Death and the American South

Craig Thompson Friend, Lorri Glover

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781107084209
• eBook ISBN: 9781316028797
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This rich collection of original essays illuminates the causes and consequences of the South's defining experiences with death. Employing a wide range of perspectives, while concentrating on discrete episodes in the region's past, the authors explore topics from the seventeenth century to the present, from the death traps that emerged during colonization to the bloody backlash against emancipation and civil rights to recent canny efforts to commemorate - and capitalize on - the region's deadly past. Some authors capture their subjects in the most intimate of moments: killing and dying, grieving and remembering, and believing and despairing. Others uncover the intentional efforts of Southerners to publicly commemorate their losses through death rituals and memorialization campaigns. Together, these poignantly told Southern stories reveal profound truths about the past of a region marked by death and unable, perhaps unwilling, to escape the ghosts of its history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction: Death and the American South
• 1 Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South
• 2 The Usable Death: Evangelicals, Anglicans, and the Politics of Dying in the Late-Colonial Lowcountry
• 3 When “History Becomes Fable Instead of Fact”: The Deaths and Resurrections of Virginia’s Leading Revolutionaries
• 4 American Mourning: Catastrophe, Public Grief, and the Making of Civic Identity in the Early National South
• 5 To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery
• 6 Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
• 7 “Cumberer of the Earth”: Suffering and Suicide among the Faithful in the Civil War South
• 8 The “Translation” of Lundy Harris: Interpreting Death out of the Confusion of Sexuality, Violence, and Religion in the New South
• 9 “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
• 10 “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi
• 11 Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
• Index