Slavery and the Past and Future of Southern Intellectual History _ Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust
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Slavery and the Past and Future of Southern Intellectual History
In 1907, Henry Adams famously observed that the southerner—by which he meant white southerner—had “no mind” and “could not analyze an idea.” Like Adams, scholars long assumed southern intellectual history was not worth considering. Yet in the last quarter of the 20th century, it emerged as a vibrant field of inquiry. A central and compelling question for many of us who pursued it during those years was how mind, reason, and intellect related to the slave institution that made the South increasingly distinctive within the American nation. How did white southerners explain, both to themselves and others, the inhumane system of bondage upon which their society rested? Eugene Genovese (1930-2012) and Bertram Wyatt-Brown (1932-2012), two founding members of the Southern Intellectual History Circle, which is meeting at UM in conjunction with this lecture, made seminal contributions to this discourse. Does their work, once regarded as path breaking, still have relevance to our perceptions of America’s racial past or do we in an era of changed racial understanding need a different approach to the role of ideas in shaping the South’s slave system and the patterns of racial injustice that persist into our own time?
Drew Gilpin Faust is President Emerita of Harvard University and the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor. She is the author of six books, including most recently This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), which chronicles the impact of the Civil War’s enormous death toll on the lives of nineteenth-century Americans. It was awarded the 2009 Bancroft Prize, the New-York Historical Society’s 2009 American History Book Prize, and was recognized by The New York Times as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2008.” This Republic of Suffering is the basis for a 2012 Emmy-nominated episode of the PBS American Experience documentaries titled Death and the Civil War, directed by Ric Burns. She is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
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