The three books reviewed here each examine the American South with one central idea in mind: violence, citizenship, and the Atlantic world. The first two seem quite primal ideas, the sort of things historians have been using for ages, and even the Atlantic world is getting rather long in the tooth now. However, each of these three books, in different ways, demonstrates new ways of thinking about ideas central to our understandings of the South and, at their best, make the familiar strange, giving us new ways to understand an old region. Since two of them are edited collections, it probably makes best sense to take them up first, leaving the monograph for later.

The two edited collections (a third is on the way) arose from an international research network involving the Universities of Manchester, Copenhagen, Cambridge, and Florida entitled Understanding the South, Understanding America: The American South in Regional, National, and Global Perspectives. Out of four conferences held between 2008 and 2010 have come these three collections. Ideally, then, we should think of them as a whole, a set of essays, some linked to one another more tightly than others, that seeks to survey the state of scholarship on the South and nudge it forward. Importantly, the collections include both historians and literary scholars, a combination that sometimes works and sometimes does not.

Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South opens with an introductory essay by William A. Link and David Brown that places the essays in the context of the relatively recent boom in histories of citizenship. As soon as we consider citizenship to be a matter of belonging and identity and not just of political participation, it becomes a much more expansive and interesting lens through which to view the South. The first section considers antebellum citizenship. Watson Jennison's essay on the pro-slavery ideology of Judge Joseph Lumpkin of Georgia shows how his legal decisions narrowed the space for free blacks in the 1840s and 1850s and cast a long shadow over later ideas about law and slavery. Jennison's essay fits well with Emily West's essay, which carefully points out that as life became ever more precarious for free people of color, some found greater security for their families in the “voluntary enslavement” legislation of the time. David Brown's “Citizenship, Democracy, and the Structure of Politics in the Old South” is a powerful challenge to the notion that the white South was getting more democratic in the years before the Civil War: poor whites were increasingly excluded. Anyone interested in antebellum politics will have to deal with this essay.

A second section of essays considers Reconstruction and especially the relationship of Reconstruction southerners with the nation. Susanna Michelle Lee's essay (foreshadowing her forthcoming book) examines Southern Claims Commission records to understand ideas about “loyalty” and its relation to citizenship. James J. Broomall uses an emotional-history approach to consider how Confederates integrated themselves into postbellum society; while not always entirely convincing, possibly because of the difficulties in analyzing individual psychologies on the basis of scant evidence, the essay is provocative and promising. William A. Link provides an overview of how Atlanta (not yet the “city too busy to hate”) became a symbol of the new racial order of the South in the first years after the war. The essay gives a fine-grained analysis of the interactions of freedpeople with the Freedmen's Bureau and local whites.

The final section, on “Reimagining Citizenship,” brings in the literary scholars (mostly, I think, identifying with the New Southern Studies) to show how imaginative literature can engage with many of the same themes the historians examined. Jennifer Rae Greeson revisits Uncle Tom's Cabin and argues that its depictions of slavery really had as much to do with northern industrialization as with southern plantations. For all the ink spilled over Stowe's novel, this seems original and convincing and an effective way to link the market revolution, slavery, and culture all together. Scott Romine argues that literary representations of citizenship during Reconstruction (especially those of Albion Tourgée and Thomas Dixon) helped shift the debate about Reconstruction from sectional conflict to racial conflict. Finally, Peter Schmidt does an excellent job of relating the New South to imperialism through a discussion of George W. Cable, Albion Tourgée (the usual suspects), and Aurelio Tolentino (who? A Filipino playwright and vocal opponent of US occupation). This is an excellent essay. Michael O'Brien rounds out the volume with a typically puckish and erudite conclusion that puts all this in much broader context and proceeds to offer a serious challenge to the intellectual coherence of the entire project of the New Southern Studies.

It is perhaps surprising that there has not already been a book called The American South and the Atlantic World. After all, the South was built upon slavery, and there is no slavery without an Atlantic world. Trevor Burnard's essay in this collection on “the relationship between Atlantic history and the study of the nineteenth-century South,” to quote its subtitle, goes some way to explaining why. “Atlantic world” has long been an organizing concept built around and more suited to the colonial era, whereas the heart of southern history (with apologies to those who study other periods and topics) is slavery, the sectional crisis, and the long unfolding of the effects of emancipation that took place in a much later period. The essays in this collection do a fairly good job of challenging that assumption and demonstrating the utility of an Atlantic perspective on the American South up to the early decades of the twentieth century. Brian Ward's pyrotechnic and wide-ranging essay on “The Place of the American South in Atlantic and Other Worlds” carries on further through the twentieth century and, along with Burnard's essay, offers a high-level intellectual justification for the entire project. In retrospect, these two essays placed side by side might have made a better introduction for the volume than Ward's very brief introduction.

