Reviews

Jon Tuttle (ed.), South Carolina Onstage (Academica Press, 2023), 298 pp., cloth $99.95.

Page 169 →In “About this Book,” the short essay that introduces South Carolina Onstage, editor Jon Tuttle writes that the compilation, which features seven plays, “is not … a Greatest Hits anthology”; instead, as Tuttle explains, the plays were chosen to “represent different periods in the state’s history as well as different geographical areas.” He readily admits that the works included, which span two hundred years, are “of uneven quality.” The value, then, of South Carolina Onstage is based on its representation of South Carolinian playwrights, tracing the history of dramatic conventions beginning in Charleston, then the Upstate, and finally the Midlands.

Tuttle, himself a playwright and professor at Francis Marion University for thirty-three years, is the just the right scholar to serve as editor of this excellent collection. Not only was he a member of the Board of Governors of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, but his interests also have always been to promote playwriting as a means of both discovering and uncovering cultural heritage. Tuttle explains that the anthology does its best to maintain “the integrity of each text while reconciling it to the expectations of a modern reader.” This means amending archaisms, correcting idiosyncratic punctuation, combining stage directions, and correcting misspellings—a mammoth but necessary endeavor.

As a playwright myself and a past South Carolinian, one who has always greatly admired Tuttle’s dramatic works and his myriad accomplishments at Francis Marion University, I very much appreciated the introduction, in which Tuttle traces the history of South Carolina theatre, beginning in antebellum Charleston and especially concentrating on its first theatre, Dock Street near the battery, and continuing through the Civil War. Tuttle documents theatre’s relationship to industrial growth, British influences, and even the advent of the railroad. He takes into account the popularity of opera and how that ignited performative interest in the state (consider the opera houses in Abbeville, Sumter, and Chester, among others). Most intriguingly, this detailed introduction shows not only how shifts in social and economic standing contributed to the growth of theatre in South Carolina but also—and, ingeniously, I might add—how the history of theatre shaped, and continues to shape, the state’s identity.

Page 170 →South Carolina Onstage shares seven plays, beginning with William Ioor’s The Battle of Eutaw Springs, and Evacuation of Charleston; or the Glorious 14th of December, 1782. As Tuttle explains, Ioor “ought rightly be considered South Carolina’s first dramatist.”. Tuttle chose The Battle of Eutaw Springs rather than loor’s first pastoral play because it “was the first to dramatize Revolutionary War combat in the southern colonies.” Each play is introduced thoroughly by Tuttle both to justify and explain the rationale for the work’s inclusion in this anthology and to provide strong background that informs each drama. Fictionalizing the war in five acts, Ioor describes his take on the war using historical figures, especially General Francis Marion and Colonel Henderson, and a chorus of continental soldiers. Although the play itself is heavy with lengthy speeches and Republicanisms, its prototypical Southern gentleman protagonist, Jonathan Slyboots, proves that “Whig sensibilities reap material rewards,” especially because he harbors a fugitive British sailor, Queerfish, who, later in the play, willingly becomes an American citizen.

Modern Honor, the second play in the anthology, features the work of John Blake White, described as possibly the “first dramatist in the South to write a substantial body of work,” which was eclipsed by his reputation as a painter. Tuttle chooses Modern Honor primarily because it is his first that addresses social reform—in this case, a treatise criticizing dueling—which was prevalent in South Carolina in 1812. White had lost several good friends to this (ironic) nod to chivalry and wrote passionately in favor of gun violence as a means of civilized self-protection. Written in verse and heavy with Platonic dialogue, White’s dream of ending dueling would not occur in the author’s lifetime, but the play advocates effectively for such reform, especially in the character of Hammer, who serves as a second in the process of dueling, primarily acting as mediator and even as an obstructionist to combat.

Tuttle also includes the first play written by a female author, Sarah Pogson, whose The Young Carolinians, or Americans in Algiers describes the siege of San Antonio as a southern border romance. In addition, the anthology includes Michael Bonham, or the Fall of Bexar, by Charleston writer William Gilmore Simms; Sand, a melodrama by prolific playwright Rebecca Dial; and, most intriguingly, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, by Alice Childress, who preceded Lorraine Hansberry as the first African-American author to be produced professionally in New York for an earlier play not included here.

Wedding Band, the best work in the anthology, is based on Childress’s grandmother. It aggressively attacks antimiscegenation laws at the time by featuring a mixed-race couple forced to move from neighborhood to Page 171 →neighborhood to escape the persecution that arises from archaic conventions and unjust laws. Filled with fascinating minor characters, the play imaginatively pushes for Black nationalism in sometimes fantastical ways and always with an eye toward establishing more equitable racial laws.

South Carolina Onstage ends with Sarah Hammond’s Kudzu, written in 2003 and appropriately named after the invasive vine that pervades the South. Hammond uses the vine metaphorically to uncover the darkness behind the veneer of Southern gentility. Kudzu openly addresses contemporary topics such as homosexuality and drug abuse and is based on Confederate reenactments.

The true worth of South Carolina Onstage comes from Jon Tuttle’s incredible affection for and knowledge of the history of theatre in the state. A recipient of the South Carolina’s Governor’s Award in the Humanities and both the Founder’s Award and Lifetime Service Award from the South Carolina Theater Association, Tuttle’s commentary about each play justifies their inclusion while providing a very readable, intelligent history of theatre in the state where Tuttle has spent his career as an educator and a playwright. I greatly admire the anthology and believe that its greatest value lies in Tuttle’s ability to relate these plays produced in South Carolina convincingly to the culture and history of the state.

Mark Charney, Texas Tech University

Millicent E. Brown, Another Sojourner Looking for Truth: My Journey from Civil Rights to Black Power and Beyond (University of South Carolina Press, 2024), 224 pp., cloth $26.99, paperback $18.99 (2026), ebook $18.99.

Millicent Brown’s memoir, Another Sojourner Looking for Truth, provides a personal, emotional history that reflects on the author’s lived experiences as a “first child” of South Carolina public school desegregation and as a constantly evolving activist-historian still grappling with many of the same questions about equity encountered in her youth. In the preface, Brown asks, “What does freedom look like in the United States for Black people like me?” Born in 1948, Brown’s awareness of both Black excellence and the realities of Southern segregation emerged during the height of the civil rights movement, grew into a more global sense of Black Power through practical and Page 172 →academic experiences, and continues to grow in her local and regional roles as a scholar and advocate for liberation.

The memoir’s accessibility and emphasis on lived experience make it appealing to a broad readership interested in civil rights history through a personal lens, and the focus on South Carolina makes it especially appealing to those looking to engage local histories. Most specifically, Brown’s oscillating sense of belonging and her consistent sense of transformation may appeal to those grappling with their own sense of inclusion. Brown shares instances of leading from the front lines of progressive empowerment movements, as well as moments of exclusion and alienation. Often, these experiences occurred simultaneously, and Brown’s reflection on this dissonance alongside her experiences of historic civil rights events make this text a thoughtful choice for a common read in high school or introductory university courses.

Chapters One through Seven recount Brown’s family and early life in a “highbrow” Black neighborhood on Charleston’s west peninsula. The first two chapters, named for the home built by her grandfather Arthur Brown at 270 Ashley Avenue and later lost to the expansion of the causeway, recount the central role of her family in her early development as an activist. Political participation permeated her home experience; her father, J. Arthur Brown, a former local chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “modeled and surrounded [his children] with people who did not operate out of fear.” This local commitment was supported by Brown’s first integrated experiences outside of Charleston through participation with the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. Here, she also encountered similar backlash to the threats to which she had become accustomed in Charleston. During one of the family’s visits in 1955 or 1956, the school was raided by local law enforcement on false charges of unlicensed alcohol sales, which resulted in a number of dubious arrests as well as the addition of a new verse to the already well-known protest song, “We Shall Overcome,” added by a teenage participant from Johns Island during the raid.

Brown’s dual experience of being in a liberatory environment surrounded by state and social oppressors mirrored prior experiences and foreshadowed upcoming ones. This section culminates with her role in the 1963 court case Brown et al. v. School District No. 20, Charleston, South Carolina, known as “Little Brown,” after the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. On September 4, 1963, Brown and Jacqueline Ford, daughter of Reverend Clarence Ford, integrated Rivers High School in Charleston. Page 173 →This landmark event was met with press coverage, ostracism from white students and faculty, new friendships with Jewish students, and numerous bomb threats made in the same month as the white terrorist attack on the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Of this constant tension that persisted until her graduation in 1966, Brown writes, “The students saying all kinds of ugly sentiments or staring angrily at me were in my face and I ignored them by showing charm. The responsibility of ‘representing the race’ was the most important I had ever taken on. And I was not about to fail.” More information about Brown’s experience at Rivers High School can be found in the extensive oral history projects of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, a once-independent center of Black excellence now administrated through the College of Charleston.

After her 1966 graduation, Brown’s extended sojourn from Charleston began. Chapters Eight through Eleven recount Brown’s first encounters with higher education in Boston and Atlanta, as well as life experiences in Mississippi and San Francisco. At Emerson College in Boston, Brown began her study at an integrated college and notes that “after three generations of college-educated family members on both maternal and paternal sides, I would be the first not attending a historically Black college in the South.” It was in Boston, although not formally at Emerson, that Brown began to encounter a more “self-loving, African-rooted rejection of long held white supremacist thought and indoctrination,” which caused her to question the implications of her impeccably respectable upbringing and the assumption that life in the North was less permeated by racism. Brown left Boston after three semesters to pursue an education more rooted in the Black experience at the Atlanta University Center (AUC) consortium. Of her move from Boston to Atlanta, Brown writes, “My time off the plantation severed any notion that I would seek to be a model of racial respectability as a means of being accepted by white America.” The 1969 student takeover of Harkness Hall, the “lack of support from Black administrators,” and the dismissal of associated Black students and faculty members contributed to Brown’s decision to leave AUC and academia for the foreseeable future. Brown had again encountered the dual experience of inclusion and alienation in her search for truth, which compelled her to continue her sojourn toward more practical activist experiences.

In the wake of her growing awareness of global systems of oppression and disappointments with academia, Brown was recruited at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee meeting to work with Liberty House, the Page 174 →main economic arm of the Poor People’s Corporation, at their workshop in Jackson, Mississippi. This position allowed Brown to “do the people’s labor while utilizing whatever intellectual understanding of struggle that [she] had.” This position expanded Brown’s awareness of the experiences of Black people living in rural poverty in Mississippi—a new experience, given her relatively privileged background—and the possibility of cooperative labor provided her an opportunity to travel the country selling Liberty House products to retailers from Seattle to Chicago to Philadelphia. The horror of the Jackson State University attack in 1970, an incident in which authorities fired on unarmed students, killing two and injuring twelve, just eleven days after the Kent State massacre, and a later incident in which Liberty House volunteers registering Black voters were shot at by white Mississippians, prompted Brown to leave Jackson for San Francisco.

