| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South. By Nicolas W. Proctor. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002. xii, 220 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8139-2087-6. Paper, $16.50, ISBN 0-8139-2091-4.)

Nicolas W. Proctor argues that hunting offered a social stage on which whites (and, to a lesser extent, blacks) defined masculinity. For whites, the hunt demonstrated prowess, self-control, and mastery. Examining each quality in turn, his analysis privileges mastery as the most significant. Setting out to describe "the social drama of the hunt" (p. 2), Proctor briefly traces the development and regulation of hunting, which was more egalitarian in America than in Europe, and then focuses on the South from 1800 to 1860. In this period, the hunt became a popular expression of white manhood and was elevated to sport among the elite and through the sporting press. Southern men created informal hunting fraternities based on locale, class, and kin; the members of those groups acted as the audience for public approbation of each other's masculinity and validated that masculinity through the exclusion of unworthy men and all women.

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