Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation

Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation

by Lorri Glover
Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation

Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation

by Lorri Glover

Paperback(New Edition)

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Overview

Between the generations of Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, the culture of white Southerners experienced significant changes, including the establishment of a normative male identity that exuded confidence, independence, and power. Southern Sons, the first work in masculinity studies to concentrate on the early South, explores how young men of the southern gentry came of age between the 1790s and the 1820s. Lorri Glover examines how standards for manhood came about, how young men experienced them in the early South, and how those values transformed many American sons into southern nationalists who ultimately would conspire to tear apart the republic they had been raised to lead.

This was the first generation of boys raised to conceive of themselves as Americans, as well as the first cohort of self-defined southern men. They grew up believing that the fate of the American experiment in self-government depended on their ability to put away personal predispositions and perform prescribed roles. Because men faced demanding gender norms, boys had to pass exacting tests of manhood—in education, refinement, courting, careers, and slave mastery. Only then could they join the ranks of the elite and claim power in society.

Revealing the complex interplay of nationalism and regionalism in the lives of southern men, Glover brings new insight to the question of what led the South toward sectionalism and civil war.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780801898211
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date: 10/01/2010
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 264
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Lorri Glover is the John Francis Bannon Professor in the Department of History at Saint Louis University. She is the author of All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds among the Early South Carolina Gentry, also published by Johns Hopkins, and coauthor with Daniel Blake Smith of The Shipwreck That Saved Jamestown: The Sea Venture Castaways and the Fate of America.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Sons
1. The First Duties of a Southern Boy
2. Raising ''Self Willed'' Sons
Part II: Gentlemen and Scholars
3. The Educational Aspirations of Southern Families
4. Creating Southern Schools for Southern Sons
5. The (Mis)Behaviors of Southern Collegians
6. The Southern Code of Gentlemanly Conduct
7. Acting the Part of a Gentleman
Part III: Patriarchs
8. Supervising Suitors
9. Winning a Wife
10. Professions and the ''Circle about Every Man''
11. Slaveholding and the Destiny of the Republic's Southern Sons
Epilogue
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

What People are Saying About This

Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Southern Sons adds immeasurably to our understanding of gender relations in the antebellum South. Compellingly argued, lucidly written, and thoroughly researched, this work is a model of sensitive historical analysis. Especially valuable is her demonstration of the complexities in social relations between parents and sons, peers and kin, college authorities and their often immature students. She pursues the lives of these favored young slaveholders through their courtships, marriages, and arrival on the threshold of responsible adulthood. Throughout their development, Glover persuasively asserts, they sought to become 'men of honor' and refinement in the classic terms of their time and culture. This study will be highly acclaimed by ordinary readers well as scholars of American history.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South and The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War

From the Publisher

Southern Sons adds immeasurably to our understanding of gender relations in the antebellum South. Compellingly argued, lucidly written, and thoroughly researched, this work is a model of sensitive historical analysis. Especially valuable is her demonstration of the complexities in social relations between parents and sons, peers and kin, college authorities and their often immature students. She pursues the lives of these favored young slaveholders through their courtships, marriages, and arrival on the threshold of responsible adulthood. Throughout their development, Glover persuasively asserts, they sought to become 'men of honor' and refinement in the classic terms of their time and culture. This study will be highly acclaimed by ordinary readers well as scholars of American history.
—Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South and The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War

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