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Over the years, the phrase "southern oratory" has become laden with myth; its mere invocation conjures up powerful images of grandiloquent antebellum patriarchs, enthusiastic New South hucksters, and raving wild-eyed demagogue politicians. In these essays, Waldo Braden strips away the myths to expose how the South's orators achieved their rhetorical effects and manipulated their audiences. The Oral Tradition in the South begins with two essays that trace the roots of the South's particular identification with oratory. In "The Emergence of the Concept of Southern Oratory, 1850-1950," Braden suggests that it was through the influence of southern scholars that southern oratory gained its renown. The second essay, "The Oral Tradition in the Old South," focuses on antebellum times to reveal the several factors that combined to make the region a fertile ground for oratory. Braden further explores the antebellum oratorical tradition in "The 1860 Election Campaign in Western Tennessee," analyzing speeches made in Memphis by such national figures as William L. Yancey, Andrew Johnson, and Stephen A. Douglas, and revealing the nature of political canvassing in that era. Shifting his discussion to the years that followed the Civil War, Braden examines. in "Myths in a Rhetorical Context," how such speakers as General John B. Gordon and Henry Grady worked to restore the shattered self-esteem of the region by spinning myths of the Old South and the Lost Cause and by proclaiming the hopeful era of the New South. The fifth essay, "The Rhetoric of Exploitation," probes the rhetorical strategies of the demagogue politicians of the twentieth century-strategies such as "plain folks" appeals and race-baiting. In the final essay, "The Rhetoric of a Closed Society." Braden analyzes the movement opposing racial integration in Mississippi. Showing how the White Citizens' Council, Governor Ross Barnett, and other leaders manipulated the public to make the state a closed society from 1954 to 1964. Although he takes pains to establish the historical context in each of these essays, Braden's emphasis as a rhetorical critic is always on the speeches themselves. He pays close attention to the kinds of appeals found in the words of the speeches and to the individual speaker's use of images and phrases to evoke particular myths. But Braden looks beyond the texts of the speeches to take into account the full context of the event. "What the reader finds in the printed version of the text," he explains, "might be only a small part of the myth, a tiny hint of what grinds inside frustrated listeners. Sometimes the trigger for the myth does not even appear in the printed version, because face-to-face the listeners and the speaker, feeling a oneness, evoke the myth without verbal expression." To account for this nonverbal dimension of oratory, these essays assess the impact of the location and atmosphere of the gathering, the audience's expectations, and the speaker's use of ritual, symbolic gestures, and props. During the nearly forty years of his career, Waldo Braden has been a pioneer in the serious study of oratory. A landmark work, The Oral Tradition in the South is the capstone to a distinguished career, a comprehensive and authoritative study of the subject Braden has so innovatively researched.

Offers a concise historical survey of the methods by which the United States government has sought to organise military forces from the days of the Revolutionary War to the Atomic Age. T. Harry Williams demonstrates that the American genius - even the genius for making mistakes - has found full expression in the systems which have been formulated.

When she was forty-four years old, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop left her comfortable home in New London, Connecticut, and soon thereafter took an apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side. She ran a newspaper ad inviting indigents dying of cancer to come live with her to be cared for until their death. The journey that led this daughter of one of America's most prominent literary figures to that Lower East Side tenement is the subject of this fascinating and far-reaching biography by Patricia Dunlavy Valenti. Rose was born in 1851, the youngest child of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne. As an adult, she reflected upon a childhood that "made me seem to myself a stranger who had come too late." Indeed, throughout much of her life, Rose found her own sense of identity subsumed by the demands and needs of those closest to her. She was overshadowed not only by her famous father but also by her brother, Julian, who achieved a modest degree of literary fame in his own right, and by her sister, Una, whose fragile health was a constant source of concern to her family. In 1871, Rose married George Parsons Lathrop, who would become a writer and an editor of her father's works. Rose herself had begun to write fiction and poetry at an early age, and after the death of their only child in 1881, she saw the publication of much of her work. Valenti reads these stories and poems with a biographer's eye and finds them filled with clues pointing to the remarkable transformation that would allow their author to transcend Victorian constraints and claim the kind of life that would realize her singular gifts. Particularly illuminating are the works Rose completed during the years in which she was making a break from her husband, whom she left in 1896. After her final separation from her husband, Rose, who had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1891, devoted the remainder of her life to the work carried on to this day by the order of nuns she founded, the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer. The account of her ministry, begun when cancer was thought contagious, should establish Rose Hawthorne Lathrop as a visionary in her belief that everyone has a right to die with dignity and as a pioneer in her advocacy of compassionate methods of caring for those near death. Valenti's well-written and thoroughly researched biography will interest a wide audience, from those who would enjoy a lively glimpse of the Hawthorne household to those concerned with the documenting of women's contributions to society.

