featured extemporaneous prayer, singing, a brief burying ritual at the graveside, and a sermon or discourse, in eighteenth-century parlance. In the context of an Anglican establishment and an embattled evangelical movement, death narratives were just as important to legitimating their religion as stories of remarkable conversions and spectacular revivals.
  • 8 - The “Translation” of Lundy Harris: Interpreting Death out of the Confusion of Sexuality, Violence, and Religion in the New South
    pp 181-206
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter investigates the deaths of the South's greatest revolutionary-era leaders: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. While other men worked alongside these three Virginians, none played a longer or greater shaping role in the creation of the American Republic. As presidents, these three men led the federal government for twenty-four of its first twenty-eight years. They were not only revolutionary leaders; they were planter-patriarchs, too. Their deaths occurred in this distinctive national/regional/gentry context, which indelibly marked the stories recounted by witnesses to their last days. And those death narratives, in the telling and retelling, helped cement the historic reputation of these revolutionaries as southern gentlemen and American heroes. Despite nineteenth-century changes to the scripts of their deaths, it is clear that the resurrection these men desired was decidedly secular: to serve a political and historical purpose.
  • 9 - “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
    pp 207-228
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This essay considers rituals and language of public grief in North America between 1760 and 1812. It deals with traditions of public mourning that Americans inherited from Britain and examines their employment in service to the founding of the United States. The chapter also examines two occasions in the early nineteenth century when deaths in the South became national news and the objects of public mourning outside the region: the attack on the Chesapeake by the HMS Leopard shortly after it left Norfolk, Virginia, in June 1807, and the devastating Richmond Theatre Fire of December 1811. An ostensibly private catastrophe became public business, and performances of community grief were orchestrated by the city government, with the city's inhabitants playing key roles as well. The performances and texts of public mourning in the early nineteenth century consistently employed the language of nation and articulated a sense of common American identity.
  • 10 - “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi
    pp 229-249
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This essay explores the vast range of treatments that black corpses received in the antebellum South, arguing that death and the dead bodies of the enslaved were important sites for expressing and challenging social claims in others. The treatment of the dead in the slave South reflected, in magnified terms, how planters and bondspeople thought of themselves and each other. Death and the dead body are important sites for historians' analyses, precisely because Southerners used them to stake claims of kinship and respectability. The bodies of enslaved people were valuable to slaveholders in two distinct ways: as sources of labor and as sources of ideological power. For masters seeking to control their slaves through violence and terror, the black corpse was disposable. The dead body of a slave could no longer produce material wealth, but the ideological profit was still there for the stealing.
  • 11 - Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
    pp 250-274
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Yellow fever was a regular visitor to the Old South, and Charleston had the displeasure of bearing the brunt of yellow fever mortalities, rivaled only by New Orleans and Savannah in death rates. European immigrants who settled in Charleston died at higher rates than native white Southerners for a variety of reasons, mostly related to lack of resistance to the disease but also indicative of social class and gender. Yellow fever also threatened people legally defined as property. Charleston was an urban slave society, and when slaves died of yellow fever, the monetary losses inspired slaveholding elite to support public health measures. Relations between Irish and African Americans were generally more hostile than those between Germans and black Southerners. Many immigrants had not been socialized to racism, and they were slow to react to the norms of southern society, especially as racial lines hardened in the late antebellum era.

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