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Antebellum Southern society re-examined

The four volumes under review here examine different aspects of the society of the antebellum Southern United States. Each offers something valuable for the student of Southern society or Southern slavery. The fascination exerted on historians by the antebellum American South can only be fuelled by volumes such as these, which both challenge and reaffirm current historiographic trends. Society and culture in the slave South is a collection of nine extracts from the works of leading American historians. This volume is part of the Rewriting histories series, which aims to challenge established historiography on the basis of either new research or new historical perspectives. While this aim is entirely laudable, and as series editor Jack R. Censer says in a preface, 'revisionism has always followed closely in the tow of history writing' (p. vii), looking at some of the ideas expressed in this book, one begins to wonder if he is not stretching revisionism a little too far. For example, Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's theory of paternalism is hardly a new concept. It received full treatment in Eugene Genovese's masterful Roll, Jordan, roll published in the early 1970s, at which time it genuinely was revisionistchallenging Stamp's concept of planters as primarily businessmen. To be fair to the editor, though, all these extracts are taken from works published since 1983, even if they often restate previously published ideas.