A Mythic Land Apart: Reassessing Southerners and Their History

John David Smith, Thomas H. Appleton

Bloomsbury Academic, May 12, 1997 - History - 206 pages

Utilizing biographical, demographic, political, social, and cultural approaches, the nine essays in this book provide a probing look at the South's diversity and its important place in the national past. The authors explore the tension between the South's well-worn mythic images and the diversity that bred such influential leaders as Philip Mazzei, Henry Clay, A. B. Happy Chandler, and John Sherman Cooper. The chapters illustrate the South's complexity in assessing the region's plain folk, slave panics, military strategy, racial reform, and temperance movement. The book untangles the South's mythology and offers fresh and penetrating insights into the ongoing reassessment of the region.

Written by leading experts on the South's rich past, this book provides nine essays on the history of the South. Utilizing biographical, demographic, political, social, and cultural approaches, the essays provide a probing look at the South's diversity and its important place in the national past. The authors explore the tension between the South's well-worn images and the diversity that bred such influential leaders as Philip Mazzei, Henry Clay, A. B. Happy Chandler, and John Sherman Cooper.

The South has always been a land of complexity and change. A Mythic Land Apart illustrates this in assessing the region's plain folk, slave panics, military strategy, racial reform, and temperance movement. Whether captured in fiction, film, or historical literature, the South's history remains intertwined with its mythic self. The essays in this book untangle the South's mythololgy and offer fresh and penetrating insights into the ongoing reassessment of the region.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• From Temperance: 19
• The Case of Louisville: 43

About the author

JOHN DAVID SMITH is Graduate Alumni Distinguished Professor of History at North Carolina State University. His most recent books include The Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery (Greenwood, 1988), Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (Greenwood, 1990), Anti-Black Thought (11 vols., 1993), and Black Voices from Reconstruction (1996).

THOMAS H. APPLETON, JR., serves as editor of publications for the Kentucky Historical Society. He is collaborating with Charles P. Roland on a biography of former Kentucky governor, U.S. Senator, and Commisioner of baseball Albert B. Happy Chandler.

Bibliographic information

• Title: A Mythic Land Apart: Reassessing Southerners and Their History; Issue 173 of Contributions in American History, ISSN 0084-9219; Volume 173 of Gene Roddenberry's Earth--Final Conflict
• Editors: John David Smith, Thomas H. Appleton
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 1997
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Sep 22, 2008
• ISBN: 031329304X, 9780313293047
• Length: 206 pages
• Subjects: History / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies); History / United States / General