The intent of Routledge's Rewriting Histories series is “to collect in one place a strong group of the major articles in selected fields, adding notes and introductions conducive to improved understanding” (viii). As editor of volumes on both the Old South and the New South in the series, J. William Harris has admirably fulfilled this intention, providing in each volume about a dozen groundbreaking articles and book chapters contextualized by brief introductory statements and minimally edited for the sake of space. Each volume sets the stage with a concise introduction explaining the lay of the historiographical land and mapping the volume's selections onto it, giving the reader the mental geography to understand the paths they blaze.

In the introduction to the volume on the Old South, Harris notes that the work of Eugene Genovese remains historiographical bedrock – eroding, perhaps, but still shaping the flow of scholarship (7). Wisely, then, Harris spends a generous amount of time in the short introduction explaining the trajectory of Genovese's interpretation, which is the most useful and comprehensive backdrop for a collection of this kind.

One group of articles struggles profitably to reconcile the paternalistic interpretation advanced by Genovese with the currents of modernity evident in the antebellum period. Genovese himself opens the collection with a chapter from The Slaveholder's Dilemma (1992), while Richard Follett's essay on Louisiana sugar planters and Mark Smith's essay on the use of time discipline on the plantation both probe the intermingling currents of paternalism and modernity. Finally, Jeffrey Young describes the failure of a sincere paternalism to mitigate the horrific mortality rates on a low-country plantation.

Focussing on the slave community itself, Dylan Penningroth's chapter examines property ownership among slaves in Liberty County, Georgia, while Stephanie Camp studies how slave women resisted enslavement by sneaking away to dances where enslaved bodies felt forbidden pleasure.

Kristen Wood's essay on female (often widowed) slaveholders leads the way into the last half-dozen essays, which are united by an emphasis on gender and its intersection with race, politics, industry, and law. Walter Johnson's fascinating account of the trial of Alexina Morrison, a slave who sued for her freedom claiming to be white, examines constructions of race and their interaction with the legal system. Elizabeth Varon examines women's participation in party politics in Virginia; a chapter from Michael O'Brien compares the conceptions of womanhood of two well-known southern women; Michele Gillespie gives an account of how mill-owners dealt with the potentially controversial (in the South) employment of white, female textile operatives; and the section finishes with Laura Edwards, who uses court records to illuminate the limits of patriarchal authority in practice.

In the introduction to an earlier collection of essays on the Old South in this series, titled Society and Culture in the Slave South (1992), Harris noted that the essays in that edition that challenged the Genoveses' interpretation did not provide a comprehensive alternative. They still do not. But Harris rightly points out that many of the essays in the new edition are concerned with different questions than those Genovese asked, and with different relationships than the one between master and slave (7). Together, the essays show fresh inroads into the Genoveses' paternalist interpretation, a continuing concern with the inner workings of the slave community, and a growing focus on the undulating social constructions of race and gender.

The collection of essays in the volume on the New South should make students appropriately wary of generalizing about the period, or, perhaps, of even using the term. As a group the essays stretch traditional chronologies, anchoring unique understandings of race, gender, and class to specific times and places. They show how the old villain memory could be turned against itself, and how the old hero religion could feed the fires of segregation as hotly as it fueled the fires of justice and civil rights.

Essays by Patricia Sullivan, Glenn T. Eskew, and Raymond Arsenault probe the multiple roots of reform and the “long civil rights movement” in the South. In an essay characteristic of scholars who are reexamining segregationists and resistance to civil rights, Jane Dailey illuminates the religious roots of resistance to desegregation, showing how many of its opponents conceived of the struggle in terms borrowed from their religious convictions and its sacred text, the Bible.

The complexities of memory in the New South are on display here, as well. An essay by Jack E. Davis examines how the annual “Natchez Pilgrimage” of historic homes uses memory to reinscribe Old South race and gender roles in the New South. Fitzhugh Brundage examines the commercial birth of Acadian memory in Louisiana. And Jacquelyn Dowd Hall examines the interaction of history and memory in the person of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, calling on historians to stop characterizing memory as the enemy of history and to realize that “history is entangled with memory and that implicates us in the history we write” (241).

Essays by Elsa Barkley Brown, Jane Turner Censer, and Nancy Hewitt examine changing conceptions of femininity and masculinity as these constructs interacted with the worlds of politics and work.

It is in the essays on race that the particularities of place figure most prominently, calling into question South-wide interpretations. A chapter from Stephen Kantrowitz's study of Ben Tillman asks why the Populist Party made little headway in Tillman's South Carolina; an essay from J. William Harris examines the nuances of race and class and a confused case of tar-and-feathering in post-World War I Vicksburg; and Victoria Bynum pursues an explanation for the “white Negroes” of Jones County, Mississippi. If the shadow of Eugene Genovese falls darkly across the pages of the Old South volume, the shadow that falls, albeit more faintly, across the pages of the volume on the New South belongs to C. Vann Woodward. Few of the essays here directly reference Woodward's narrative of a southern postwar elite taking on the bourgeois, industrial values of the North while fending off the challenge of populism and improvising the edifice of Jim Crow. This is not surprising, since, as Harris notes, many of the essays here are “post-Woodward” in either their lens (memory) or their chronological focus (civil rights) (5). Nevertheless, the essays gathered here evoke Woodward by making the reader wonder whether his accomplishment can be matched in a field that is considerably broader and more variegated than it was in the mid-twentieth century.

In light of this fact, perhaps these volumes should be included in syllabi alongside the work of Genovese and Woodward, whose work an introductory statement by Harris, however useful and necessary, cannot fully render. Both volumes highlight not only the continuing depth and vigor of scholarship on the South, but also the continuing usefulness of attempts at overarching interpretations (such as Edward Ayers's The Promise of the New South, 1992). Nevertheless, both volumes represent well-chosen collections of scholarship that gain much from Harris's insightful editing and should prove indispensable in the classroom and seminar.