Robert Greene II on Lacy Ford’s *Understanding the American South: Slavery, Race, Identity, and the American Century*

Rarely does a book utilize debates about historiography and scholars reckoning with the American past to speak to the present moment as effectively as does Lacy Ford’s Understanding the American South. Ford, a preeminent scholar on the antebellum American South, uses this collection of essays to get at a difficult—but timely—question: how do the American people come together and stitch together what we in the historical profession call a “usable past”? “Americans are looking for a past,” Ford writes on the first page of his introduction, “not a past rendered usable for partisan advantages and brief news bites but one that can help them understand the divided and fractious present, a past that informs and inspires” (1). Throughout the collection of essays, Ford comes back to this theme, via his specialty: the intellectual history of the American South.

The ten essays in the collection cover a variety of topics that relate, in some form or fashion, to how the American South fits in the broader tapestry of American history. Some of this is done by Ford re-examining and reappraising several prominent historians of the United States, such as David Potter, Louis Hartz, and Daniel Boorstin, and how they all contributed to, and dissented from, ideas of American “exceptionalism” in the middle of the 20^th century. In another section, Ford uses his extensive knowledge of the American South to think about how the region’s history has greatly impacted the rest of the nation and the world. For him, the entire collection is a meditation on the impact of history on the present—and how so much of that history is being argued over today.

For readers of this blog, several essays should draw particular attention. His first essay, “A Twenty-First Century Meaning for the Civil War,” allows Ford to dive into how the Civil War has become a battleground for contemporary culture wars. Tying this to the end of the Cold War and broad trends in technology making life less personal between individuals, Ford finds much to think about when considering how the United States—and the broader Western world—became so polarized in the early decades of the 21^st century. And for Ford, the mission giving Americans a common identity is one that is, partially, the purview of historians: “It will require the recovery of a sense of common purpose—a common purpose for all Americans, including African Americans and Hispanics and Muslims and Asian and gay and transgender people and all others, not just white Americans, who are a shrinking portion of the population” (33).

Throughout Understanding the American South, Ford considers how historians have played a vital role in helping Southerners—and Americans, more broadly speaking—understand the nation in which they live via the history they focus on. Section II of the book, essays on the aforementioned Hartz, Boorstin, and Potter, all point to how they grappled with the newfound confidence—some would argue, perhaps, arrogance—felt by American leaders and much of the general public after U.S. victory in World War II and the beginnings of “the American Century,” the idea promoted by Henry Luce in the 1940s that the nation was on the way to leading the world into the future. All three historians, in various ways, tried to understand how the nation’s history and culture impacted this American Century idea. Each of the essays is worth reading on their own, but together, they allow Ford the opportunity to reconsider well-known works—The Liberal Tradition in America, The Genius of American Politics, and People of Plenty—and how they all help, in varying ways, historians to understand the evolution of American ideology and government.

Section III of the book is filled with essays specifically about history and the American South. For example, “The Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois: Slavery and Race in Southern and American History,” is a powerful reflection on Du Bois’ impact on both Southern and American history, reminding readers of how much Du Bois’ works still speak to historians and lay readers alike, generations after his passing in 1963. A particular strength of the essay is that Ford deals with Du Bois’ best-known works, Souls of Black Folks and Black Reconstruction, but is thoroughgoing in his consideration of how and why Du Bois wrote both works, and how they continue to influence scholars today. For example, Ford takes great pains to mention that it was not only Du Bois who pushed forth an interpretation that centered Black people in Reconstruction, but it was also part of a small, but important, movement of scholars—such as Altheous Taylor, Robert H. Woody, and Francis Butler Simkins—who dissented from the dominant Dunning School of Reconstruction history. Du Bois, however, was the loudest and most prominent voice in this movement.

Also, in Part III of the book, Ford argues for a better understanding of the role of women in transforming Southern history, along with using history to understand the changing political, cultural, and social fortunes of the white working class. Part IV, Ford’s lone chapter, “The Irony of Southern History and the Problem of Innocence in American Life,” brings together the overarching themes of his collection into one final, forceful essay. “Americans stand in a very peculiar relationship to their history,” Ford begins the essay (255). But where most historians would merely condemn America’s mishmash relationship with its own history, Ford argues instead for taking this as an opportunity to strengthen America’s relationship to its own stories, traditions, and histories. Like other historians of the South, such as C. Vann Woodward, Ford believes the region’s history—if properly understood and taught—can serve as an elixir to grandiose claims of national greatness that can lead to national ruin. Principled Southerners, argues Ford, can “still humbly teach those hard lessons of southern history all over again, again, and again” knowing that it is very possible people will need time—perhaps time no one can afford to spare—to digest those lessons.

Like so many Southern historians, Ford juggles different time periods and regions of the country together in his essays to produce a fascinating—and much-needed—meditation on the value of Southern history in the 21^st century. Before historians can figure out what, exactly, we have to say to a public sphere where the role of history is being diminished every day, we must understand what we have said before. It has never been with a full, collective voice. But with works such as Understanding the American South, we can at least figure out the need for empathy and humility by the forces of history.