New Books in the American South

In his recent book, High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor (The Kent State University Press, 2024), Edwin P. Rutan II rehabilitates the motivations and contributions of late-war Union soldiers and reframes our understanding of how the Union won the Civil War.For more than a century, historians have disparaged the men who joined the Union army in the later days of the Civil War –– when higher bounty payments and the conditional draft were in effect –– as unpatriotic mercenaries who made poor soldiers and contributed little to the Union victory. However, as Rutan explains, historians have relied on the accounts of 1861 and 1862 veterans who resented these new recruits who had not yet suffered the hardships of war, and they were jealous of the higher bounties those recruits received. The result, he argues, is a long-standing mischaracterization of the service of 750,000 Union soldiers.High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac offers a much-needed correction to the historical record, providing a more balanced assessment of the “high-bounty” replacements in the Army of the Potomac. Rutan argues, using combat-effectiveness methodology, that they were generally competent soldiers and indispensable in defeating the Army of Northern Virginia. He also examines the issue of financial motivation, concluding that the volunteers of 1862 may have been more driven by economic incentives than once thought, and 1864 recruits were less driven by this than typically described. Thus, Rutan concludes that the Union “high-bounty” men do not deserve the scorn heaped on them by early volunteers and subsequent generations of historians.Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In 'We Want Better Education!': The 1960s Chicano Student Movement, School Walkouts, and the Quest for Educational Reform in South Texas (Texas A&M UP, 2023), James B. Barrera offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the educational, cultural, and political issues of the Chicano Movement in Texas, which remains one of the lesser-known social and political efforts of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This movement became the political training ground for greater Chicano empowerment for students. By the 1970s, it was these students who helped to organize La Raza Unida Party in Texas. This book explores the conditions faced by students of Mexican origin in public schools throughout the South Texas region, including Westside San Antonio, Edcouch-Elsa, Kingsville, and Crystal City. Barrera focuses on the relationship of Chicano students and their parents with the school systems and reveals the types of educational deficiencies faced by such students that led to greater political activism. He also shows how school-related issues became an important element of the students' political and cultural struggle to gain a quality education and equal treatment. Protests enabled students and their supporters to gain considerable political leverage in the decision-making process of their schools. Barrera incorporates information collected from archives throughout the state of Texas, including statistical data, government documents, census information, oral history accounts, and legal records. Of particular note are the in-depth interviews he conducted with numerous former students and community activists who participated or witnessed the various "walkouts" or student protests. "We Want Better Education!" is a major contribution to the historiography of social movements, Mexican American studies, and twentieth-century Texas and American history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670-1825 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023), Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony.The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution’s development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them.Throughout South Carolina’s long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Poet Laureate of Kentucky Crystal Wilkinson’s food memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks (Clarkson Potter, 2023), honors her kitchen ghosts, five generations of Black Appalachian women. She contends, “The concept of the kitchen ghost came to me years ago, when I realized that my ancestors are always with me and that the women are most present while I’m chopping or stirring or standing at the stove.” Wilkinson shares nearly forty family recipes like Corn Pudding, Chicken and Dumplings, and Granny Christine’s Jam Cake, with stories and family photos to bring to life the rich heritage of Black Appalachia.Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption II, set in 1911 and 1899, are the most-played American history video games since The Oregon Trail. Beloved by millions, they’ve been widely acclaimed for their realism and attention to detail. But how do they fare as re-creations of history?In Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past (St Martin's Press, 2024), award-winning American history professor Dr. Tore Olsson takes up that question and more. Weaving the games’ plots and characters into an exploration of American violence between 1870 and 1920, Dr. Olsson shows that it was more often disputes over capitalism and race, not just poker games and bank robberies, that fueled the bloodshed of these turbulent years. As such, this era has much to teach us today. From the West to the Deep South to Appalachia, Olsson reveals the gritty and brutal world that inspired the games, but sometimes lacks context and complexity on the digital screen. Colourful, fast-paced, and dramatic, Red Dead’s History sheds light on dark corners of the American past for gamers and history buffs alike.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865 (U Georgia Press, 2021), Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865.Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America's system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one's status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual's continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system.Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together—by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies—these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property—including that most precious, themselves.For more, see the "Generations of Freedom" website.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous - as was, according to legend, the temper that landed him in two of the South's most brutal prisons, while his immense talent twice won him pardons. But, as Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies (Cambridge UP, 2024) shows, these stories were shaped by the white folklorists who 'discovered' Lead Belly and, along with reporters, recording executives, and radio and film producers, introduced him to audiences beyond the South. Through a revelatory examination of arrest, trial, and prison records; sharecropping reports; oral histories; newspaper articles; and more, author Sheila Curran Bernard replaces myth with fact, offering a stunning indictment of systemic racism in the Jim Crow era of the United States and the power of narrative to erase and distort the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

In Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign that Broke the Confederacy (Simon & Schuster, 2019), Donald L. Miller explains in great detail how Grant ultimately succeeded in taking the city and turning the tide of the war in favor of the Union. Miller begins his tale with events in Cairo and leads the reader through all the important events that lead to success at Vicksburg. He also discusses Grant’s background, personal characteristics, and the influential people surrounding General Grant during this crucial time.Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Emeritus Professor of History at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Miller’s work includes books on World War II, the war in the Pacific, America’s air war against Germany, studies of Chicago and Jazz Age Manhattan.Jessica Moloughney is a graduate student in history and library science at Queens College in New York Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Toby Green draws upon a range of underutilized sources to describe the evolution of West Africa over a period of four transformative centuries. With these sources Green demonstrates that the region was integrated into the developing transcontinental trade networks far earlier than is often portrayed in more Western-centric accounts, and in ways that influenced the development of local communities long before European ships arrived off of their coast. The arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century, however, shifted the dynamics of this trade in dramatic ways, changing kingdoms and reshaping economic priorities. While West Africa was an equal partner for the first two and a half centuries of this period, Green shows how the growing demand for slaves and the very different nature of slavery in the West during this period combined increasingly disadvantaged the region, while simultaneously changing the internal political dynamics of kingdoms and the societies within them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south

A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor.In Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans (U Chicago Press, 2024), Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploitation of working-class people. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details how enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans’s culinary history to focus on how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-south