[Editor’s note: The following guest post comes to us from Steven M. Snowe, Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University and former editor of the Journal of American History. He is the author of Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Johns Hopkins U Press, 1990), Doctoring the South: Southern Physicians and Everyday Medicine in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2004), and the forthcoming Keeping the Days: the Civil War Diaries of Southern Women and the Problem of Historical Empathy. This is the second in a series of four guest posts, curated by Read more