Brown’s relatively short sojourn to San Francisco resulted in a newfound sense of self-reliance through personal economic struggle. She arrived with “just under $300 in [her] pocket” and “the very act of surviving replaced all thoughts of civil rights, Black power, fighting the system, and all other concerns [she] had carried everywhere [she’d] ever been.” This experience of urban poverty allowed Brown to step “outside the intellectual platforms and just [see] what was in front of all our eyes.” The knowledge she gained from her one-year California “disengagement,” along with a simultaneous expansion and contraction of pride and guilt, sent her back to Charleston to “be quiet and listen a little more patiently … for a while.”

Completing the memoir, Chapters Twelve through Fourteen narrate Brown’s reintegration into academia and activism in South Carolina. Rebuilding a support system on her return was necessary, and this system helped Brown complete her bachelor of arts degree in history at the College of Charleston and a master of arts degree in counseling education at The Citadel, as well as her work in a variety of positions of direct action. A brief academic sojourn to Howard University for doctoral study, disrupted by the sudden death of her father, resulted in yet another return to and sojourn from Charleston, and Brown later completed her PhD studies at Florida State and re-entered academic life as a faculty member at multiple institutions, ultimately joining the faculty at Claflin University. Throughout this period, Brown remained engaged in activism to empower Black communities and support equity in education through work with more organizations than this review can address.

Brown closes the memoir by addressing some of the same questions she encountered as a “first child” of public school desegregation. After speaking Page 175 →at a Charleston County School Board meeting, Brown notes that it seemed as though she had “entered a time warp and the same resistance to racial and class parity [she] experienced as a teen persisted,” and the persistent lack of acknowledgment that “Black models of education [are] worthy for all students” continued to frustrate Brown, whereas other, more positive experiences with organizations such as the nonprofit Center for Creative Partnerships continued to drive Brown’s commitment to advocacy. The maturity that Brown gained through intellectual and practical experiences comes through in the final chapters, allowing her more patience and understanding as she continued the good fight. The last line of Brown’s memoir encapsulates this forward drive: “While I breathe, I hope.”

Delilah Clark, Francis Marion University

Richard W. Hatcher III, Thunder in the Harbor: Fort Sumter and the Civil War (Savas Beatie, 2024), 246 pp., cloth $32.95, ebook $32.95.

On average, over three hundred thousand people per year come to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor to see where the Civil War began. However, many guests are shocked, even unimpressed, by the small stature of the original fort, which is overshadowed by the large, black structure that forms Battery Huger. Many visitors assume that the battery, constructed in 1899 in response to the Spanish-American War, is part of the original fort construction and survived unscathed during the five years of the Civil War. The rest of the fort’s history falls into the background, and several fascinating stories, facts, and people go unnoticed and unheard. Recovering this overlooked history, Richard W. Hatcher, a former historian of Fort Sumter–Fort Moultrie National Park, does an excellent service to everyone from the academic scholar to the layperson.

Chapter One covers the most extensive period, 1829–1860, explaining why Charleston was on the list for the nation’s Third System of Seacoast Defense as a site for a principal fort; why it was named for Thomas Sumter, the Revolutionary War hero and South Carolina native; and how the artificial island was created over fifteen years using enslaved labor and northern granite. After the War of 1812, Congress knew that a better layered shoreline defense was needed. The nation could not afford to re-experience the burning of the White House or the burning and bombardment of coastal Page 176 →communities. Designed to hold one hundred thirty-five guns and a garrison of six hundred fifty troops, the immense, pentagon-shaped fort with five-foot-thick walls was intended to repel invading forces. The fort remained incomplete when the new harbor garrison commander Major Robert Anderson took charge in 1860.

Chapter Two provides a well-written summary and analysis of the tense period in November–December 1860 when South Carolina seceded, and local forces set out to encircle the eighty-nine federal troops stationed in Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island. Anderson needed to hold the garrison and the government fortifications and avoid war. Hatcher masterfully lays out these two months of complex political maneuvering, back-and-forth communications, and rising stakes. Chapter Three unpacks the period from December 1860 to early April 1861 as South Carolina and Charleston, the newly formed Confederacy, and the Buchanan and Lincoln Administrations grappled with the implications of Anderson’s choice to hole up inside Fort Sumter while he continued its construction. Hatcher makes plain that the Confederacy was willing to fire the first shot if it meant capturing the fort and thereby humiliating and humbling the North.

Chapter Four, “Grand and Awful,” masterfully traces the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12–14, 1861, the most famous moment in the fort’s history. Readers who are well versed in the shots that started the Civil War will find their knowledge refreshed through Hatcher’s thrilling prose. However, it is through the subsequent chapters that Hatcher graces readers, be they experts or amateurs, by filling in the fort’s role during the remainder of the Civil War. Maintaining his chronological approach, Hatcher carefully lays out the major and minor bombardments of the Union Army and Navy, the stubborn Confederate defense, and Charleston’s belief that the fort would prevent a Union invasion.

Chapter Twelve, “It Don’t Look Much Like a Fort Inside,” invites readers to witness the return of the American flag to Fort Sumter on the fourth anniversary of Anderson’s evacuation, a celebratory event designed by Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Robert Anderson, now retired, hauled the flag atop a new flagpole to the cheers and tears of a few thousand northerners inside the reduced structure. Civilians, soldiers, sailors, politicians, preachers, and other guests flocked to Charleston for this ceremony and toured the devastated city. The flag ceremony itself is overlooked, generally lost to the memory of people today, as Lincoln was assassinated that same night.

Page 177 →Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen are enlightening, as Hatcher reveals the largely unsuccessful efforts to rebuild and rearm the fort. By the end of the century, the fort became the site of a new coastal battery and a lighthouse station. After the centennial anniversary of the start of the Civil War, the fort became a national monument, a capacity it held until 2019, when it was upgraded to a National Park. Visitors rarely ask about this part of Sumter’s history, and history students seem to ignore it.

Hatcher provides numerous fascinating snippets of the fort’s story that are worthy of more concentrated scholarship, including the fact that the fort’s first tourists were locals, who paid to visit after Anderson’s evacuation. There were also mutiny and military executions, holiday balls, various celebrations, and a possible murder investigation. Perhaps most important, there were the experiences of enslaved laborers during the siege. Although it is generally a smooth read, Hatcher sometimes overwhelms the reader with too much technical detail, especially concerning artillery and munitions.

Overall, this is a much-needed addition to anyone’s Civil War library and a boon to scholars hoping to understand the fort’s history beyond the opening days of the Civil War.

Mike Emett, University of Alabama in Huntsville

Tim Sommer, Only Wanna Be with You: The Inside Story of Hootie & the Blowfish (University of South Carolina Press, 2022), 296 pp., cloth $26.99, paperback $18.99 (2024), ebook $18.99.

Anyone who has traversed the musical landscape of the early nineties remembers well the shot across the bow that was Nirvana’s single “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Seemingly overnight, the makeup, leather, and teased hair that served as cultural makers for a particular time were replaced with flannel shirts, thrift shop boots, and an unwashed ponytail. Seattle was the breeding ground for this new sound and thus became the sonic hub for the entire country. Artist and repertoire representatives (A&R reps) stormed the streets of the Northwest looking to sign any band that fit the template for success. Meanwhile, down in South Carolina, a group of college buddies were playing golf, writing songs, performing in pizza joints, and getting ready to launch one of the most successful albums of all time. In Only Wanna Page 178 →Be with You, music journalist and industry insider Tim Sommer chronicles the inception, development, success, and struggles of Hootie & the Blowfish. As a friend to the band members and Atlantic Records signing representative, Sommer presents the story as both witness and collaborator, providing detail that puts the reader both in the room and on the stage.

From the outset, Sommer provides a first-person perspective on the events that led to Hootie’s development and fame. He begins by reminding the reader that “Hootie” is not a person but, rather, the common abbreviation for Hootie & the Blowfish, which always has been and always will be a band. Sommer then reflects on his first live exposure to the group at a concert in Charleston. Sommer was there as a representative for Atlantic Records, and he recalls how, the minute he saw them live, he knew he would be offering them a recording deal. Sommer offers little details like this to bring the book to life in fresh and surprising ways. In the subsequent chapters, Sommer lays out the familial groundwork that eventually leads to the Hootie & the Blowfish inception. The band includes vocalist Darius Rucker, guitarist Mark Bryan, bassist Dean Felber, and drummer Jim Sonefeld. As fellow students at the University of South Carolina, they all shared passions for sports, music, and a good party. Guitarist Mark Bryan heard Darius singing in the dorm one day and asked him to form a band. Before long (and after some shuffling), the rest of the crew lined up, and the band was complete. Sommer spends quite a bit of time addressing the development of the band name. Hootie & the Blowfish was not at all attractive to the record labels initially, and Sommer played a large role in selling the band to the record company executives. Once Hootie connected with manager Rusty Harmon and attorney Gus Gusler, the pieces were all in place, though success was far from guaranteed.

Unsurprisingly, Sommers’s close personal and professional connection to the band helps bring to life the sections of the story for which he was not yet present. Sommer presents Hootie as, quite often, more of an event than just a band. Playing covers in local bars in Columbia and university frat houses, the group built an impressive following, in large part, on the fun and joy they brought to the stage. Sommer describes the members of Hootie as kind, thoughtful, and always approachable. The fact that they somehow managed to convey this on stage through their music and performance was one of their greatest strengths. As an A&R rep, Sommer’s principal role for Atlantic Records was finding new talent. At the point that Hootie was brought to his attention, the American South was on nobody’s radar. An Atlantic staff member discovered that Hootie was selling a very impressive amount Page 179 →of merchandise throughout the mid-South, and Sommer was tasked with traveling to Charleston to see what the fuss was about. Here, again, Sommer details the impact that the trip and concert would have as he approached Rusty and offers the band a recording contract.

