How travel writing about the South shaped the identity of a nation

Traveling South is the first major study of how narratives of travel through the antebellum South helped construct an American national identity during the years between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. John Cox makes his case on the basis of a broad range of texts that includes slave narratives, domestic literature, and soldiers’ diaries, as well as more traditional forms of travel writing. In the process he extends the boundaries of travel literature both as a genre and as a subject of academic study.

The writers of these intranational accounts struggled with the significance of travel through a region that was both America and “other.” In writings by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and William Bartram, for example, the narrators create personal identities and express their Americanness through travel that, Cox argues, becomes a defining aspect of the young nation. In the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup, the complex relationship between travel and slavery highlights contemporary debates over the meaning of space and movement. Both Fanny Kemble and Harriet Jacobs explore the intimate linkings of women’s travel and the construction of an ideal domestic space, whereas Frederick Law Olmsted seeks, through his travel writing, to reform the southern economy and expand a New England yeoman ideology throughout the nation. The Civil War diaries of Union soldiers, written during the years that witnessed the largest movement of travelers through the South, echo earlier themes while concluding that the South should not be transformed in order to become sufficiently “American”; rather, it was and should remain a part of the American nation, regardless of perceived differences.

John D. Cox is an assistant professor of English at Georgia College & State University. He also serves as the associate director of the Center for Georgia Studies and the assistant editor of the Flannery O’Connor Review.

"Cox's critical approach reflects an unusual and interesting combination of interests in the cognate areas of travel writing, domestic narratives, and nationalist literature. I know of no other book quite like this one, and I consider it a fresh approach to an important and timely subject."
—Michael P. Branch, editor of Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden

"Traveling South is a solid and well-conceptualized book with very smart and persuasive arguments and insights. Cox shows excellent command of the scholarship of travel, travel writing, and of the individual travelers he analyzes. Cox carves out a niche in the scholarship of the field as well as in the interpretation of texts of travel."
—Mary S. Schriber, author of Writing Home: American Women Abroad

November 2005
264 pp.
6 x 9 in.
2 photos

Biography of a Self-Made Man

Vincent Carretta

An epic of slavery, freedom, and the will to succeed

This definitive biography tells the story of the former slave Olaudah Equiano (1745?-97), who in his day was the English-speaking world's most renowned person of African descent. Equiano's greatest legacy is his classic 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African . A key document of the early movement to ban the slave trade, it includes the earliest known firsthand description by a slave of the horrific Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas. Equiano, the African is filled with fresh revelations about this many-sided figure--most notably that Equiano may have been born not in Africa, as he claimed, but in South Carolina.

For Vincent Carretta, such disconnects between the public persona and actual life of Equiano only increase his importance as a window into a number of complex, overlapping worlds. Equiano was a sailor, adventurer, entrepreneur, and jack-of-all-trades. Carretta distills years of scholarly detective work on Equiano's life and writings into a richly textured portrait of the man whose many transformations took him from slave to slave trader to anti-slave-trade advocate, and from pagan to Christian.

This is "life and times" history at its best. Throughout, Carretta relates The Interesting Narrative to the historical record on Equiano, as well as to the century's economic, political, and religious undercurrents. Carretta argues that Equiano may have fabricated his African roots and his survival of the Middle Passage not only to sell more copies of his book but also to help advance the movement against the slave trade. Equiano, the African will leave readers with a fuller appreciation of the man's achievements and a deeper understanding of race and slavery in the Atlantic world.

"A remarkable man has been blessed with a superbly qualified biographer. Vincent Carretta knows more about Equiano than anyone alive, has carefully and respectfully edited his work, has boldly raised tantalizing questions about his origins, and has meticulously tracked down information about him that no one else has found. This book will be the authoritative source about Equiano's life for many years to come."--Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

"This biography provides an accurate, fair-minded, reliable, and engagingly written account of the life of the man whom Carretta describes justifiably as 'the most famous person of African descent in the Atlantic world.' In this rewarding study, Carretta invests the large store of erudition he has amassed from many years of assiduous study of Equiano's life and times. I know of no scholar who is as steeped in Equiano and no one who has done more to restore Equiano and his literary work to serious scholarly consideration."--William L. Andrews, E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Vincent Carretta, professor of English at the University of Maryland, is currently a senior fellow at Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. His books include scholarly editions of the works of Equiano and of Equiano's contemporaries Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Phillis Wheatley.

