Overview

In this in-depth and detailed history, Timothy J. Williams reveals that antebellum southern higher education did more than train future secessionists and proslavery ideologues. It also fostered a growing world of intellectualism flexible enough to marry the era's middle-class value system to the honor-bound worldview of the southern gentry. By focusing on the students' perspective and drawing from a rich trove of their letters, diaries, essays, speeches, and memoirs, Williams narrates the under examined story of education and manhood at the University of North Carolina, the nation's first public university. Every aspect of student life is considered, from the formal classroom and the vibrant curriculum of private literary societies to students' personal relationships with each other, their families, young women, and college slaves. In each of these areas, Williams sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual history of young southern men, and in the process dispels commonly held misunderstandings of southern history. Williams's fresh perspective reveals that students of this era produced a distinctly southern form of intellectual masculinity and maturity that laid the foundation for the formulation of the post-Civil War South.

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9781469618395

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Reviews

A landmark study in the history of southern higher education, and one that will be of interest to historians of education, the South, sectionalism, and masculinity.-- American Historical Review

A deeply researched and highly interesting contribution to the scholarship on education, gender, and intellectual culture in the antebellum South.--<i>The Journal of Southern History</i>

Recommended. -- CHOICE

A deeply researched and highly interesting contribution to the scholarship on education, gender, and intellectual culture in the antebellum South.-- The Journal of Southern History

A deeply researched and highly interesting contribution to the scholarship on education, gender, and intellectual culture in the antebellum South.--The Journal of Southern History <p/>

Author Information

Timothy J. Williams is a visiting assistant professor of history in the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon.

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