In these fourteen beautifully crafted stories David Slavitt shows his mastery of the form. Elegant, spare, sometimes funny, sometimes elegiac, this collection reflects a writer in admirable control of his craft.

Opens up the feminist critical project by showing that author gender has no bearing on the creation of feminine-structured narrative. Moreover, by exposing a considerable "female consciousness" in the major fictional works of Robert Penn Warren, it departs dramatically from previous criticism of Warren.

One of America's more perceptive younger critics, Louis Rubin is well known for his commentaries on the literature of the South. These essays - selected from his critical works over a period of more than a dozen years - reflect his wider concern with the whole spectrum of American literature.

David Boyd's biography is the story of one man's dedicated struggle to protect and preserve Louisiana's fledgling state university from the cumulative effects of war, Reconstruction, political hostility, and parochial greed. Boyd fought hard to promote his vision of higher education among a largely antagonistic or apathetic citizenry.

Recent interest in the life and works of John Crowe Ransom has brought to light the many apparent contradictions and discontinuities in the career of this important man of letters. In John Crowe Ransom's Secular Faith, Keiran Quinlan offers a substantially revisionist interpretation of his subject.

Focuses on four representative poets - Louise Bogan, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, and Adrienne Rich - to explore the ways in which women writers' treatment of isolation extends our perception of women's experience and our understanding of the alienated human sensibility.

Offers the first full-scale biography of a man of meager education and limited political experience who worked his way from the North Georgia mountains to the positions of governor and US senator. Drawing on previously unavailable documents, Parks captures the mood of Georgia as well as the personality of this astute and controversial politician.

Albion Tourgee published a succession of novels and stories which made him famous. Bricks Without Straw, one of his two best-selling novels, is not only a moving story but an important commentary on the Reconstruction process in the South. In his introduction, Profession Otto H. Olsen gives a comprehensive evaluation of the book and its author.

Ines Murat's readable and entertaining narrative introduces us to little-known facts about the adventures and misadventures of numerous French veterans of Waterloo who migrated to the United States. More often than not, their visions of life in America conflicted with the original New World dream of the peaceful pioneer.

The first comprehensive survey of the Marquis de Lafayette as a symbolic figure in American intellectual history, this book examines the compound image of the man and the ideas he represented.

Joy J. Jackson's Where the River Runs Deep tells two stories--both significant and both fascinating. It is a biography of the author's father, Oliver Jackson, who spent virtually his entire life on or near the Mississippi River. And it is a history of the river itself, and the many changes that have transformed it in the twentieth century. Born in an oysterman's camp in south Louisiana, only a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico, and raised in an orphanage in New Orleans, Oliver Jackson (1896-1985) grew up to become a pilot boat crew member, a merchant seaman, a tugboat-man, and ultimately a Mississippi River pilot, the profession to which he had always aspired. Drawing extensively on oral history, including a series of audiotapes her father recorded before his death, Jackson presents a detailed social history not only of her father and his forebears but of a way of life now past. She vividly portrays village life in once-thriving but now-vanished river communities such as Port Eads and Burrwood in the delta below New Orleans, and in such working-class areas of the city as the Irish Channel. And she provides detailed descriptions of the early days of riverboat piloting between New Orleans and Baton Rouge and of tugboat work in the New Orleans harbor. Throughout, she evokes the special passion and respect that pilots have always had for their work and the river. Woven into Jackson's narrative of her father's life and career is a history of the profound changes in life and commerce on the Mississippi River since the turn of the century. During Oliver Jackson's lifetime, cotton gave way to petroleum as the major product transported on the lower Mississippi, while steamboats faded away and were replaced by towboats, with their long lines of barges. After mid-century many of the plantations and rural homesteads that had lined the banks of the river since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were crowded by the increasing presence of petrochemical plants. Jackson also writes about such calamitous events as the hurricane of 1915 and the great flood of 1927, and she describes the menace of German submarines at the mouth of the Mississippi during America's early months in World War II. Where the River Runs Deep is a story of river life unlike any other. It will appeal to students of regional history and family history, as well as to anyone fascinated by the lore of the Mississippi.