A crucial addition to American literary criticism on sentimental literaturePast studies have discussed antebellum and early national sentimental literature by and about women as a retreat from, or criticism of, the burgeoning market. In this landmark study, Joseph Fichtelberg examines how this literature actually helped to bring market behaviors into maturity. Between 1780 and 1870, Americans endured no fewer than seventeen economic depressions. Each one generated sentimental outpourings in which women came to personify the travails of the marketplace. In the early national period, novels like Martha Meredith Read's Margaretta and Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum depicted resolute heroines who soothed national ills with virtuous vulnerability. While men often languished in such novels, women thrived. Antebellum fictions extend the argument: bankrupt husbands dissolved in sentimental despair, while their wives used a different sensibility to understand, and adapt to, the market itself. These fictions used women characters to think through the problems of economic crisis and growth--a process completed by the Civil War, when popular fictions began to depict merchants and clerks as feminine. To master the market was to act like a woman--virtuous, immune to commercial temptation, and thus pure. This notion, Fichtelberg argues, was crucial to the onset of liberalism and the emergence of the American middle class. In addition to his discussions of popular, though noncanonical, writers such as Read and Mitchell, Fichtelberg also covers well-known authors such as Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Olaudah Equiano, and Walt Whitman. He brings to bear neglected sources (including the ledgers of Ralph Waldo Emerson) and interweaves best-selling novels and pamphlets with political debates and contemporary economic analyses to create rich descriptions of the era. A crucial addition to American literary criticism on sentimental literature, Critical Fictions is a groundbreaking analysis of the relations between commercial and sentimental discourses in early American literature as well as a history of early American economics. It will appeal to specialists as well as to the general reader interested in how American culture has portrayed women in ways that express its deepest needs.

"Joseph Fichtelberg’s Critical Fictions overthrows the received wisdom that early American sentimental fiction was a form of resistance to the impersonal rationality of commerce. Exploring commercial discourse and fiction from 1780 to 1870, he discovers sentiment to have been the organizing discursive structure of the market in the early republic, determining the character of negotiation and the force of reward and punishment, while providing the pathos of acquisition and contractual compromise. In this year when executive greed has made us notice the acquisitive passions of players in the market, Fichtelberg’s insightful study teaches us that there has never been a divorce between the desires that impel commerce and those that bind persons in imaginative communities." --David Shields, Editor of Early American Literature

"Joseph Fichtelberg's Critical Fictions is an exemplary study of the early American novel, its cultural context, and its pragmatic intervention in the discourse crucial to the defining of democracy for a new republic. The study is wide in scope and fascinating in its findings--a must read for anyone studying writings from the era of the new republic." --Carla J. Mulford, Pennsylvania State University

Joseph Fichtelberg is an associate professor of English at Hofstra University.

Charles D. Spornick, Alan R. Cattier and Robert J. Greene

All you need to explore Bartram's trail by foot, canoe, bicycle, horseback, car--or armchair

From 1773 to 1777, naturalist William Bartram journeyed through the American South from the Carolinas to Florida to the Mississippi River. Bartram's classic account, Travels, documents what he saw: a world of flora, fauna, cultures, and terrains unknown to most readers of his time--and, we too often assume, lost to us today. An Outdoor Guide to Bartram's Travels reconstructs as closely as possible the original routes Bartram took. Featuring some fifty thoroughly tested and researched tours, the guide takes today's outdoor enthusiasts and history buffs along Bartram's path through what were once colonial towns and outposts, native kingdoms, and unspoiled wilderness. Some tours can be taken by car or bicycle; others can be taken only as Bartram himself would have traveled--on foot, by canoe, or on horseback. The tours are supplemented with more than 140 maps and photographs as well as informative sidebars and listings of nearby points of interest. As the guide points out details of both the natural and manmade environments to be seen along each tour, it imparts an understanding of the forces at work on the landscape. Visitors to Paynes Prairie in north central Florida, for instance, are urged to notice not only networks of manmade dikes built in the last century but also evidence of current efforts to dismantle them and let the wetlands again manage itself. At one level, the guide is an invitation into the past, to travel along with Bartram as he visits the lands of the American colonists, the Creek, the Seminole, and the Cherokee--all on the eve of the American Revolution. At another level, it is an invitation to the present: to see how the some parts of the American Southeast have changed in the last two centuries while others have survived in all their wild splendor. From the mountain grandeur of the Blue Ridge to the coastal beauty of Cumberland Island, from the formal gardens of Charleston to the False River plantations near the Mississippi River, the present answers the past in An Outdoor Guide to Bartram's Travels.

