Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

This anthology on one of the most controversial historians of the American South presents 26 essays and excerpts by recognized authorities who comment on Phillip's writings, his background, training, regional and racial prejudices, methodology, and the historical genres in which he worked. A brief interpretive introduction prefaces each chapter. and a chronological listing of the critical literature on Phillips completes the work. This anthology represents the best work on Phillips published between 1913 and 1986.

Daniel Joseph Singal examines this struggle between the characteristic culture of twentieth-century America and the South's tenacious blend of Victorianism and the Cavalier myth.

The Crucible of Race, a major reinterpretation of black-white relations in the South, was widely acclaimed on publication and compared favorably to two of the seminal books on Southern history: Wilbur J. Cash's The Mind of the South and C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Representing 20 years of research and writing on the history of the South, The Crucible of Race explores the large topic of Southern race relations for a span of a century and a half. Oxford is pleased to make available an abridgement of this parent volume: A Rage for Order preserves all the theme lines that were advanced in the original volume and many of the individual stories. As in Crucible of Race, Williamson here confronts the awful irony that the war to free blacks from slavery also freed racism. He examines the shift in the power base of Southern white leadership after 1850 and recounts the terrible violence done to blacks in the name of self-protection. This condensation of one of the most important interpretations of Southern history is offered as a means by which a large audience can grasp the essentials of black-white relations--a problem that persists to this day and one with which we all must contend--North and South, black and white.