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Emberton Carole . Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War . Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2013. 285 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780226024271 ; $27.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0226269993 .
Prince K. Stephen . Stories of the South: Race and Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915 . Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 2014. 321 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1469614182 .
Book Reviews
Stephen Prince has written a cultural history of the South's project to invent and impose its own story after the Civil War, and Carole Emberton centers her study of the postwar South upon the nature, uses, and meanings of violence for both white and African American men. These studies differ in focus, period, sources, and more. Both evaluate the discourse of the postwar period, but it is Prince who makes that the center of his study, evaluating fiction and nonfiction, and white and African American discourse. Emberton, by putting violence at the center of her study, interrogates the stories of the South as a part of a wider social history of the immediate postwar experience. Both simply excel.
In Stories of the South, Prince deftly contrasts the shifting attitudes toward the Klan and carpetbaggers. As Northern white readers of these stories of the South found more and more compelling the idea that carpetbaggers were a problem and the Klan was comprised of upright men wanting only self-defense, opposition to the white South's dominance crumbled. By shifting the focus of the "race question," white Southern writers succeeded in making the answer self-evident: we are like you, you would have done the same, so simply leave us alone. Decade by decade, and through hundreds of books, stories, and articles penned by white Southern writers, this argument became more and more the common sense not just of the unreconstructed South, but of the re-made "New North" as well (119).
There are important arguments in each of Prince's six chapters, which march chronologically through the shifting rhetorical strategies deployed in the fifty years after the Civil War. The North's first postwar narrative of the South--emerging during Reconstruction--tended to take the posture of objectivity and contrasted traitorous Southern whites against an...