These stories deal with the clash between old and new values, with ties to the land and the lure of the sea, with the struggle to maintain relationships- between parents and children, husbands and wives, community and individual.

William Faulkner was one of the few major writers of the period following World War I to retain a sense of the place of abstractions in life and in art. Faulkner saw life as a process of flux and change and abstractions as a means of either denying actuality or of coping with change and providing a solid touchstone in the flux. William Faulkner: The Abstract and the Actual is the first critical study of Faulkner to examine in depth the theme of evasion and distortion of existence through abstractions--a theme that can be found to a greater or lesser degree in every Faulkner novel. The book covers the entire seventeen-novel canon and includes discussions of a significant number of short stories. Its thematic organization points out the unity and continuity of Faulkner's work. Examining the interrelationships between Faulkner's fiction and modern thinking, Panthea Broughton shows the insight Faulkner had into the philosophical problem of the abstract versus the actual. She concludes that the central dilemma in Faulkner's fiction--resistance to flux or change--is also one of the salient problems of the modern world.

Writing from a conviction of the centrality and worth of Walker Percy's work, as well as from the idea that fresh criticism is of value not only to readers but to living authors as well, the essayists in this collection present diverse approaches to understanding his art.

In this critical study of Theodore Roethke's poetry, Peter Balakian treats the evolution of the poet's work from his first book, Open House (1941), to his last, The Far Field (1964). Balakian argues that Roethke was among the most innovative poets of his time and that The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948) brought America to a new frontier in the contemporary era. Balakian maintains that Roethke combined and furthered major traditions in English and American poetry -- the formal poetics and meditative sensibility of British metaphysical and Romantic poetry, the American visionary tradition, and the innovations of modernism.The early chapters of the book explore Roethke's intellectual, religious, nd psychological development and his development as a poet. Balakian discusses the influence of William Carlos Williams on Roethke's work and claims that the relationship between the two poets provided Roethke with a sense of the American grain. Later chapters treat the shift from self-absorption to union with otherness that marks Roethke's love poems, exploring the poet's development of mysticism and a poetic persona and examining the influences of Eliot and Whitman on his work. Balakian also discusses the metaphysical language necessary for Roethke's late poems and follows Roethke's spiritual progress as he prophetically faces his final work.In presenting the evolution of Roethke's career, Balakian offers fresh and original readings of the poetry. He avoids any monolithic approach to the body of Roethke's work, employing instead various approaches to Roethke's stages of poetic evolution. Balakian makes use of the psychology of C.G. Jung and Erich Neumann, the writings of the mystics, the aesthetics of William Carlos Williams, and the myth of the American frontier. With a literary historian's concern for Roethke's place in history and a critic's eye for the sources and structures of poetry, Balakian studies the resonances of language and the inner life of this poet's craft. Theodore Roethke's Far Fields places Roethke firmly in literary and intellectual history and asserts his place as a major poet.

Examines the case of six men of Italian descent who were charged with the murder of a businessman in 1921 in Independence, Louisiana, and ultimately hanged.

The career of any black writer in nineteenth-century American was fraught with difficulties, and William Andrews undertakes to explain how and why Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) became the first Negro novelist of importance: "Steering a difficult course between becoming co-opted by his white literary supporters and becoming alienated from then and their access to the publishing medium, Chesnutt became the first Afro-American writer to use the white-controlled mass media in the service of serious fiction on behalf of the black community." Awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1928 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Chesnutt admitted without apologies that because of his own experiences, most of his writings concentrated on issue about racial identity. Only one-eighth Negro and able to pass for Caucasian, Chesnutt dramatized the dilemma of others like him. The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt's most autobiographical novel, evokes the world of "bright mulatto" caste in post-Civil War North Carolina and pictures the punitive consequences of being of mixed heritage. Chesnutt not only made a crucial break with many literary conventions regarding Afro-American life, crafting his authentic material with artistic distinction, he also broached the moral issue of the racial caste system and dared to suggest that a gradual blending of the races would alleviate a pernicious blight on the nation's moral progress. Andrews argues that "along with Cable in The Grandissimes and Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson, Chesnutt anticipated Faulkner in focusing on miscegenation, even more than slavery, as the repressed myth of the American past and a powerful metaphor of southern post-Civil War history." Although Chesnutt's career suffered setback and though he was faced with compromises he consistently saw America's race problem as intrinsically moral rather than social or political. In his fiction he pictures the strengths of Afro-Americans and affirms their human dignity and heroic will. William L. Andrews provides an account of essentially all that Chesnutt wrote, covering the unpublished manuscripts as well as the more successful efforts and viewing these materials in he context of the author's times and of his total career. Though the scope of this book extends beyond textual criticism, the thoughtful discussions of Chesnutt's works afford us a vivid and gratifying acquaintance with the fiction and also account for an important episode in American letters and history.

