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Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction. Edited by Euan Hague, Heidi Beirich, and Edward H. Sebesta. Foreword by James W. Loewen. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Pp. [xvi], 338. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-29271837-1.)
The contributors to Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction show admirable patience and steadiness with their subject matter: the often frantic, willfully ignorant, and paranoia-laced movement among some white southerners toward modern-day secession. This even, strong volume of essays, edited by Euan Hague, Heidi Beirich, and Edward H. Sebesta, explores the cultural, historical. gendered, white supremacist, and political components of the neo-Confederate ideology. The authors painstakingly explicate the writings and speeches of the main neo-Confederates such as Clyde Wilson, John Shelton Reed, Michael Hill, and other leading figures of the Council of Conservative Citizens and the League of the South. Also covered in the collection are the political battles over flying the Confederate battle flag and the adoption of textbooks with allegedly antisouthern biases. The entire movement, the authors find, "is underpinned by ideas of irreconcilable racial and ethnic difference, white dominance, patriarchy, social Darwinism, and so-called orthodox Christianity" (p. 310). Therefore, in the afterword, Hague and Sebesta conclude that the neo-Confederate movement is, at its core, antidemocratic and a threat to civil rights for racial minorities, women, immigrants, and the gay community. It is, moreover,...