Charles D. Spornick is director of the Beck Center at the Emory University Library. Alan R. Cattier is director of the Academic Technology Group at the Emory University Information Technology Division. Robert J. Greene, who is retired, is formerly library director at Kennesaw State University and a science coordinator at the Emory University Library.

John F. Wilson

George H. Shriver Lecture Series in Religion in American History

A reflective look at historians' understanding, over time, of the place of religion in our nation
This lively survey ranges across several centuries of change in the ways historians have thought and written about religion in America. In particular, John F. Wilson is concerned with how historians have perceived religion's relationship to the political organization of our country. He begins by establishing the genesis of religion as a specialized area of American history in the nineteenth century, and then discusses religious history's development through the early 1970s. Along the way he considers topics ranging from the "long shadow" the Puritans have cast over our comprehension of religion in American history to the ascendancy of such institutions as the University of Chicago as systematizing forces in religious scholarship. Wilson then discusses how scholars, since the early 1970s, have sought to ground their accounts of American religious trends and events in ways that either avoid or transcend references to Puritanism. The rise of comparative religious histories, Wilson notes, has been the welcome outcome. Moving into the present, Wilson explores a range of behaviors, if not beliefs, that might be understood as religious aspects of American life, and looks at how the spiritual or religious dimensions of American cultural life have been expressed in gnosticism, the mass media, and consumerism. One commentator, Wilson notes, suggested that there are no longer any religions as such in America today, but only religious "brands." Wilson himself sees America as a place where there is room for Old World traditions and new spiritual initiatives, a modern nation remarkably hospitable to ancient preoccupations.

John F. Wilson is Collord Professor of Religion and has been dean of the Graduate School at Princeton University. His books include Pulpit in Parliament and Public Religion in American Culture.

Donald Edward Davis

The first book-length environmental history of this region Winner of the Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment

A timely study of change in a complex environment, Where There Are Mountains explores the relationship between human inhabitants of the southern Appalachians and their environment. Incorporating a wide variety of disciplines in the natural and social sciences, the study draws information from several viewpoints and spans more than four hundred years of geological, ecological, anthropological, and historical development in the Appalachian region. The book begins with a description of the indigenous Mississippian culture in 1500 and ends with the destructive effects of industrial logging and dam building during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Donald Edward Davis discusses the degradation of the southern Appalachians on a number of levels, from the general effects of settlement and industry to the extinction of the American chestnut due to blight and logging in the early 1900s. This portrait of environmental destruction is echoed by the human struggle to survive in one of our nation's poorest areas. The farming, livestock raising, dam building, and pearl and logging industries that have gradually destroyed this region have also been the livelihood of the Appalachian people. The author explores the sometimes conflicting needs of humans and nature in the mountains while presenting impressive and comprehensive research on the increasingly threatened environment of the southern Appalachians.Donald

Edward Davis is a professor of sociology at Dalton State College. He is the author of Ecophilosophy: A Field Guide to the Literature and coauthor of Hiking Trails of the Smokies.

Racial Construction in the Early South

Theda Perdue

Now in Paper

An enlightening look at issues of race, "blood," and kinship in the American South from a Native perspective

On the southern frontier in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European men--including traders, soldiers, and government agents--sometimes married Native women. Children of these unions were known by whites as "half-breeds." The Indian societies into which they were born, however, had no corresponding concepts of race or "blood." Moreover, counter to European customs and laws, Native lineage was traced through the mother only. No familial status or rights stemmed from the father.

"Mixed Blood" Indians looks at a fascinating array of such birth- and kin-related issues as they were alternately misunderstood and astutely exploited by both Native and European cultures. Theda Perdue discusses the assimilation of non-Indians into Native societies, their descendants' participation in tribal life, and the white cultural assumptions conveyed in the designation "mixed blood." In addition to unions between European men and Native women, Perdue also considers the special cases arising from the presence of white women and African men and women in Indian society.

From the colonial through the early national era, "mixed bloods" were often in the middle of struggles between white expansionism and Native cultural survival. That these "half-breeds" often resisted appeals to their "civilized" blood helped foster an enduring image of Natives as fickle allies of white politicians, missionaries, and entrepreneurs. "Mixed Blood" Indians rereads a number of early writings to show us the Native outlook on these misperceptions and to make clear that race is too simple a measure of their--or any peoples'--motives.

Theda Perdue is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has written or edited ten books, including Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 and S lavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 .

March   2005
160 pp. 5.5 x 8.25 in. 4 photos 1 map
ISBN 0-8203-2731-X paper
$16.95

January 2003
Hardcover
ISBN 0-8203-2453-1 (cl.) • $24.95