All in all, I found the historical essays that covered the traditional “Atlantic world” period to be more effective and engaging than the ones covering a later period, though that judgment has a couple of important caveats. Jon Sensbach, who has been applying Atlantic insights to the South for some time, argues that, in a longer chronological frame, the South's association with evangelical religion seems less a defining characteristic of the region and more a temporary, contingent historical development. The variation between the different parts of the colonial Atlantic world is captured well in an essay by Natalie Zacek about Daniel Parke, who learned the hard way that approaches to governance – brutality with underlings and licentiousness with the wives of his peers – that worked well for a Virginia planter at the beginning of the eighteenth century were ill-suited to the West Indies (though it is doubtful that Parke was able to formulate this insight as elegantly as Zacek has while an Antiguan mob was doing nasty and fatal things to him in 1710). Extending our framework of the South beyond the borders of the United States provides more complicated accounts of standard historical episodes. Jennifer K. Snyder tempers the optimistic accounts of black resistance and agency during the Revolutionary era by tracing the fates of a number of groups of slaves of Loyalist masters who found themselves transported around the Caribbean, still enslaved. Tracing journeys in the other direction, Martha S. Jones follows a group of black Haitians, nominally free in the wake of the revolution there, who accompanied their former master to Baltimore and slowly slid back into enslavement there. Two essays consider matters of race in the half-century from the Civil War to the early twentieth century. Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie presents a strongly argued discussion of the question “Was U.S. Emancipation Exceptional in the Atlantic, or Other Worlds?” His answer, unsurprisingly, is no, but in getting to this answer Kerr-Ritchie gives a very thorough overview of a huge range of scholarship and goes right to the core of some key debates. I could see this essay becoming a staple of graduate seminar reading lists. While comparisons between South Africa and the American South during the eras of apartheid and Jim Crow have long become commonplace, Leigh Anne Duck's essay looks at links at the beginning of the twentieth century in an essay that studies how an African Methodist Episcopal bishop sent to be the first bishop of Cape Town wrote about race. Extending the Atlantic world framework into the 1920s, Natanya Keisha Duncan effectively brings Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South all into one essay by following the career of Princess Laura Nofey, a Ghanaian who was a dynamic organizer for the United Negro Improvement Association in Florida until her assassination in 1928.

Carole Emberton's Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War is a complex and important book. Rather than search out some little-known corner or under-studied figure, it covers familiar ground. Readers with a decent knowledge of this subject area will find few new names or events here. Even the key concepts – race, violence, masculinity, citizenship, religion – are familiar, the basic building blocks of hundreds of studies of this time and place. What is new, and powerful in a way difficult to convey in a brief review, is the depth of analysis, the ideas about how these familiar things worked and connected to one another and what that means.

Historians with an awareness of religion have pointed out before that it was no coincidence that the movement to end Reconstruction was called “Redemption,” but Emberton demonstrates that this concept went much deeper than just a political movement in the mid-1870s. Returning to the religious origins of the concept, she argues that redemption was always linked to violence and suffering and that in this form redemption suffused the postwar South well before and well after 1876. “The language of redemption,” Emberton writes,

Emberton makes violence absolutely central to understanding Reconstruction. At first glance, this might seem a bit obvious: haven't we always known that violence was fundamental to the experience of Reconstruction, from the chaotic killings of the immediate postwar period through the multifaceted whippings and murders and rapes of the Ku Klux Klan to the paramilitary politics of the campaigns that ended Reconstruction? George Rable pointed this out in 1984 with But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction. Yet these earlier interpretations separated violence from Reconstruction. Reconstruction, they argued, was the process of integrating freedpeople into the society, economy, and political system of the South, on something approaching equality, and violence was the weapon that the opponents of that process used to stop it. For Emberton, though, violence was a constitutive part of Reconstruction. Its goals and the ways people thought to reach them were built around violence. In this context, it is less surprising that the violence that was used by some to make Reconstruction got out of their hands and was turned back against them to end Reconstruction.

In the first chapter, Emberton captures the optimism present at the very beginning of Reconstruction, casting it not, as has been standard for perhaps the last forty years, as a political transition (the shift from slave labor to free labor) but as a religious transition. Lincoln's martyrdom becomes the sacrifice that redeems the billions of drops of blood drawn by the lash over the nation's history, and the Thirteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 become stages towards the perfection of American institutions. At the same time, though, violence was rife in the wake of the violence of war, not just in the South but across the North as well, according to the newspapers. This fear of generalized violence encouraged many to fear the pent-up violence of the freedpeople. This leads into the second chapter, “The Politics of Suffering,” which, more than anything else I have read, places the experience and representation of suffering of freedpeople in a broad political and intellectual context. Images of violence inflicted upon freedpeople could arouse white sympathy, but it often required black passivity, leaving freedpeople in a vulnerable position, depicting them as weak and ultimately incapable of assuming the responsibilities of citizenship. Many supporters of free labor believed that some whipping was a necessary educational tool to help African Americans make the transition from being compelled to work to learning to work on their own. The effect of all this violence, in chapter 3, is to shape the vision of the freedpeople about what they should expect from the state. In a radical shift from earlier notions about masculinity, power and political participation, freedpeople denied that vulnerability to violence impaired their abilities as citizens and demanded protection as one of the fundamental services the state should provide its citizens. It was this demand for protection more than abstract notions of political economy that fueled the lust for land: owning land meant more self-reliance and more control over interactions with potentially dangerous white neighbors. Another part of this chapter considers how former slaves remembered, or more often buried, memory of violence inflicted on them during slavery. For some, such suffering could never be redeemed, a bleak part of history that goes against Whiggish assumptions.

Chapter 4 focusses on “The Militarization of Freedom.” When black soldiers enlisted, the path from martial service to citizenship was not simple. Military life, especially for African American soldiers, was often based on violence nearly as much as slavery had been. At the same time, violent black soldiers left many whites uneasy. It also made it that much harder for women to share in the gains of freedom and citizenship and entered black men into the dangerous game of a politics based in large part on physical force, a contest they were destined to lose. With all of this elaborate background about race, slavery, violence, and citizenship, Emberton's chapter about “Ballots and Bullets” makes even more sense. If Rable's earlier work catalogued this sort of thing and demonstrated the immediate origins and effects, then Emberton's book provides the deeper context necessary for really understanding what was going on, how it connected to the past, and how the violence directed at politically active African Americans during Reconstruction continued to configure ideas about race and democracy for generations.