San Antonio College Library

"This ... social history of the slaveholding South marks a turn in our understanding of antebellum America and the coming of the Civil War. Oakes's ... analysis breaks the myth that slaveholders were a paternalistic aristocracy dedicated to the values of honor, race, and section. Instead they emerge as having much in common with their entrepreneurial counterparts in the North: they were committed to free-market commercialism and political democracy...

From the Back Cover: A look into deep communal meanings that emerge as small towns stage their annual festivals. Everybody knows about community festivals that celebrate the good ol' days-events like Rattlesnake Roundup, Peanut Days, and Mule Day. Countless towns around the South stage them. They set aside one weekend a year, rope off some parking, and celebrate some local theme on the courthouse lawn or in a nearby pasture, touting lost days of imagined...

"In this book Bruce Collins adopts a fresh perspective to re-examine white society in the American South before the Civil War. He starts with the central fact that Southern whites displayed considerable unity of purpose in fighting the Civil War; and he looks back at the generation of white Southerners before the conflict to analyse the social bonds that helped to draw these people together. By examining a large body of scholarly work on the antebellum...

"Yuletide in Dixie scrutinizes two centuries of stereotypes about U.S. slaves' Christmases. Much has been written about Christmas in the antebellum South, but no book has tackled its place in master-slave relations, addressed black perspectives on holiday privileges, showed how these traditions disintegrated under the stress of the Civil War, or explained how antebellum Christmases were mythologized after the war--as they had been before it--in support...