Throughout the middle portion of the book, Sommer deftly draws the reader through the challenges and near-calamities of the album recording and release process. Sommer’s background as a record label rep again proves pivotal to the sinew of the story. Although this is the story of one particular band and particular stretch of time, it could also serve as playbook for dealing with record labels and the immense challenges of operating within an opaque top-down corporate structure. Sommer recounts how the band was already quite financially successful and, as such, weren’t approaching the label with dollar signs in their eyes. They wanted no major monetary advance and asked simply for their album to be recorded and released. Being huge R.E.M. fans, they managed to secure the seminal Athens group’s producer Don Gehman to help spearhead their freshman release. Sommer details this process beautifully, as he was an integral part of the process. What resulted was the album Cracked Rear View, the title of which was drawn from a classic John Hiatt tune. Although Sommer describes the recording process as magical, he still presents two near-fatal collisions that could have stopped the band in their tracks. A superior at Atlantic decided to completely shelve the project, and Sommer had to go above his head to push it through. Perhaps even more dangerously, some unlicensed Bob Dylan lyrics were questioned, and the band had to reach a financial settlement to move forward. Regardless of the snags, within two years, Cracked Rear View became one of the highest selling albums ever in the history of Atlantic records.

Perhaps victims of overexposure or just professional burnout, Hootie was never quite able to replicate the success of Cracked Rear View. The band released several more albums and maintained their legendary tour schedule, but the crowds shrank, and the sales dropped. Although both Sommer and the band have always maintained that Hootie & the Blowfish never “broke up,” the group’s hiatus has been lasting. Darius Rucker has, of course, found another level of stardom on the country charts, but the band still maintains their position as a brotherhood and are still active through the numerous charities they continue to support.

Tim Sommer is perhaps the only person who could have written this book with such visceral clarity yet from a compellingly objective point of view. His lifelong love for the band and their music shines through on every page, but at no point does the reader sense a glossing over of the challenging Page 180 →bits. The reader needn’t be a fan of Hootie & the Blowfish to be pulled deeply into their story. This book is about music, brotherhood, and the challenges of success and failure. It is a fantastic read for anyone.

Brandon Goff, Francis Marion University

Elizabeth Ellis Miller, Liturgy of Change: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting (University of South Carolina Press, 2023), 204 pp., cloth $114.99, paperback $32.99, ebook $32.99.

For many people, the most important events of the civil rights movement include the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the sit-ins, the Freedom Riders, and the March on Washington. These public-facing events brought much needed attention to the injustices of Jim Crow. Elizabeth Ellis Miller focuses on lesser known events: the mass meetings that were held within Black communities, often in churches. These meetings not only encouraged Black citizens to resist oppression but also provided the tools necessary for successful nonviolent resistance. Miller’s insightful study, part of the University of South Carolina Press’s innovative Movement Rhetoric/Rhetoric’s Movements series, takes the reader into those meetings; introduces the everyday people whose contributions to racial equality have been overlooked; and bears witness to the astonishing power of song, prayer, and personal testimony. Liturgy of Change is extensively researched, carefully argued, and clearly written. It will appeal to a wide range of readers, including those interested in rhetoric, the civil rights movement, and the intersections of religion and social progress.

Miller focuses on meetings that occurred between 1955 and 1965. She makes extensive use of contemporary sources; most important, the audio recordings of individual meetings. Doing so allows her to recover many lost voices and demonstrate the profound impact that the meetings had on participants. In setting up her argument, Miller uses the terms liturgy and genre in ways that may be unfamiliar to some readers. By liturgy, she means “an embodied spirituality,” or, more specifically, a ritual made up of recognizable components. Those components, which she terms genres, “structure collective religious experience.” When assembled into a liturgy, the genres create shared emotional responses among the congregants, which establish cohesive communities and strengthen resolve for action. In this way, the Page 181 →mass meetings were “transformative through the rhetorical, religious experience that collective participation created.” Equally important, liturgies empowered activists to “move out into more public protest in unique and authentic ways.” Using Carolyn Miller’s expansive understandings of genre as “dynamic, power-laden sites” that “shape and coordinate social action,” Miller argues that the particular genres of music, prayer, and testimony generated an ideology of liberation and gave shape to the most effective civil rights protests.

In her first full chapter, Miller frames her discussion of mass meetings through a discussion of “religion’s rhetorical role in the civil rights movement.” Here, she broadens her understanding of liturgy by introducing Thomas Merton’s claim that “liturgies are recurring sites for sanctification,” which “shape the ongoing transformation that characterizes Christian experience.” Equally important, she demonstrates that liturgy does not necessarily provide an “otherworldly escape” from life’s injustices but can also shape civic and political action. To substantiate her claim, Miller calls attention to the Black church’s efforts from the time of Reconstruction to provide a “space for African Americans to speak freely, engage in rhetorical training, and perform literate action.” Moving beyond academic theory, she enriches her discussion with insights from the late activist and congressional representative John Lewis and Georgia senator and minister Raphael Warnock.

Miller also explores religious feeling, a topic that has not received sufficient scholarly attention. The emotional experiences of the mass meetings “prompted participants toward action and sustained them to continue working over the long haul of the movement.” Even negative emotions such as “fear, sorrow, and pain” could become useful, as the liturgical power of the meetings “transformed these feelings into … courage, faith, love, and defiance.” Equally important, Miller notes that previous studies of mass meetings have underappreciated women’s contributions, in large part because those studies have overly focused on the sermons provided by male preachers. Neglecting the “collective genres open to women,” scholars have provided an incomplete understanding of mass meetings. Only by examining all the components of the liturgy can we grasp how through “one song, one prayer, one testimony … people tested out Christian non-violence and explored how it felt to be this kind of activist, working through faith toward an integrated world.”

The second chapter focuses on music, particularly the invention of the freedom song. Bernice Johnson Reagon, an activist and musician from Georgia, receives well-deserved credit for her unacknowledged contributions to Page 182 →this developing genre. While singing the spiritual “Over My Head, I See Trouble in the Air,” Reagon realized that the lyrics seemed inappropriate for an occasion focused on hope and action. Substituting the word freedom for trouble, she transformed a song about disempowerment into one “where freedom, glory, and justice reign.” In her discussion of freedom songs, Miller recognizes the importance of white groups, such as the Highlander Folk School, but focuses on the contributions of Black musicians who, through mass meetings, developed a forward-looking genre that extended the “African American tradition of merging music and resistance.” Mass meetings also included songs that crossed racial barriers, including “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” These songs, familiar to both Black and white congregations, celebrated “spiritual and national freedom” and advanced the “Christian ideals of love and peace.” More important, they celebrated “interracial unity” by showing the shared values and traditions of both oppressor and oppressed.

Song became an essential venue for women and girls to participate in mass meetings, a point Miller explores through her discussion of the white song leader Guy Carawan and Mrs. J. N. Rucker, who grew up within the Black church tradition. One gets the impression that Carawan, who mixed commentary and song, saw himself as a teacher. Rucker, in contrast, relied only on the music itself. Without offering “extensive arguments about songs,” she reminded her listeners of “how powerfully singing functions to sound freedom.” Those who are unfamiliar with folk song traditions may be pleased to learn that the summer-camp staple “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” originated as a spiritual sung by enslaved people in South Carolina. Miller ends the chapter with an in-depth analysis of Matthew Jones’s “The Ballad of Medgar Evers,” which shows the “capacity of freedom songs” to respond to “recurrent violence.”

Prayer, the subject of the third chapter, becomes a form of “reverent resistance.” Miller begins her discussion by calling attention to the public prayers that followed early lunch counter protests. By praying visibly on the street, the young Greensboro Four not only displayed peace but also “unsettled” a “segregated space.” Their actions demonstrated that prayer could serve as an “unruly genre,” because it disrupted the norms defining the spaces that “Black bodies should inhabit” and where “prayer should occur.” Miller’s frame of reference is expansive, and her analysis draws upon writers and activists as diverse as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Adrienne Rich, and Andrew Young. Examining the roles of prayer in mass meetings in Greenwood, Mississippi; St. Augustine, Florida; and Americus, Georgia, Page 183 →Miller extends her discussion of prayer as a “mode of peaceful resistance.” She concludes the chapter with a brief discussion of Stokely Carmichael’s efforts to move civil rights protests away from freedom songs and prayers and toward the more aggressive advocacy of the Black Power movement.

If prayer serves as an “unruly genre,” testimony becomes a “fuzzy genre,” which is to say a genre with “permeable boundaries and a range of usable social actions.” Miller introduces Fannie Lou Hamer, one of “the most outstanding civil rights orators.” She also takes the reader into meetings in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Danville, Virginia. In Mississippi, testimony helped transform the participants’ “sense of themselves and who they could be.” In Virginia, Miller discovers the underlying anxiety of participants who feared repercussion for their testimony. “At times,” Miller notes, “people needed a break from the recorder to testify.” Despite these understandable worries, people did testify and used their own words as a “mode of loving confrontation.” In doing so, they demonstrated the power of testimony not only to give voice to the experiences of ordinary people but also to focus attention on social issues outside purely religious concerns. In this way, testimony becomes an essential vehicle for connecting the values of a faith tradition to the immediate concerns of those denied justice.

Miller’s final chapter explores the intersections of mass meetings and racial violence. The meetings, the reader learns, were often attended by individuals and groups who were hostile to their purpose. The Citizen’s Council and Ku Klux Klan were a constant presence, as were law enforcement officials, some of whom installed microphones to record the meetings. Rather than excluding these groups, activists welcomed them and used their attendance to model “radical pacificist” engagement and “Christian nonviolence.” The liturgical structure of the meetings, of course, helped advance this purpose by situating the meetings within “already accepted Christian genres.” In one of the chapter’s best moments, Miller discusses how speakers would refer to police microphones as “doohickies” and humorously remind speakers that others were listening. Turning an instrument of surveillance into a comedic prop, they disempowered those who sought to control them.

Without question, Miller has great appreciation of the impact of mass meetings and great admiration for the courageous men and women who participated in them. Examining the records, she finds courage, selflessness, and a laudable commitment to nonviolence, even in the face of overt threats. Miller is not, however, an uncritical apologist. In her conclusion, she calls attention to several paradoxes within the mass meetings. She notes, for example, that although the meetings were “designed to invite collective Page 184 →participation,” they never promoted an “egalitarian leadership structure.” Similarly, the meetings focused on the experiences of men and, by so doing, “missed key aspects of the injustice Black people in the United States faced.” The mass meetings, the reader discovers, were the products of their age, and however beneficial they may have been, they reflect the values of the mid-twentieth century, not the twenty-first. Miller brings these dynamics to light by contrasting mass meetings with the more recent activities of the Black Lives Matter movement. The latter, she shows, abandons hierarchal structures and promotes greater inclusion, not only of women but also of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual/aromantic/agender plus other (LGBTQIA+) communities. In this way, the Black Lives Matter movement corrects the “myopic, gendered vision of freedom and citizenship” offered by earlier activists. Miller ends her study by examining the works of two modern rhetoricians: Michael Eric Dyson and Barack Obama. Dyson’s important 2017 book, Tears We Cannot Stop, continues the work of the mass meetings in its insistence on a nonviolent resistance that welcomes opponents in dialogue. Moreover, the book is structured like a liturgy, with a call to worship, hymn, invocation, sermon, and benediction. President Obama’s powerful response to the 2015 murder of nine innocent people within Charleston’s Emanuel Baptist Church similarly evokes the power of mass meetings and replicates their liturgical emphasis on song, prayer, and testimony. These examples suggest that, however imperfect and dated, mass meetings continue to shape responses to injustice and violence.

