There is a great deal of scholarship on US–European relations. However, too little of this has been focussed on European interaction with the various regions of the United States, perhaps with the exception of New England in the colonial era, the mid-Atlantic states in the era of mass immigration, and the West Coast during World War II. So this book, which deals with European perceptions of, and interactions and cross-pollination with, the American South is a welcome collection of essays. Like so often in the US, “Europe” becomes synonymous with Great Britain, Germany and Italy. The rest of Europe, especially Eastern and Northern Europe, and the Iberian peninsula – not to mention small European countries – tends to be ignored.

The first two essays in this collection are concerned with mutual perceptions. William A. Link deals with southern perceptions of Europe, while Thomas Clark summarizes European visitors’ travel reports of the South. In particular, black visitors such as Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois found their European tours liberating, while Alexis de Toqueville and Julius Fröbel deemed the “slave South” “un-American.” Fröbel was especially fascinated by exotic New Orleans, with its “urbanity” and “exotic multiplicity” (36).

The next block of essays covers the Civil War era. Daniel Nagel presents a thick description of German 1848ers’ critique of southern slavery. Slavery morally degraded the South and inhibited the economic progress of the region. The 1848ers supported the Republican Party from the outset but were unhappy with its growing nativism. Kathleen Hilliard's and Lawrence T. McDonnell's essays focus on Charleston – “the Queen city of the South.” Hilliard traces Charlestonians’ attraction to Venice as a commercial capital and sea-born metropolis. But such attraction was also underwritten by the foreboding of Venice's decline. After the destruction of the Civil War both cities basked in “faded glory” (81) and flogged their cities to tourists, “trading on their history” (83). McDonnell retraces the quaint manly aspirations of the aristocracy of Charleston and the low country to copy Walter Scott's novels and re-create a chivalrous age in the humid South “rooted in knightly tradition, legitimate descendants of the Hugonot [sic] & the cavalier” (88). By 1865 there was little left of these “gallant or knightly” visions. Don H. Doyle expertly recovers the inept diplomacy of the Confederacy – its miscalculations and failed efforts to gain diplomatic recognition from the European powers. In spite of a massive propaganda campaign in some Western European capitals, the Confederacy could not persuade Europeans out of their view that slavery was an immoral system. Melvyn Stokes's essay covers the British and French critiques of the blockbuster films The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) and the filmmakers’ curious historical interpretations of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Stefano Luconi's and Sarah L. Silkey's essays on lynching in the South are poignant. Luconi retraces the infamous 1891 incident in which eleven Italians were lynched in New Orleans. In total, some thirty-four Italians (mostly Sicilians) were lynched in the South between 1886 and 1910 (125 ff.). Why? On the one hand Sicilians were perceived to be less assuredly “white” than their Anglo-American counterparts and they often showed solidarity towards blacks. More importantly, they were seen as economic rivals by white nativist southerners who wanted to intimidate and disenfranchise these unwelcome immigrants. Silkey tells the story of the African American antilynching activist Ida B. Wells and her campaign in Great Britain to call lynching what it was. For Wells, lynchings were “racist acts of violence” (150), not a tool required to maintain order on the frontier, as southerners wanted to make the world believe.

While William R. Glass's essay on “transatlantic fundamentalism” (southern Baptist preachers hired by London churches) left me unimpressed, Louis Mazzari's essay on the close collaboration between Gunnar Myrdal and the North Carolina sociologist Arthur Raper in the classic study of race in the United States An American Dilemma (1944) beautifully elucidates the transatlantic cross-fertilization in the social sciences of the study of race. Myrdal wanted to establish a comprehensive picture of “the dynamics of social forces” and “interpret American culture from the viewpoint of the nation's most disadvantaged minority” (211). Raper's extensive research contributions helped Myrdal to accomplish this. Meanwhile, Matthias Reiss's chapter on German World War II prisoners of war in POW camps in the South, their solidarity with disadvantaged African Americans, and American reeducation efforts among German POWs, is warmed-up material from his earlier book.

Clive Webb's essay on the influence of the American civil rights movement on Great Britain in the postwar era, and Daniel Geary's and Jennifer Sutton's final chapter on southern white supremacists’ opposition to European decolonization in Africa, are persuasive case studies of transnational “cross-pollinations across the black Atlantic” (249). When Caribbean immigrants started to arrive in large numbers in Great Britain in the 1950s, the British looked to the American civil rights movement to help them understand the growing race struggle in their country. Conversely, southern white supremacists “identified with the ideal of a racially homogeneous Europe,” and criticized European decolonization and its “abandonment of civilization to the anarchy of black majority rule” (265).

Readers of this review by now realize that the essays in this solid collection largely focus on issues of race, both as defined by the American South and as perceived by European observers. Only Doyle deals with interstate diplomatic relations. Webb is the only author in the collection who cites Alfred Hero's classic study The Southerner and World Affairs (1965; 2005) (259 n. 4). No effort is made to cover economic relations between the South and Europe, for example the export of raw materials and food to Europe during the Marshall Plan era, or the prodigious foreign investment and building of production facilities by European corporations in the modern anti-union South, offering cheap energy. Also absent here is an essay on cultural relations, for instance the role of jazz from New Orleans (as my Austrian colleague Reinhold Wagnleitner puts it, “the classical music of globalization”) in the “Americanization” of postwar Europe. Still, this is an engaging and rich collection of essays that every research library should have in its stacks.