Intellectual Manhood: University, Self, and Society in the Antebellum South (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781469618395)

In this in-depth and detailed history, Timothy J. Williams reveals that antebellum southern higher education did more than train future secessionists and proslavery ideologues. It also fostered a growing world of intellectualism flexible enough to marry the era's middle-class value system to the honor-bound worldview of the southern gentry. By focusing on the students' perspective and drawing from a rich trove of their letters, diaries, essays, speeches, and memoirs, Williams narrates the under examined story of education and manhood at the University of North Carolina, the nation's first public university.

Every aspect of student life is considered, from the formal classroom and the vibrant curriculum of private literary societies to students' personal relationships with each other, their families, young women, and college slaves. In each of these areas, Williams sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual history of young southern men, and in the process dispels commonly held misunderstandings of southern history. Williams's fresh perspective reveals that students of this era produced a distinctly southern form of intellectual masculinity and maturity that laid the foundation for the formulation of the post-Civil War South.

Author: Timothy J. Williams
ISBN-10: 1469618397
ISBN-13: 9781469618395
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Language: English
Published: 03/09/2015
Pages: 302
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.33h x 6.20w x 0.84d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2015