Elizabeth Ellis Miller has written an exceptional study. Students of rhetoric will find her analysis fresh and convincing. Professors preparing courses on Black and civil rights rhetoric would do well to put her book on their reading lists (the paperback edition is a veritable bargain in today’s academic marketplace). Historians will relish Miller’s insights, particularly as they relate to little-studied events and people. Most important, readers outside the academy will find much value within Liturgy of Change. Even those who do not think within academic contexts, such as genres and imaginaries, will find Miller’s arguments accessible and convincing. They will be reminded that oppressors are never as powerful as they seem and that ordinary people can assemble the materials of their experiences and traditions to advance the causes of inclusion, peace, and justice.

Christopher D. Johnson, Francis Marion University

Page 185 →Edda L. Fields-Black, Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2024). 776 pp., cloth $39.99, ebook $39.99.

In this rich volume, Edda Fields-Black weaves together lesser-known parts of Harriet Tubman’s life, the story of her ancestors, and the June 3, 1863, raid of seven rice plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina that resulted in the freedom of seven hundred fifty-six enslaved people. Fields-Black explains, “This story is as local as it is national. Central as she was to the Combahee River Raid, in this book Harriet Tubman shares the spotlight with the men, women, and children who utilized the raid to seize their freedom and create a new community.” Using previously neglected US Civil War Pension Files alongside compensation records from plantation owners who lost property—including the people they enslaved—during the raid, Fields-Black names numerous enslaved people in print for the first time. For generations, white plantation owners enslaved Fields-Black’s ancestors along the Combahee, and her great-great-great uncle, Jonas Fields, and great-greatgreat grandfather, Hector Fields, served in the US Colored Troops during the Civil War. Jonas’s pension file revealed ancestors’ names she had not previously known. For the Combahee’s freedom seekers, the Civil War catalyzed their Gullah–Geechee culture, which “ultimately crystalized in the early twentieth century.” Fields-Black divides the book’s nineteen chapters into four parts, moving chronologically from the late seventeenth century through early Reconstruction.

The seven chapters of the first part explore the antebellum period. In the first chapter, she emphasizes how “enslavement was not the same across the South, and the Lowcountry’s was distinct.” Tubman experienced enslavement in Maryland, where tobacco was the dominant crop. By the start of the nineteenth century, most of the enslaved population there was Creole, not African-born. Chapter Two shifts to South Carolina, providing significant vocabulary, details of plantation society, and the genealogy of seven Combahee plantations raided. To grow rice on their plantations, the enslavers relied on “skilled and strong field hands, known as ‘Prime Hands.’” The seven plantations belonged to the Blakes, Middletons, Heywards, Lowndeses, Kirklands, Nichollses, and Pauls. She explains the complexity of the names of the enslaved, especially as it relates to understanding and identifying pension files. Some enslaved people used the surnames of enslavers, but they may have had more than one enslaver. Enslaved people referred to their surnames Page 186 →as a “title,” and many went by a “basket name” or nickname within their own communities. Enslaved people along the Combahee had an internal hierarchy based on age, where “those considered Old Heads—born between 1780 and 1823 and married many years before the Civil War began—commanded respect from younger enslaved people.”

Chapters Three, Four, and Five examine the effects of slavery on families. The third chapter moves back up the eastern coast to Tubman and Sojourner Truth to discuss the breaking apart of enslaved families. When male enslavers died, they often bequeathed enslaved people to their sons and daughters. This was the case with Tubman’s grandmother, Rit Green. On the other hand, a New York enslaver sold Isabella Van Wagenen (later, Sojourner Truth) and her siblings after freeing her parents, so he did not have to care for them in old age. Seen ultimately as property, enslavers split up enslaved families to serve their own interests. This was true with marriage as well. Although enslavers did not typically support “abroad marriages” where enslaved people on differing plantations wed, when they did, the children lived separately from one parent. The fourth chapter also examines the objectification of enslaved people to secure loans. Fields-Black asserts that “planters in the Lowcountry bought, sold, and mortgaged the people they held in bondage whenever they saw fit” and “during the 1840s, fluctuating rice prices and the deaths of planters increased uncertainty for Blacks enslaved along the Combahee River.” The author also further analyzes the hierarchy of the enslaved through drivers. Typically male, enslaved drivers ran most day-to-day work on plantations by means of a task system. Prime hands often held these positions of power, earning them little protection from enslavers splitting up their families and hatred from other enslaved people. The sixth chapter returns to enslaved children and enslavers’ intergenerational wealth. Enslaved children died at higher rates on rice plantations—nearly two-thirds died before the age of fifteen—than on cotton or sugar plantations. The author notes, “The planters’ intergenerational wealth was created by the labor of unfree Black people toiling in the pestilent rice swamps and losing their children in large numbers.”

Chapters Five through Seven focus on efforts to liberate the enslaved. Fields-Black highlights the Underground Railroad in the fifth chapter. Selfliberation was extremely dangerous for the enslaved, and absconding from enslavement further divided families. Prime hands were the most likely to seek their freedom. White and Black abolitionists risked their livelihoods and relationships in helping freedom seekers as well. Fields-Black stresses how exceptional Tubman was in her willingness to risk her own hard-won Page 187 →freedom by returning to the South to help others gain their freedom. Despite the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, also known as the Bloodhound Act, enslaved people still sought their freedom via the Underground Railroad, as evidenced by reporting on the Dover Eight in 1857. The final chapter in the first section shifts to Tubman’s radicalization after John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. The two met in Canada in 1858 and had a mutual respect. After Brown’s martyrdom, she engaged in violence in response to the arrest of Charles Nalle, who was to be re-enslaved in the South. Up to that point, she risked her freedom and life for people she knew, but moving forward, she “resolved to risk her life for people she did not know.”

Part Two’s five chapters examine Tubman and South Carolina in the American Civil War. Chapters Eight, Nine, and Eleven cover the Battle of Port Royal, the Port Royal Experiment, and the Sea Islands. Union forces won the battle, allowing the United States to implement an Atlantic blockade called the Anaconda Plan. The Gullah–Geechee refer to the battle at “Gun Shoot at Bay Point” and the resulting chaos of fleeing white South Carolinians as the “Great Skedaddle.” These events further divided enslaved families, as some accompanied their enslavers “whether by force or by choice” to the interior, whereas others sought refuge in the woods until they could reach Union forces. In the early 1860s, slavery was still legal in the United States, so Union forces at Port Royal labeled the freedom seekers “contrabands” and put them to work “building fortifications, transporting goods, cooking, washing, serving, and even bearing arms against the rebellion.” This action became the Port Royal Experiment. Although the workers received wages, they were too low for them to sustain their families. Despite the tribulations of the experiment, Tubman was able to embed herself among the refugees and earn their trust. In Chapter Nine, Fields-Black notes, “Though she could not understand the dialect the Lowcountry Creoles spoke nor their cultural practices, she knew that they all understood freedom and the willingness to sacrifice to attain it.” Chapter Eleven examines the differences between Tubman and Charlotte Forten and their engagement with South Carolina’s Black refugees. Forten was of mixed ancestry, was educated, and had never experienced slavery, yet both women “faced bigotry in the North when they stepped outside of free Black communities and abolitionist circles.” Tubman cooked, did laundry, and collected intelligence, and Forten taught the formerly enslaved in makeshift schools.

Chapters Ten and Twelve focus on Black men in Union forces. In May 1862, General David Hunter issued General Order Number Eleven, freeing enslaved people in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and requiring Page 188 →the men to fight for the Union. However, when forces delivered his orders and took formerly enslaved men into custody, they gave no explanation, spreading distrust. Some deserted fearing their sale back to the Confederates. However, President Abraham Lincoln nullified Hunter’s orders. Two months later, Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act and the Militia Act freed enslaved people in Confederate territories, six months before the Emancipation Proclamation, reaffirming “the president’s authority to marshal the labor of formerly enslaved individuals in whatever capacities were beneficial to the war effort.” The author recounts the well-known story of Robert Smalls’s heroic escape and seizure of the CSS Planter, as well as the names of a handful of lesser known Black boatmen from the Lowcountry. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Black men helped deliver it to the enslaved people in the South. Part of the First and Second South Carolina Volunteers, they also fought alongside white soldiers in the attack on Jacksonville, but they were “sorely disappointed and dejected” when they had to evacuate without the enslaved people who sought their protection. The author’s great-great-great-grandfather Hector Fields was a member of the Second South Carolina Volunteers.

Fields-Black finally gets to the Combahee River Raid in the four chapters of Part Three. Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen trace the events of the raid. Despite the Combahee being “breadbasket of the Confederacy,” the Confederates prioritized protecting railroads over rice plantations. However, there had been rumors of a Northern attack, and gunboats surveyed the river for torpedoes. Tubman led at least eight men, but only two of her “ring of scouts, spies, and pilots” enlisted in the US Army. She sang an abolitionist song, “Uncle Sam’s Farm” to signal that the forces were there to free the enslaved and “give them land” to sustain their families. Fields-Black analyzes Tubman’s service on the Combahee despite limited sources to give her “some credit,” as the author titles Chapter Fifteen. The sixteenth chapter takes up the Confederate response to the raid. There were questions of who to blame, but “the Confederate Army’s military strategy … was never on trial.” Despite Union forces coming to liberate the enslaved, some stayed on the plantations because they did not want to break up their families. For those who did flee, however, the plantation owners sought compensation from the Confederacy.

The final section of the book looks at South Carolina after the raid and the emergence of the Combee identity. At Battery Wagner, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth, the first Northern regiment of Black troops, proved that “Black men would and could fight for their freedom and the freedom of people still in bondage.” Black women also served Page 189 →as nurses for Black soldiers. Building the Swamp Angel on Morris Island left many members of the Second South Carolina ill and even disabled. During the war, Northern volunteers in South Carolina continuously remarked on the language of Black people in the Lowcountry. In the 1930s, an educator noted the Creole language spoken by the Gullah people, as teachers like Forten recorded in the 1860s. This unique language developed because the enslaved spent most days in relative separation from white influence, and they held onto this localized identity even after freedom. Fields-Black explains, “The Combahee refugees identified themselves as ‘Combee’ because they ‘came from the Combahee River.’” When General William Tecumseh Sherman marched from Charleston into the interior, he issued Special Field Order Number Fifteen, promising formerly enslaved people forty acres of land. However, President Andrew Johnson reversed the order when he pardoned Confederate plantation owners. Most of the free Black population did not have money to purchase land after the war. However, Hector Fields was able to do so through white intermediaries. Having survived slavery and the American Civil War, the Gullah–Geechee created a new community, and “one of the most enduring legacies of the Combahee River Raid is the window it opens into the process by which Lowcountry Creoles became those whom we today call the Gullah Geechee.”

Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War is more than just a monograph. The afterword acknowledgments section will be insightful for students pursuing a career in history as she explores the fascinating process of re-enacting and researching these stories amidst a global pandemic. Educators could easily assign most of the reasonably short nineteen chapters or four parts separately, making the size of this tome a little less intimidating for undergraduate students. With the inclusion of a detailed timeline at the beginning and primary sources in the center and appendices, this is sure to become a textbook for many classes and a reference book on countless scholars’ shelves.

Erica Johnson, Francis Marion University

Page 190 →Carrie Tipton, From Dixie to Rocky Top: Music and Meaning in Southeastern Conference Football (Vanderbilt University Press, 2023), 320 pp., cloth $99.95, paperback $34.95, ebook $19.99.

In From Dixie to Rocky Top, Carrie Tipton argues that the college fight songs of the Southeastern Conference (SEC) reflect the cultural politics of the American South in the twentieth century and beyond. Tipton grew up near Davis Wade Stadium, home to the Mississippi State University Bulldogs. On game days, Tipton heard what she described as “the unmistakable sounds of war.” Like other children growing up in the US South, these sonic memories established an indelible connection between SEC football and an epistemological cultural identity. According to Tipton, SEC fight songs are the skeleton key for understanding the sociopolitical fault lines of the white South from the perspective of race, regional identity, gender, and capitalism.

In tune with Karl Hagstrom Miller’s Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow, From Dixie to Rocky Top uncovers a hidden musical history: The expressive culture of the South was a fluid ecosystem that encompassed a much wider variety of commercial music than it is often given credit for. Like Miller, Tipton wisely argues that, to comprehend such a vast aesthetic infrastructure, one must explore how the market and pecuniary conditions influenced the rise of fight songs as a marker of cultural identity. By examining the ways in which school spirit is commoditized in the form of a tune, Tipton’s study of fight song history is an important intervention into the economic history of commercial music in the American South.

Tipton organizes her study into eleven chapters devoted to revealing the numerous connections between the book’s imbricated themes: how the commodification of school spirit took place, the ways in which SEC football traditions engendered the construction and expression of race, how fight songs represented regional identity, and how the contributions of women affected the SEC soundscape. Chapter One explores the aural sphere of the burgeoning praxis of white college football in the American South in the 1890s. Chapter Two sutures the residue of minstrelsy and Civil War songs in early southern football culture to plantation tropes and “Lost Cause” ideology. Chapters Three and Four document case studies of the emerging “school spirit” commercial music genre among southern universities. Chapter Five explores the ways in which women participated in the proto-SEC football soundscape in the South before World War II. Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight—case studies on the influence of jazz and popular music in the Page 191 →school spirit genre, the business of fight songs, and the fight song mania of the 1930s—document the heyday of the fight song, 1920–1940. Chapter Nine examines the curious marriage of music and politics through the lens of Huey P. Long’s involvement with Louisiana State University football pageantry while serving as Louisiana governor, US senator, and presidential candidate. Chapter Ten, “Three Postwar Fight Songs,” examines three songs adopted as the official fight songs at Auburn University, the University of South Carolina (USC), and the University of Tennessee between 1955 and 1972. Tipton is particularly insightful in her explication of how USC’s “Fighting Gamecocks Lead the Way” journeyed from the Broadway theater to the football stadium. Key to the song taking a foothold in becoming the main fight song at USC was the collaboration between football coach Paul Dietzel and band director James Pritchard. Dietzel’s vigorous support of the “Fighting Gamecocks Lead the Way,” the USC Marching Band, and football pageantry in general represents the only case study in Tipton’s book in which a coach was explicitly involved in the aesthetics of school spirit. The book concludes with Chapter Eleven’s exploration of the changes that took place in SEC football pageantry during the course of the twentieth century, including a critique of “southern exceptionalism.”

From Dixie to Rocky Top is an interdisciplinary work that draws on the methodologies of various fields of study, including musicology, American studies, Southern history, and sports history. Mining both physical and digital archives, Tipton utilizes a sweeping variety of sources: manuscript collections and oral histories, newspapers, magazines, trade journals, football programs, sheet music, legal records, recordings, university student and alumni publications, and US government documents. In this regard, Tipton’s research into the business practices of college song publisher Thornton W. Allen is particularly impressive for its scope. Tipton’s chapter on Allen is at once economic history, a musicological examination of Allen’s work as a composer and lyricist, and a psychological portrait of greed. Additionally, Tipton organizes Allen’s entire catalog of “College Songs Published, Written, or Copyrighted by Thornton W. Allen” in an appendix, highlighting in physical form just how important the publishing industry was in cementing college songs as a legitimate commercial musical subgenre.

From Dixie to Rocky Top is an exceptional addition to the literature of musicology, American studies, Southern history, and sports history. Tipton’s insightful amalgamation of economic analysis and cultural theory provides a shrewd and unique look into the history of the musical ecosystem of the SEC. Scholars in the fields of musicology, music industry studies, American Page 192 →studies, women’s and gender studies, sports history, and Southern history will utilize From Dixie to Rocky Top to seek a deeper understanding of how SEC football pageantry and the commodification of college fight songs became a marker of cultural and political identity in the American South.

Brian Edward Jones, Francis Marion University

John D. Miller (ed.), Honorable and Brilliant Labors: Orations of William Gilmore Simms (University of South Carolina Press, 2024), 324 pp., cloth $59.99, open access ebook $0.00.

The monumental William Gilmore Simms Initiatives series concludes with John D. Miller’s consideration of William Gilmore Simms as orator and public intellectual, complementing the series’ prior efforts to flesh out our understanding of Simms, best known as novelist and poet, through his personal correspondence, reviews, and editorials. Miller’s treatment of Simms’s orations as the subject of study (rather than as adjunct to studying something else Simms wrote) meaningfully enlarges our view of a writer whose era was a golden age of oratory, when public speaking was regarded as a high-prestige art form of social consequence, especially, Miller argues, in the Old South. Although Miller’s book is billed as an edited collection of primary sources, it is, in fact, both less and more. Honorable and Brilliant Labors is neither a complete collection of Simms’s orations—it includes nine, fewer than half of those known to exist—nor a purely representative sample. Miller’s selection and arrangement are meant to illustrate the critical thesis that he advances explicitly in well-developed volume and section introductions: that Simms’s oratory responds to “the contradictions of progress by synthesizing the different responses of his era to it, including seemingly incongruous perspectives”; specifically, Southern conservatism and Northern progressivism. Although Simms’s conservatism and sectional partisanship are widely noted, Miller’s claim of synthesis with progressive perspectives in Simms’s public orations is more provocative and certainly makes a case for reassessment.

The book begins with the same excellent biographical overview included in other series volumes (and available at the Simms Initiatives online) by independent scholar David Moltke-Hansen, founding director of the William Gilmore Simms Initiatives. The overview is a model of the genre that Page 193 →achieves breadth of coverage with concision and economy, and it constitutes an insightful, at-a-glance reference for the Simms novice and veteran scholar alike. As for the presentation of primary texts, Miller’s editorial apparatus seems purposely designed to interfere only mildly or not at all with a reader’s direct experience of Simms’s words as they were spoken. Aside from two of his own brief notes to “Barnwell Agricultural Society Oration,” for instance, Miller eschews editor’s notes altogether. Whenever possible, Miller uses manuscript sources for the orations rather than the versions Simms himself prepared for publication, aiming to come closer to Simms’s actual delivery. Although many of the orations included in this volume have been otherwise broadly accessible to scholars—including through the digitization efforts of the Simms Initiatives—three (“Choice of a Profession,” “The Social Moral, Lecture 1,” and “Antagonisms of the Social Moral, North and South”) are newly available outside of manuscript collections of the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina. Honorable and Brilliant Labors resides in Open Carolina, the open-access repository of the University of South Carolina Press, so the entire volume is available digitally.

After Moltke-Hansen’s biographical sketch, the book includes Miller’s brief general introduction to William Gilmore Simms as Orator, followed by four parts, each consisting of an extensive critical introduction followed by two or (in Part IV) three of Simms’s orations. One way to get a sense of how this book stretches beyond the confines of the typical edited collection is by observing how many of its pages are Miller’s and how many are Simms’s: Of the two hundred eighty-two pages of the main text (excluding the appendix, bibliography, and index), for example, almost a third are Miller’s. Miller’s critical introduction to Part I exceeds the length of either one of the orations that succeed it and, in fact, approaches their length put together. Although some of Miller’s pages are owing to the editor’s comprehensive grounding of Simms’s texts in their historical, biographical, and bibliographical contexts as any editor of primary texts might do, Miller also produces less expected critical analysis in service of his larger argument about Simms’s synthesis of Southern and Northern responses to progress. The result is that Miller’s parts are somewhat less like cohesive categories that organize primary texts and somewhat more like book chapters.

Nowhere is Miller’s central argument clearer and more compelling than in Part I: Nature and Its Social Uses. Drawing on Simms’s earliest major oration, “Barnwell Agricultural Society Oration” (1840), and his last oration, “The Sense of the Beautiful” (1870), delivered mere weeks before Simms succumbed to cancer, Miller argues for the essential congruity between Page 194 →Simmsian and Emersonian conceptions of nature as a sign of moral and spiritual truth. Here, Miller’s claims are nuanced and considered, asserting neither too much nor too little; at least, he argues, such affinities bespeak the influence of European Romanticism that Simms and Emerson held in common. Given the dim view of New England’s historical and contemporary enthusiasms taken by the South of Simms’s day (and in the South’s intellectual history well into the twentieth century), Miller’s line of reasoning will be seen as provocative, and, in some quarters, even heretical. Unlike Part I, Parts II–IV are arranged chronologically as well as thematically. Part II: Progress and Its Fragility examines Simms’s account of the historical roots of American social development and liberty, and the contemporary forces of materialism and abolitionism that threaten them, through the lens of two orations of the 1840s, as Simms was becoming known as an orator: “The Social Principle” (1842) and “The Sources of American Independence” (1844). Part III: Class, Gender, and the Purpose of an Education includes two 1855 orations, “Choice of a Profession” and “Inauguration of the Spartanburg Female College,” that advance obligations to family and community as necessary constraints on personal freedom in the lives of South Carolina postgraduates. In Part IV: Loud Voices, Empty Rooms, the historical context of rising sectionalism and looming war becomes central, as Miller introduces a trio of orations from Simms’s failed Northern tour (“South Carolina and the Revolution” [1856]) and his follow-up “Our Social Moral” series in Charleston the following year (“The Social Moral, Lecture 1” [1857] and “The Antagonisms of the Social Moral, North and South” [1857]).

