| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

John B. Boles, editor. Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2004. Pp. x, 334. Cloth $54.95, paper $22.95. Constance B. Schultz and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, editors. Clio's Southern Sisters: Interviews with Leaders of the Southern Association for Women Historians. (Southern Women.) Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2004. Pp. xv, 276. $44.95.
These two autobiographical collections, interesting in their own right, are also important as primary documents, because they detail the personal impact of the civil rights and feminist movements and the cultural shifts they occasioned on a group of influential historians of southern history. Their personal stories are significant in showing the ways that individual scholars understood and reacted to the social changes taking place around them. The issues in one's life and times, as postmodernists have made us profoundly aware, shape our understanding of the world, and these historians demonstrate how much personal history and changing times combined to dictate their issues and choice of topics for research. For most there was no epiphany; instead, their paths reflected a process, but one based on an enduring commitment to equality. Equality is their unstated yardstick; and when they found it lacking, they turned their attention to providing evidence and explanation for this deficiency.	1
History is more about change than continuity, and, because of their scholarship and activities, these historians represent an important break with the past. Their focus is more inclusive and their values more egalitarian. Their narratives are especially significant in the context of southern history, since the South, despite its genteel ethos, has been the epicenter of U.S. racism, sexism, and classism. One way of looking at these life stories is to see them as efforts to understand and hopefully help in the eradication of one or more of these isms, often the ones that had the most profound effects on individual authors. Shapers of Southern History, edited by John B. Boles, contains the reflections of John Hope Franklin, Jack P. Greene, Anne Firor Scott, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Bill C. Malone, Dan T. Carter, Charles Joyner, Pete Daniel, Peter H. Wood, Anthony J. Badger, Drew Gilpin Faust, Darlene Clark Hine, Vernon Burton, Suzanne Lebsock, and Edward L. Ayers—not all of the "shapers" of southern history by any means but certainly a significant sampling. The essays are frank and engaging, demonstrating why their authors have been such successful writers. More than chronicles of their professional careers, these narratives explore the personal: they describe parental backgrounds, discuss their childhood likes and dislikes, delineate the serendipitous nature of their selection of the historical profession, name the scholars who influenced their lives, explain their choice of research topics, and provide their take on what was the significance of their scholarship. The only major influence not dealt with in much detail is their marital relationships, but perhaps this was due more to their interpretation of the questions posed by the editor. Nevertheless, this is an important omission.	2
Looking for some commonality in the experiences of these historians, this reviewer was struck by three things. First, they all exuded an unshakeable confidence in their own intellectual abilities (even on the rare occasions when their performances did not necessarily match their assessments). This does not appear to have been the result of looking back from the vantage point of successful careers. Rather, confidence in their innate intelligence was a deeply ingrained part of their identities from their earliest recollections. Second, they had the foresight to choose eminent scholars with whom to study even in those instances where they remained naïfive about the profession generally. For example, Greene knew that Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and Chicago had bad or nonexistent football teams but did not know that a doctorate from those institutions would be advantageous professionally. Finally, each of these scholars pursued a topic that was of passionate interest. As a consequence research was a driving force in their lives. There is a take-home message here for aspiring historians.	. . .

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