Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

Politics and Property Rights: The Closing of the Open Range in the Postbellum South. By Shawn Everett Kantor. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. x, 187 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 0-226-42375-1. Paper, $18.00, isbn 0-226-42377-8.)

Shawn Everett Kantor's Politics and Property Rights proved a very frustrating book to review. Kantor has done undoubtedly the most thorough and sophisticated statistical work yet seen with the 1880 manuscript census materials from Georgia. His statistical methods are well laid out, and, barring errors with the data, well executed. The information derived from this work is clearly important and could tell us a great deal about society and culture in late-nineteenth-century Georgia. 1

Sadly, this superior work is overshadowed by Kantor's glaring lack of historical context, his terse prose, and his obsessive, relentless attacks on Steven Hahn's 1983 book The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890. Kantor's book is part of the Law and Economics series produced by the University of Chicago Press, and his writing very much reflects the combative style of that school. It is not enough for Kantor merely to point out the reasons for his disagreements with other scholars; rather, he ridicules them and suggests they deliberately misrepresent or falsify data to support their political objectives. These continual attacks become quite tedious and obscure the very real contribution Kantor makes. . . .

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