Miller’s thesis, already a bit attenuated in Parts II and III, arguably disappears in Part IV. If these final orations of the volume develop or exemplify Simms’s synthesis of Southern conservatism and Northern progressivism, Miller leaves unsaid how. The mere continuation of some characteristically Simmsian themes, perhaps, now marshaled to prepare Simms’s audience for disunion and conflict, is the extent of what may be pointed out. What Miller leaves unsaid in Part IV might be missed less if the volume included a critical conclusion; that is, undoubtedly, an odd thing to want in an edited collection of primary sources, but Miller’s unusually elevated critical ambitions seem to call for it. Nevertheless, Honorable and Brilliant Labors is both a welcome new collection of Simms’s primary texts and an unfailingly thought-provoking critical assessment of them, as well as a worthy culmination of the Simms Initiative’s publication project.

Shawn E. Miller, Francis Marion University

Page 195 →Claudia Smith Brinson, Injustice in Focus: The Civil Rights Photography of Cecil Williams (University of South Carolina Press, 2024), 256 pp., cloth $39.99, ebook $39.99.

Injustice in Focus highlights the powerful role that the people of South Carolina, particularly the people of Orangeburg, played in the civil rights movement, concentrating on one Orangeburg native, Cecil J. Williams. From an early age, Williams seemed destined to use his camera as a tool for social change. Brinson’s book takes the reader from the 1940s, when a young Cecil first began photographing, through the 1950s and, ultimately, into the 1960s, presenting key events that Williams photographed that were influential in the state’s struggle to attain racial equality. Beautifully printed black-and-white photographs, mainly attributed to Williams, illustrate these powerful events and leave the reader longing to see more of his work.

The book is presented chronologically in four parts, starting with Cecil Williams’s early life in Orangeburg. Throughout the chapters, Brinson unfurls Williams’s flourishing devotion to photography, which is intertwined with his dedication to the social change unfolding in South Carolina. The preface outlines the book’s purpose and Williams’s purpose as a photographer. Brinson emphasizes how the events that took place in Orangeburg, as documented by a savvy young photographer, played a fateful and consequential role in the history of the civil rights movement. Through Brinson’s insightful analysis, the reader discovers that Cecil Williams was not just a passerby with a camera but was, instead, an engaged observer immersed in the science and art of photography and, equally important, an active participant in the events that unfolded in front of his camera.

After the preface, the book explores Cecil J. Williams’s early days in the 1940s. Williams, like many photographers, including me, got his start with a hand-me-down camera from his brother. It struck me that one never knows what might become of the future of a child when they are introduced to different tools or experiences and are surrounded by impassioned people. Throughout the book, the reader gets a sense of what it was to be a photographer in the midtwentieth century. Photographs were not instantly available on a screen as they are today. One had to wait for the images to be processed, either in a personal darkroom or through mail service. Williams was so enthralled with photography at a young age that he set up his own darkroom in his house. I was impressed that Williams shot his first wedding at the age of twelve and very quickly learned how to make photography a vocation. He Page 196 →was able to serve as an apprentice to Edward C. Jones, who would introduce him to his role as a storyteller, documentarian, and historian. Although this section of the book focuses on Williams’s beginnings in photography, it also details what life what like for him growing up “not white” in Orangeburg. There was a parallel in the difficulty that Cecil Williams had in carrying his heavy equipment (Crown and Speed Graphic cameras are especially cumbersome) and the struggles of steadfast parents, educators, farmers, and business owners who were working toward equality day by day.

The next chapter of the book takes the reader through the 1950s, during which time Orangeburg and Clarendon Counties showed leadership, innovation, and persistence through nonviolent resistance. The chapter also follows Williams’s increasing photographic skills through to his decision to attend college at Claflin. In 1950, twelve-year-old Williams was already a photographer and, from an early age, felt as though he was on a “divine mission.” He and his camera would be used by God to exchange evil for good. He photographed marches, demonstrations, and key figures, his camera always ready to tell the story of a people understandably not satisfied with separate but equal. Williams seemed to be everywhere things were happening, answering the call to photograph this event or that key figure. Ultimately, his persistence led to the fulfillment of one of his goals: his photographs being featured in Jet magazine. The chapter on the 1950s ends with fifteen black-and-white photographs of events, figures and the Black way of life in South Carolina, all of which would challenge the South to push past segregation.

The chapter on the 1960s reads like a bursting timeline of sit-ins, marches, lawsuits, pickets and petitions organized by the Black citizens of Orangeburg. Williams, now in his twenties, continued to be a godsend with a camera, making images that recorded pivotal turns in the pursuit of freedom and racial equality. The 1960s for Williams seemed to be a time of marked advancements. The student became the teacher, with his own line of assistants. He also opened a photography studio, focusing on all types of portraiture, photographed celebrities and civil rights dignitaries, and even made a connection with President Kennedy. Breakthroughs in social equality were happening in the 1960s, but not without heartbreak. Williams witnessed and photographed painful events—arrests, beatings, and even death. He continued to photograph for Jet magazine and was a valuable resource for outlets that sought to highlight events in South Carolina. The chapter ends like the previous one, with eleven momentous black-and-white photographs that record the people, places, and events that changed our nation forever.

Page 197 →The last chapter of the book is aptly titled, “And So Much More,” which properly describes Williams’s life outside of photography. Although he seemed to be everywhere, photographing everything with his camera, he did so much more. He was not just a photojournalist. He was also a businessman, entrepreneur, designer, artist, protester, self-taught architect, visionary, and inventor. The book concludes with a discussion of the awards and honors Williams received for his remarkable contributions. It is my hope that his legacy will continue to be passed on to future generations, particularly young South Carolinians, so they can get a glimpse of the grit and perseverance of a generation of Americans as they fought to gain their freedom.

This book is for everyone. Photographers, like me, will enjoy reading about the common feelings that many photographers experience, such as getting your first camera, seeing images emerge in darkroom chemicals, and the challenges of telling your story. Those who want to learn more about the people of South Carolina, with Williams as a role model, will be equally satisfied as they read about brave people who sacrificed so much to secure a better and more equal future for their children.

Before reading this book, I was appreciative of Cecil Williams’s work and legacy. After reading this book, my appreciation has deepened. I have realized the importance of introducing his photographs to my photography students in the hopes that they will see opportunities to use photography as a tool for change and not forget South Carolina’s path to racial equality.

Julie Mixon, Francis Marion University

Judy Goldman, Child: A Memoir (University of South Carolina Press, 2022), 160 pp., paperback $19.99, ebook $19.99.

Beautifully written and immensely readable, Child is a love story for the ages—and of its age. That age is midtwentieth century Rock Hill, SC, where Jim Crow is prevailing over its residents and everything they do. Bucking the trend, quietly and politely, are Peggy and Ben Kurtz, a Jewish couple raising their three children in comfort and privilege. They also are raising them with invaluable, immeasurable help. That’s Mattie Cherry Culp, the Black housekeeper who keeps the children safe and the family fed and, shockingly, lives with them full time. That wasn’t done in that place and time, particularly with only one bathroom in the house.

Page 198 →But such was the unconventional reality and genuine love in the Kurtz home. Despite the obvious differences between the races—Mattie was always “Mattie,” Mrs. Kurtz was always “Mrs. Peggy”—an unlikely family bonded in the respectable Eden Terrace neighborhood. With Child, the youngest of that family, at eighty, looks back and writes about it.

“Can we ever tell the whole truth to ourselves?” Judy Goldman wonders midway through her memoir. “Insights are tenuous, imperfect. It’s so hard to go beyond the familiarity we have with our own stories, interrupt what we’ve known forever.” Goldman questions herself throughout Child, recognizing that memories can be faulty, different to different people. We sit with her at her mother’s dressing table, which was passed, on her death, to Mattie and then, on Mattie’s death, to the author. Goldman studies the photos of Mattie on the table and tries to piece together the truth about the woman who helped raise her, whom she loved devotedly since she was three. For Goldman, Mattie’s mystery lies in her own child, a daughter she gave up to work for and live with the Kurtzes. That daughter, Minnie, lives with Mattie’s brother and sister-in-law in Charlotte, NC. Goldman tries to understand how Mattie can be mother to them both and how Minnie thinks about her biological mother. In Goldman’s mind, she, Minnie, and Mattie form a triangle.

But in the beginning—Judy Kurtz Goldman’s beginning—there’s no other child. It’s just Judy and Mattie in their private world of love and play, with Mattie cutting colorful papier-mâché dresses for Judy to wear, sharing a bedroom and double bed “that felt as wide as the world.” Mattie walked young Judy to school—picking her up and carrying her once they were out of Ben Kurtz’s strict view. And she carried her most dramatically when sevenyear-old Judy fell through a jungle gym, cutting her underarm to the bone. Mattie ran through the streets, Judy in her arms, until she found someone to call a cab to the hospital. Once there, waiting for the doctor, a nurse whispers to Mattie, who then loosens herself from Judy’s grip. “Child, you go on now, go with the nurse,” Goldman recalls Mattie telling her. “I’ll be waitin’ for you. You gon’ be all right.” Goldman recounts waiting in the whites-only room while Mattie waited in the “colored” room.

“I didn’t know then that one thin wall separated us, a frightened woman on one side, a frightened child on the other, a child whose arm would need layers of stitches, who did not even think how the separate waiting rooms might be affecting Mattie, how it felt to her to be judged not good enough to sit in a room with a child she was certainly good enough to take care of every other day of the year, the child who only knew she wanted Mattie.”

Page 199 →Mattie Culp would carry Goldman much of her life, eventually helping with her two newborns, becoming godmother to her son and like a grandmother to all the Kurtz grandchildren. “My white children,” she called the Kurtz children. “My best friend,” she and Peggy Kurtz called each other. In truth, Mattie carried the whole family, cooking Thanksgiving dinners for decades, even after retirement, and helping tend Peggy Kurtz when Alzheimer’s disease robbed her of her elegance and generosity. For their part, the Kurtzes kept Mattie safe and solvent, buying her a home when the children didn’t need full-time care.

