Two New Books Revisit Southern History

Two new books on different aspects of Southern history are featured in the current issue of The New York Times Book Review (9/10/06).

The first book, entitled Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, is a popular history of Reconstruction centered on Mississippi. Written by Nicholas Lemann of Columbia University, the book focuses on Adelbert Ames, a transplanted Northerner who served as Mississippi's Reconstruction governor. A reformer interested in improving the well-being of the freedmen, Ames encountered increasingly violent white resistance -- a resistance that eventually forced him from office and paved the way for legalized segregation in Mississippi.

The second book, called There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, was written by Jason Sokol, a professor at Cornell University. Sokol's book focuses on the reactions of ordinary white Southerners to the Civil Rights movement. While many whites supported the defiant positions taken by leaders like George Wallace, many others felt deeply ambivalent about the events surrounding them. Sokol attempts to marshal the different voices to show the complexity of white reactions during the Civil Rights era.