Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation - Softcover

Glover, Lorri

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801898218 ISBN 13: 9780801898211

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Product Description:

A work on masculinity that focuses on the early South, exploring how young men of the southern gentry came of age between the 1790s and the 1820s. It 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.

Review:

"A compelling examination."

(Giselle Roberts Civil War Book Review)

"Makes important contributions to historians' understandings of gender, family, and sectionalism."

(Anya Jabour Journal of American History)

"Insightful study."

(Choice)

"We read about young men who exhibited a lifelong negotiation with authority, with society's expectations, with one another, and eventually with the North... Well-written, meticulously researched."

(Evan A. Kontarinis Journal of the Early Republic)

"Glover convincingly revises the long-held thesis that honor is the best paradigm for investigating young Southern men's identities in the early national period."

(Jennifer L. Gross H-NC, H-Net Reviews)

"Glover successfully demonstrates that becoming a man in the early national South was a complicated process that demanded much of the boys who sought to be considered men."

(Charlene Boyer Lewis Register of the Kentucky Historical Society)

"Glover carefully charts the empowerment which elite southern boys received over a lifetime of successfully navigating these social waters."

(R. Matthew Poteat Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review)

"Glover's new study of southern elite manhood in the new nation is an important contribution to southern history as well as to gender history."

(Thomas A. Foster William and Mary Quarterly)

"Southern Sons is an impressive work, certain to influence―and perhaps even reshape―Southern social and cultural history for years to come, as well as the history of American masculinities."

(Steve Tripp Historian)

"Glover's analysis is insightful and rests on exhaustive research in reliable sources."

(Matthew Mason Southern Quarterly)

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0801898218
• ISBN 13: 9780801898211
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 262