Still, the times were what they were, and Mattie, too, had unfathomable reasoning about race and class. Goldman questions why Mattie—as close as she was to the Kurtz family—would never eat at the table with them and bristled noticeably when Goldman’s brother, Donald, then in the Army, brought home a Black friend who did. Nor would Mattie go to the Carver Movie Theater, which local Blacks patronized and Kurtz family members owned. “In that neighborhood? With that rough crowd?” she says when Goldman asks. “I wouldn’t set foot in that place.”

Goldman doesn’t shy from describing those incongruities, always in her search to understand why and how her family and Mattie came to love each other so thoroughly in such thoroughly unfair conditions. Despite what many have told her—that her parents as members of a minority race would of course be sympathetic to Blacks—the author disagrees. Goldman concludes they were remarkably strong in different ways. Ben Kurtz was formidable in his ability to do the right, hard thing—hiring a Black woman to be a saleslady decades before that became normal and standing down a pair of New York men who came to their home one night, threatening him about his pro-union stances. For her part, Peggy Kurtz bloomed with empathy. She, too, did the unthinkable: She befriended a Catawba Indian family in a drugstore, visiting them for years at their home in the Lancaster County reservation.

Told in “micronarratives,” Child unfolds as memories do: brief flashes from childhood alongside adult wisdom and curiosity. An important gift is its portrait of Rock Hill in that era, with Winthrop College and its student-teachers’ school for local children, and its economy-driving “Bleachery” textile plant, which experienced a violent strike in 1956 that rocked the whole town. Goldman’s descriptions of segregated Trade Street are riveting, particularly the lively Black section with its pawn shops, cafes, pool halls, and backslapping clientele. We learn that the late Chief Blue of the Catawba Indian Nation was a downtown fixture, posing for photos in his regalia. And Page 200 →we learn through Goldman’s clear, poetic prose and sharp memory that Rock Hill was a town of dichotomy: both a gracious place where ladies put camellias in cut-glass bowls and an unfair world in which Black yardmen magically appeared with their shovels to kill the snakes that scared the white children. “This was our landscape,” Goldman writes. “Camellias and snakes. The particulars of our lives. The irregular ground on which our life stories were built.”

Above all, Child—a title with multiple meanings, the most significant of which the author doesn’t reveal until the end—is a love story. That is, perhaps, best illustrated by the time Judy and Mattie were separated in the hospital, when Judy fell through the jungle gym. She wouldn’t have waited for the doctor long, she writes; that wouldn’t happen with a white child. But love doesn’t separate. Seven-year-old Judy left the white waiting room and found Mattie in the colored one. Then she climbed into her lap, “and we were waiting there, together.”

Aïda Rogers, University of South Carolina

Ruth R. Martin, with Vivian B. Martin, Beatrice’s Ledger: Coming of Age in the Jim Crow South (University of South Carolina Press, 2022), 148 pp., cloth $29.99, ebook $29.99.

In Beatrice’s Ledger: Coming of Age in the Jim Crow South, Ruth R. Martin, along with collaborator Vivian B. Martin, provides an essential first-person account of growing up in South Carolina during a time of intense racism. Part memoir, part researched history of the region in and around Smoaks, SC, Martin’s memoir invites readers into a personal account of growing up in 1940s as a Black woman. She speaks to both the hardships and beloved memories, creating a fuller picture of the region and a deeper understanding of the time, while focusing on her own family’s story.

Martin begins by setting the tone for all to come within the book: telling the story of a white woman bringing the sheriff to her house to force Martin’s father to pay a debt. As her father insists that he has paid his debts, young Martin watches in fear, because “even as a young girl, I knew being in the right did not mean that a Black man would not be harmed.” After her father shows a record book that proves his claim, the author notes that the woman does not apologize to her father, as “I already knew that [the need Page 201 →to apologize when wrong] did not apply when it came to whites.” In this anecdote, readers understand both her father’s pride in the work he has done as well as the fear all Blacks live under for the very fact of their race. The remainder of Martin’s story is suffused with this dual pride and fear—pride for lives well lived and fear of a larger racism within which they exist.

Often, Martin tells stories of beloved memories from her personal life that have roots in chattel slavery, creating a more complex story behind many parts of her life that she holds dear. For example, she describes the Lovely Hills Missionary Baptist Church as having been founded by permission of enslavers in 1850. She then goes on to discuss how this place of worship would be an important place in her life. She describes it as where her family chooses to worship and as the place of worship for many Black leaders in the community. She writes, “It’s no wonder that throughout my life it has been to Lovely Hill … to which I return to bury my loved ones, to attend family reunions, and to worship when I am in the area.” Martin leaves readers to grapple with the beloved place created by a horrid history, a commonplace occurrence in her own life.

Her description of the education system for Black people in Smoaks is no less complex. She describes the segregation at Simmons Elementary School, which she attended as a child, stating, “South Carolina was especially aggressive passing Jim Crow laws to control Blacks and whites, and denying Blacks education was a key tactic.” Still, she describes Simmons as “a monument to how, not long after slavery, Blacks set about trying to get education for themselves in their children.” Repeatedly, Martin’s story places racist laws in direct relationship to the people who lived under them. Again and again, she shows the tenacity of her family and her community, highlighting the people who fought for a better future under a racist system. Although we hear stories of this courage on the national stage, Beatrice’s Ledger provides witness to the ways that this resistance happened at every level of society.

Of course, Martin provides at least as many examples of racism’s effects on her life and the lives of those around her that did not have a silver lining. She describes a life with separate rules for Blacks and whites, often stating, “I never questioned it; it was just the way things were.” From Black children watching the school bus full of white children pass them by as they walked to school to helping with yardwork for white families because “you couldn’t have white folks thinking you were uppity,” Black and white lives were governed by a different set of regulations.

Besides being unfair, those rules were often unclear and ever changing. Martin describes witnessing a fight between two white girls, not knowing Page 202 →whether she should try to separate them or whether she should let it take place. “Race relations in the South had not prepared me to know what my role was in this situation.” She considers separating them but knows it could result in her being beaten, yet when she does nothing, she’s accused of “letting them fight.” Although readers may understand conundrums such as these on an intellectual level, Beatrice’s Ledger provides firsthand accounts against the larger historical backdrop. Furthermore, although readers may have an intellectual response to these events, Martin’s accounts force an emotional response.

Martin’s story often meanders, moving between the subject of living in South Carolina during Jim Crow and more mundane or personal recollections of her childhood and the families who lived around her. Still, Beatrice’s Ledger provides an essential firsthand account of what it meant to live during these times in this place. She tells the story of being Black and living alongside whites, often in an uneasy peace. Martin’s book is one of many important stories that showcase how legalized racism played out on individual lives and how people managed to overcome even in the face of such adversity.

Laura Leigh Morris, Furman University

Diane Catherine Vecchio, Peddlers, Merchants, and Manufacturers: How Jewish Entrepreneurs Built Economy and Community in Upcountry South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press, 2023), 280 pp., cloth $34.99, ebook $34.99.

Peddlers, Merchants, and Manufacturers offers a case study of a unique geographical region to examine an overlooked question in South Carolina history: Why would Jews settle in the Upcountry (now known as the “Upstate”) of South Carolina when they had no established Jewish community? Diane Catherine Vecchio’s story unfolds chronologically beginning with first-generation Jewish immigrants arriving to South Carolina in the late seventeenth century as skilled traders and merchants who connected trans-Atlantic businesses with the port city of Charleston and ending with contemporary Jewish professionals in the Greenville–Spartanburg corridor who work as doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, realtors, educators, and managers at international corporations. Along the way, Jews filled important economic Page 203 →niches as peddlers who helped transition subsistence-based farm households into sites of consumption and merchants who supplied goods and services to the rapidly growing population of textile workers. However, Vecchio’s main argument is that Jewish-owned manufacturing companies launched in the midtwentieth century contributed significantly to the economic and community development of Greenville and Spartanburg Counties. Sociology enthusiasts will appreciate how Vecchio grounds her argument in opportunity structures, group characteristics, and strategies.

Opportunity structures are pathways that make entrepreneurship possible. The Upstate was a hospitable business climate for textile and clothing manufacturers seeking low corporate tax rates, nonunionized workers, an abundance of cheap labor, and proximity to cotton fields that reduced transportation costs. Furthermore, the desire for a “New South” image may have compelled non-Jewish community leaders to overlook religious objections and welcome Jews who had skills to match the market needs in Greenville and Spartanburg, particularly the fast-growing consumer interest in clothing, high-end footwear, and jewelry.

Group characteristics refer to the skills and goals that people bring with them to an opportunity as well as the social networking necessary to mobilize labor and resources. Vecchio explains that many post–World War II Jews who migrated to the Upstate were well educated sons of successful Northeastern Jewish businessmen skilled in the needle trade. Jews who relocated to the Upstate applied their knowledge of the clothing industry and the cultural trait of resourcefulness to provide work clothes for laborers and business attire for executives. Their connections with European businesses also helped introduce Upstate consumers to innovative marketing ideas and products, such as one-price clothing and double-knit clothing.

Strategies are purposeful actions taken to confront the numerous problems and uncertainties of founding and operating a business. Access to capital represents a significant challenge. Jews adopted the strategy of offering credit to other Jews “rooted in the Judaic concept of tzedakah, the communal obligation to help others.” Vecchio also describes chain migration. For instance, foreign-born Jews often settled in large northeastern cities to work in the garment industry before migrating to Upstate South Carolina in search of more fruitful opportunities. The wives of Upstate Jewish businessmen would board Jewish migrants temporarily in homes, and their husbands found managerial positions for them in Jewish-owned factories. Another strategy consisted of intermarriage in middle-class Jewish business communities, which consolidated the resources necessary for expanding businesses.

Page 204 →Vecchio not only provides a solid theoretical framework but also supports her claims with a dazzling array of sources that would humble the most rigorous methodologist. She uses transcripts of life histories based on interviews conducted between 1936 and 1943 as part of the Federal Writers project. Other evidence originates from her personal interviews with thirty-nine different people, including the well-known civil rights activist and politician Reverend Jesse Jackson, who is a Greenville native. Other relevant sources include photographs, books and peer-reviewed articles on Jewish American history, church temple records, journal and diary entries, letters, obituaries, memoirs, school yearbooks, manuscript collections from libraries and historical association, minutes from city council meetings, city directories, newspapers and periodicals, census data, Ancestry.com, master’s theses, and a PhD dissertation. These myriad sources allow Vecchio to present competing views of the motives behind antisemitic threats and violence encountered by a surprisingly small number of Jewish merchants in Greenville before the Civil War. They also help explain why upstate Jewish business owners shied away from direct involvement in the 1960s civil rights movement. Additionally, Vecchio presents different arguments on whether the transition from segregation to integration occurred more peacefully in South Carolina than other deep Southern states.

