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A Warring Nation: Honor, Race, and Humiliation in America and Abroad. By Bertram Wyatt-Brown. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. viii, 247. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8139-3474-7.)
The late Bertram Wyatt-Brown was an internationally known scholar of southern history and culture, best remembered for his seminal work Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982). In this final work he engages again the difficult subject of honor and-much like any old nemesis-uncovers new wrinkles and adds complexity to his understanding of it. He moves beyond the nineteenth century, the South, and the traditional boundaries of white male honor. A Warring Nation: Honor, Race, and Humiliation in America and Abroad is a book that most readers will find anchored in Wyatt-Brown's previous work but also filled with new questions and insights. The book also highlights Wyatt-Brown's frequently comparative, cross-cultural approach as he studies honor and shame among the Vikings, in West African nations, and in the United States.
Wyatt-Brown integrates this study of honor with race and humiliation to a greater extent than ever before. Some critics of Southern Honor charged that he ignored the role of race and racism in shaping honor and the old ethic's influence in the region. In A Warring Nation, Wyatt-Brown writes that "honor...