This biography offers a portrait of the enigmatic leader Franz Sigel. It shows him to be a disciplined, self-sacrificing idealist who sparked pride among his fellow emigres, aroused controversy among Americans, and perhaps enjoyed more admiration than other Civil War figures.

Louis D. Rubin, Jr., brings forty years of critical integrity and imaginative involvement with the history and literature of the South to his inquiry into the foundations of the southern literary imagination. His exploration centers on three of the most important writers of the pre-Civil War South: Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod.

Theodore Bilbo is remembered almost exclusively as the Archangel of white Supremacy. His reputation as perhaps the vilest purveyor of racist rhetoric is richly deserved. Yet, as Chester Morgan demonstrates in Redneck Liberal, the conventional image of Bilbo as merely a racist demagogue paints only half the picture.

Gathers together, evaluates, and sets down the stories, legends, facts, and circumstances of the founding of Baton Rouge; its troubled history under the colonial governments of France, England, and Spain; and its eventual entry into the Union in 1812.

At the close of the Civil War, the Federal government undertook a sweeping reform of land tenure in the South with the passage of the Southern Homestead Act of 1866. Michael Lanza studies the conception, evolution, and demise of this critical aspect of Reconstruction history.

Traditionally, the secession of the states in the lower South has been viewed as an irrational response to Lincoln's election or as a rational response to the genuine threat a Republican president posed to the geographical expansion of slavery. Both views emphasize the fundamental importance of relations between the federal government and the southern states, but overlook the degree to which secession was a response to a crisis within the South.Johnson argues that secession was a double revolution -- for home rule and for those who ruled at home -- brought about by an internal crisis in southern society. He portrays secession as the culmination of the long-developing tension between slavery on one side and the institutional and ideological consequences of the American Revolution on the other. This tension was masked during the antebellum years by the conflicting social, political, sectional, and national loyalties of many southerners. Lincoln's election forced southerners to choose among their loyalties, and their choice revealed a South that was divided along lines coinciding roughly with an interest in slavery and the established order.Starting with a thorough analysis of election data and integrating quantitative with more traditional literary sources, Johnson goes beyond the act of secession itself to examine what the secessionists said and did after they left the Union. Although this book is a close study of secession in Georgia, it has implications for the rest of the lower South. The result is a new thesis that presents secession as the response to a more complex set of motivations than has been recognized.

Elite, personable, and persuasive, Edward Douglass White served on the United States Supreme Court for twenty-seven years. During his tenure, he significantly influenced American public law. Robert Highsaw' s extensive judicial biography stresses White's constitutional thought and philosophy.

Because of the legendary exploits of Sir Francis Drake, most people have heard of the sixteenth-century conflicts between the English and the Spanish in the New World. Paul Hoffman looks behind the legend to discover the reality of what the Spanish crown was doing to defend its empire against raiders such as Drake. Using quantitative as well as literary data on the costs, types, and locations of defenses and on the locations and types of corsair incidents, Hoffman documents the evolution of s system of defenses that he believes was adequate for confronting the violence of the French and English in the years before 1586. He suggests that the size of Drake's expedition of 1586 was a response to this system and in turn caused the Spanish to abandon the system in favor of one that concentrated on the defense of the major towns and trade routes. Besides telling the complex story of how the Spanish built forts, installed garrisons and artillery, and patrolled the Caribbean, Hoffman discusses the ways in which the political system of the empire shaped decisions on defenses. Contrary to what many have believed, Hoffman concludes, Spain exhibited neither military failure nor timidity in its defense of hits interest in the New World. Sharing the results of his meticulous research about the Spanish Caribbean, Paul Hoffman examines an important period that legend has obscured.

Daniel Hoffman's bold new readings reveal unsuspected dimensions in Faulkner's The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. He shows how these works, often regarded as disunified collections of short stories and novellas, are coherent and successful experiments in novelistic form.

Examining his frequently overlooked successes, as well as his failures, Hargrove analyses both the content and the methods of Jimmy Carter's policy leadership. His style of leadership is studied in the light of his beliefs and values, and of his problem-solving skills and experience.