It is interesting that Vecchio departs from a holistic understanding of Jewish history in the Upstate to a reductionistic approach in the final chapter of the book, where she briefly revisits the controversial South Carolina Fourth Congressional District campaign race in 1978 between Democrat Max Heller and Republican Carroll Campbell, who eventually became the one hundred twelfth governor of South Carolina from 1987 to 1995. Campbell won the election by a relatively small margin of 5,793 votes. Vecchio suggests that Campbell found his way to victory through his campaign manager and an independent party candidate who messaged voters about Heller’s Jewish and foreign-born status. Some readers may wish that Vecchio had balanced this assertion with broader political and economic factors, such as South Carolina’s transition from a solid blue state to a swing state, tremendously high levels of inflation, and failing textile industry, all of which Campbell emphasized aggressively during his well-funded campaign. In defense of Vecchio, she documents other antisemitic episodes directed toward Heller leading up to and during his tenure as popular mayor of Greenville from 1971 to 1979. It cannot be ruled out that religious bigotry cost Heller the election.

Vecchio asks us to recognize that the Jewish contribution to economic and community development in the Upstate has been overshadowed by Page 205 →non-Jewish contributors such as textile giant Roger Milliken, who relocated his company headquarters from New York to Spartanburg in 1954, and the more recent massive recruiting of hundreds of international businesses, including Michelin, BMW, and Adidas. She writes a little-known but convincing story about how Jewish immigrant families paved the way for their success in Upstate South Carolina and, at the same time, paved the way for our success.

Russell E. Ward, Francis Marion University

Daniel Wolff, How to Become an American: A History of Immigration, Assimilation, and Loneliness (University of South Carolina Press, 2022), 248 pp., paperback $24.99, ebook $24.99.

How to Become an American, Daniel Wolff’s latest book, raises as many questions about what it means to be “American” as it answers. This makes it a compelling read. Wolff is a prolific biographer, capturing American history and culture through the lens of famous Americans. Here, he diverges from that method, instead excavating the lives of “so-called unimportant Americans” to tell a poignant story of immigration and belonging. It is interesting to consider that the result may be the same: People’s lives, well-known or not, move with history and inevitably reflect some cultural themes. Average people may not have the drama of fame punctuating and elevating their lives, but Wolff shows that private, ordinary experiences reverberate with larger significance.

Beginning with a woman’s diary found while cleaning out a home, Wolff pieces together a multigenerational saga of one family trying to become American, questioning at each stage whether this identity has been attained. To underscore their “un-specialness,” as he puts it, Wolff chooses to keep the family anonymous. Emigrating from a Polish village in 1839, a young Bohemian Jew landed in New York and peddled his way to owning a paint shop in Charleston in the 1840s. The man was welcomed by an established Jewish community. Thanks to its religious tolerance, South Carolina has been home to Jews since 1695. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Charleston had the largest Jewish population in the United States. The man built a family, a home, and a thriving business within the relatively prosperous stratum of merchants who existed in between opulent plantation Page 206 →owners and mixed-race working classes. Although life in Charleston offered Southern Jews like this family social and economic stability, even freedom, it also required setting aside the moral contradictions of slavery, which may have been particularly difficult for Jewish immigrants to reconcile. As Wolff explains, they “left the Old World because they’d been denied the right to marry or start a family, to own land, to vote…. But part of how they’d become Americans was by denying other people the right to marry or start a family, to own land, to vote.” Moreover, Southern Jews in antebellum Charleston were just white enough to be left alone to pursue their livelihoods, but they always remained cultural outsiders in this fiercely hierarchical society. The immigrant couple pinned their hopes on their children, and their children’s children, becoming true Americans as the tarnish of the Old World would fade and they would all eventually melt in.

The growing family lived through the Civil War relatively unscathed, but Charleston struggled to recover. It did not industrialize along with the New South. In 1873, some cousins opened new stores in St. Augustine and then Jacksonville, which were more lucrative markets. Florida needed paint stores not only to rebuild its housing stock after the war but also to transform its jungles into winter getaways for a new class of Northern tourists. Jacksonville had a small but strong Jewish community. It also offered some greater promise of American equality for Black people and immigrants alike: “Maybe it was easier to fit in, to become American, as part of a growing middle class in a growing city,” Wolff muses. The paint business, like many of the trades, was democratizing too, shifting from an Old World guild of master craftsmen into an industry of factory products, distribution chains, and less specialized workers. There were rumblings of labor unrest. The merchants and shop owners were getting squeezed between the interests of new corporations and intensifying strikes for workers’ rights. The next generation of the family looked north for new opportunities. They moved to Minneapolis and opened the city’s first paint store in 1880.

Wolff recounts two generations of this immigrant family making Minneapolis their home. Minneapolis was a burgeoning city, thanks to the largest flour mill in the world that processed the area’s wheat and shipped it across the country. It also became the financial center of the upper Midwest, overseeing one of the country’s largest economic booms of the Gilded Age. In addition to their profitable store, the family invested in properties throughout the city as real estate values grew exponentially. But here, too, they were still betwixt and between: They were neither the region’s “empire builders” (gentrified New Englanders and robber barons) nor the city’s workers Page 207 →(farmers, miners, lumberjacks, railroad men, and millworkers who tended to be German, Irish, or Scandinavian). Once again, this immigrant family was part of a growing merchant class interested in assimilation but not easily finding a pot to melt into. They did have a Jewish community, but even that was fraught with tension between newly arrived Russian Jews and well-established German Jews. Notably, Minneapolis’s Jewish population grew rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, and the city became home to a range of differing but intertwined Jewish organizations that were all confronting a backlash against “foreigners” and non-Christians. Ultimately, the Minneapolis chapters of this family’s history are marked most by the labor wars and the difficulty not only of religion and culture but of class wedging them out from above and below. As small business owners, they shared workers’ contempt for large corporations and the mechanization of labor; name-brand companies were scooping up large shares of the paint market. Yet they bristled at some of the union demands and struggled to keep their business going amid all the strikes. As Wolff recounts, “if assimilation in the South meant accepting slavery, in Minneapolis, a small business owner was expected to be antiunion.” This was a difficult line to walk. The political winds kept changing. The definition of American kept shifting.

With one family, Wolff conveys many parallel histories of nineteenth-and twentieth-century America: South, North, immigration, citizenship, industrialization, Jewish America, labor. Running through them all are intensely personal trials of identity and belonging. Each generation of this family secured significant levels of comfort and stability, but isolation and loneliness never left their sides. Americanness was continually elusive. If Wolff takes readers into finely textured experiences of these individuals’ disillusionment with assimilation, he also probes their larger implications. As a nation of immigrants, all of us exist somewhere in the in-between, each a little too much of this and never enough of that. “American” is capacious, to be sure, but in all that space, there is a lot of distance.

Shevaun E. Watson, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Page 208 →Daniel B. Friedman, Tracy L. Skipper, and Catherine S. Greene (eds.), From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer, University 101 at the University of South Carolina (University of South Carolina Press, 2022), 272 pp., cloth $114.99, paperback $32.99, ebook $32.99.

The University of South Carolina (USC) is well known for having the nation’s best first-year student experience. From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer is a captivating historical view of USC’s efforts to ensure first-year student success and develop a globally replicated University 101 course.

Fifty years ago, the student experience on this beautiful campus, located in the heart of Columbia, was quite different than it is today. As civil rights protests broke out, USC students perceived that the administration was tone-deaf to their needs and rights. Student activism of the 1960s and 1970s led to much change across the campus. The administration needed to bridge the gap between the student body and the administration, faculty, and staff. Student life was of the utmost concern for both students and the university. The authors describe this period of collision and how the then–university president, Thomas Jones, assembled a group of stakeholders, including students, which became the President’s Committee on Academic Atmosphere, to address the current affairs of the university and develop plans to move the university into the future. Perhaps the most critical and lasting initiative derived from the committee was the development of University 101.

University 101 was designed to assist first-year students with the transition to college life and allow faculty to build relationships with students. Before the development of this course, students were expected to succeed without having the tools necessary to do so. The university’s motto, Emollit Mores Nec Sinit Esse Feros—learning humanizes character and does not permit it to be cruel—would become reality as President Jones worked with faculty and students to build the program from the ground up.

University 101 seemed to be the solution to President Jones’s vision for the continued growth of the university while addressing the unique needs of the students. Because of the increasing size of the university, it was critical for this course to allow faculty to build strong, impactful connections with students. Participating faculty were tasked with building relationships, teaching the history of the university, and creating a sense of pride and love among students for their university. The goals of the course included orienting students to the purpose of higher education, improving retention rates, Page 209 →and building communication between students and faculty. University 101’s success drew national attention. Universities across the nation started adopting the USC model in hopes of seeing similar impacts. By the 1980s, international interest was also evident, and an international advisory board was established.

President Jones wanted the course not only to benefit students but also to transform faculty. Faculty teaching University 101 are trained to be open-minded in connecting with the students as they help them become acclimated to the university. The authors highlight research that faculty became more student centered and focused on student success after training for and teaching University 101.

Today’s model of University 101 stays true to its initial efforts while also reflecting years of development and refinement. Three broad goals with ten learning outcomes define the course. These goals are to foster academic success; discover and connect with USC; and promote personal development, well-being, and social responsibility. Building community is widely considered the most essential part of the course. Peer involvement has also led to the use of student leaders in the course and the strengthening of the relationship between students and the university. Research across the University has narrowed down six areas that students feel are most influential and impactful in the course. These six areas include connection to the USC, connection with faculty and staff, connection with peers, campus involvement and engagement, awareness and use of campus resources, and academic success.

From Educational Experiment to Standard Bearer provides an in-depth historical background of how the university built a successful University 101 program from the ground up. As a former student at USC, I enrolled in a section of University 101 as an education major during the Fall 2006 semester. This book gives me great insight into the work it took to offer such a course. However, in my experience, I felt that my particular class focused more on producing teachers than on student success in higher education. As a first-generation student, I desperately needed the transitional piece of the course more than the teacher preparation that I already received in other courses. Still, I have fond memories of the course, and, as a current professor in higher education, I appreciate the preparation that went into the development of University 101. Without reading this book, I would have never considered the years of work it took to develop such a strong program. This book is an excellent read for any future or current student, faculty member, or anyone interested in the growth and history of the University of South Carolina. Page 210 →It also gives great insight to all stakeholders of higher education in turning challenges into triumphs in the continued growth of their university.

Krystin McCormick Williams, Francis Marion University