| 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

The Southern Elite and Social Change: Essays in Honor of Willard B. Gatewood Jr. Ed. by Randy Finley and Thomas A. DeBlack. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2002. xxii, 221 pp. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-55728-720-1.)

Ten colleagues and former students of Willard B. Gatewood Jr., the distinguished University of Arkansas historian, have collaborated to produce a festschrift in honor of their friend and mentor. The wide-ranging essays stretch from Whittington B. Johnson's exploration of Savannah's free African American community in the early republic to Thomas Deaton's Horatio Alger stories of the late-twentieth-century business titans in the carpet industry of Dalton, Georgia. Other essays feature three women—one black and two white—and five men—three white and two black. Geographically, five of the essays focus on Arkansas.

Clearly, finding connecting tissue for so many diverse subjects proved challenging. The editors argue—perhaps a bit too defensively—that the essays counter recent historiographical trends to study history from the bottom up. An elite group of powerful men and women, they insist, influenced southern life and institutions. That truism hardly needs defending. A more appropriate question might be: How representative are the men and women selected for study in graphing change in southern life and communities? The results are mixed.

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