Hailed as a classic by reviewers and historians, Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor now appears in abridged form under the title Honor and Violence in the Old South. The first major reinterpretation of southern life and custom since W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South, this work explores the meaning and expression of the ancient code of honor as whites-both slaveholders and nonslaveholders-applied it to their lives. Wyatt-Brown argues persuasively that southern ethical habits and traditions are the basis of regional distinctiveness and helped to justify the South's most cherished peculiarity: the institution of slavery. Using both literature and anthropology in innovative ways, he shows how honor affected family loyalty and community defensiveness. The work begins with a study of Hawthorne's famous story of a tar-and-feathering, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," and it ends with an authentic lynching, an absorbing and chilling example of a public shaming ritual. Between these studies of fictional and historical violence, Wyatt-Brown deals with such wide-ranging topics as childbearing, marital patterns, gentility, legal traditions, duelling, hospitality, slave discipline, lynch-law, and insurrectionary panic-all of which gave white southerners a special sense of themselves. Book jacket.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida