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Book Review
| The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview. By Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiv, 828 pp. Cloth, $70.00, ISBN 0521-85065-7. Paper, $29.00, ISBN 0-521-61562-3.)
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| The scholarship of Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's intellectual history The Mind of the Master Class makes it an invaluable resource for specialists. The authors have read widely and well in the documents of elite antebellum southern thinkers and have assembled those scholars' musings on such topics as the French Revolution, antiquity, and the Middle Ages. Those reflections delight and occasionally startle the reader. The authors, however, focus on southern intellectuals' views on the relationships of philosophy and religion, religion and science, slavery and the Bible, and, most welcome, history and progress. The work is a surprisingly traditional intellectual history, in which great minds communicate across time on shared issues. Neither the writing of this brand of intellectual history nor use of "the South" as a monolithic subject for a history has been popular with scholars for a generation. Work that breaks from or ignores the professional pack, as Genovese and Fox-Genovese's does here, is always refreshing and often leads to provocative new debates. But in this magisterial and occasionally strident book, the results are uneven. |
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Mind of the Master Class adopts the tone of major revisionism—in a field overdue for revision. W. J. Cash and H. L. Mencken and their assumptions of bigoted southern intellectual backwardness no longer stalk southern history. An entire generation of intellectual historians has written comfortably about the antebellum South without the burdens of having to justify writing on the subject or needing to argue that the South "had a mind." In large part because of Genovese and Fox-Genovese, and many other outstanding scholars, such as Michael O'Brien, whom they generously acknowledge, current scholars assume that antebellum southerners engaged with major intellectual trends, embraced progress, and participated at the center of the debate about the meaning and future of American democratic culture. Mind of the Master Class constitutes a sweeping summation of that view by demonstrating the sheer number and erudition of southern intellectuals and the volume of their work. The authors have an accomplished command of the primary sources. Yet portions of the book are written to rankle, rather than engender debate with, a broad segment of the profession. |
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