| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Peter Kolchin. A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective. (The Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 124. $22.95.
This brief but thoughtful book, based on Peter Kolchin's Fleming Lectures, argues for a more explicitly comparative approach to the historical riddle that is the nineteenth-century American South. Southern history is by nature comparative, Kolchin notes; it assumes a North. Yet most southern historians do not think of themselves as practicing comparative history. Kolchin's well-known studies of southern slavery and Russian serfdom are exceptions but need not be, and he suggests how.	1
The book has three chapters. In each, the author considers a broad range of topics and historical literature through the lens of comparative history. The first chapter looks at the question of southern distinctiveness. Any effort to define the South means measuring it against some place else, what Kolchin calls the un-South, usually the North but not really because the North exists in many southern histories less as a real place than as a mirror of the South. If, for example, the southern economy was essentially capitalist then it was like the North, and if not, then it was unlike the North. But just how capitalist was the North? The answer is typically assumed: more than the South. A consciously comparative approach would give us some needed precision.	. . .

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