Southern Manhood

by Friend, Craig Thompson; Glover, Lorri

• ISBN13: 9780820326160
• ISBN10: 082032616X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr

Summary

Spanning the era from the American Revolution to the Civil War, these nine pathbreaking original essays explore the unexpected, competing, or contradictory ways in which southerners made sense of manhood. Employing a rich variety of methodologies, the contributors look at southern masculinity within African American, white, and Native American communities; on the frontier and in towns; and across boundaries of class and age.Until now, the emerging subdiscipline of southern masculinity studies has been informed mainly by conclusions drawn from research on how the planter class engaged issues of honor, mastery, and patriarchy. But what about men who didn't own slaves or were themselves enslaved? These essays illuminate the mechanisms through which such men negotiated with overarching conceptions of masculine power. Here the reader encounters Choctaw elites struggling to maintain manly status in the market economy, black and white artisans forging rival communities and competing against the gentry for social recognition, slave men on the southern frontier balancing community expectations against owner domination, and men in a variety of military settings acting out community expectations to secure manly status.AsSouthern Manhoodbrings definition to an emerging subdiscipline of southern history, it also pushes the broader field in new directions. All of the essayists take up large themes in antebellum history, including southern womanhood, the advent of consumer culture and market relations, and the emergence of sectional conflict.

Author Biography

Craig Thompson Friend is an associate professor of history and Director of Public History at North Carolina State University. He is coeditor of Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South (Georgia). Lorri Glover is an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of All Our Relations.

Table of Contents

Rethinking Southern Masculinity: An Introduction	vii
Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover
Refuge of Manhood: Masculinity and the Militia Experience in Kentucky	1	(21)
Harry S. Laver
"Let Us Manufacture Men": Educating Elite Boys in the Early National South	22	(27)
Lorri Glover
Trying to Look Like Men: Changing Notions of Masculinity among Choctaw Elites in the Early Republic	49	(22)
Greg O'Brien
Fraternity and Masculine Identity: The Search for Respectability among White and Black Artisans in Petersburg, Virginia	71	(21)
L. Diane Barnes
Belles, Benefactors, and the Blacksmith's Son: Cyrus Stuart and the Enigma of Southern Gentlemanliness	92	(21)
Craig Thompson Friend
Being Shifty in a New Country: Southern Humor and the Masculine Ideal	113	(23)
John Mayfield
The Absent Subject: African American Masculinity and Forced Migration to the Antebellum Plantation Frontier	136	(38)
Edward E. Baptist
"Stout Chaps Who Can Bear the Distress": Young Men in Antebellum Military Academies	174	(22)
Jennifer R. Green
"Commenced to Think Like a Man": Literacy and Manhood in African American Civil War Regiments	196	(25)
Heather Andrea Williams
Contributors	221	(2)
Selected Bibliography	223