| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective. By Peter Kolchin. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. xii, 124 pp. $22.95, ISBN 0-8071-2866-X.)
For thirty years Peter Kolchin has devoted his exceptional talents to the subject of slavery, particularly in its comparative manifestations. His American Slavery (1993) handsomely informed thousands of students about the slave regime. Having mastered Russian, he provided in Unfree Labor (1987) a brilliant study of both Russian serfdom and African American slavery. With equal success, A Sphinx on the American Land explains how southernness has become an elusive, controversial topic and boldly inspects the historiographical land mines.	1
In this work, based on his Walter L. Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University, Kolchin expertly surveys how historians have treated the regional past. As he points out, the subject used to belong exclusively to conservative white natives. Now, though, interest has assumed national, even global, proportions. At Cambridge University, for instance, Michael O'Brien and Anthony Badger shepherd eager young colleagues into the southern arena. In this country, such historical carpetbaggers as George Fredrickson and Carl Degler have dramatically advanced southern studies.	. . .

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