In 1990, political columnist George F. Will assessed Georgia Senator Sam Nunn’s skepticism about President George H. W. Bush’s militaristic response to the Gulf crisis: “Nunn is a Southerner with that region’s regard for military values. Is he not a hawk? . . . The pedigree of Nunn’s statecraft runs back to [Georgia Senator Richard] Russell, and hence back, in a sense, 125 years. For most Americans today, the Civil War is a television series. For many Southerners, . . . the ‘lost cause’ is a lesson of perennial relevance: Things often do not work out well.” Between 1953 and...

If Tunis G. Campbell looked for friends and supporters among the people who witnessed his progress along the streets of Savannah, Georgia, or glared into the faces of enemies, he left no record of it. It was 12 January 1876, and Savannah’s populace was as divided over issues of race as it was about most everything else. Even many African American Savannahns found men like Campbell embarrassing, if not frightening. Although he attracted as many people as he frightened, there Campbell was, at age sixty-three, on his way to Colonel Jack Smith’s Washington County plantation, where men were measured by...

It is easy to imagine American evangelical Christianity and the ideals of southern manhood in opposition. Nineteenth-century evangelicalism, in the North and the South, has typically been portrayed as women’s domain: women were more in attendance at congregational activities, and pastors bent over backward to accommodate theological ideals to feminine sentimentality even as the culture at large considered women more naturally inclined to spiritual and moral matters than men. Men, in contrast, and especially in the South, were beholden to a code of honor that, among other things, encouraged violence—martial, retributive, or vigilant—gambling, blood sports, sowing wild oats,...

At the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, one father, when questioned about the propriety of holding his young son on his shoulder so he could get a good view of the mob that kicked, stabbed, castrated, and incinerated Washington, replied: “My son can’t learn too young the proper way to treat a nigger.”¹ Between 1877 and 1939, similar events occurred repeatedly across the South, and, as this example—a white man with his son—suggests, the social hierarchy of the New South rested upon a foundation of race and gender. Concerns about the future of white supremacy...

In 1896, Samuel H. Mayes wrote an impassioned letter in which he described his countrymen as the quintessence of virtuous, modern manhood. He used evocative words with strong connotations to convey his pride: these men were “sober,” “industrious,” and “independent.” He explained that although the common men he lived among humbly “earned [their] daily bread by honest labor upon the soil,” each was “an equal participant in God’s great gift of liberty.” Mayes went on to assure his readers that, in time, the men of their nation could become upright citizens in the model that he had just described. He...

When, in 1908, William Greene Raoul Jr. decided he would “travel about, hobo if necessary, and find out what was being done in the socialist and working class world,” he committed political and social apostasy and announced his voluntary descent down the ladder of the American hierarchy his father and grandfather had struggled to climb.¹ He lived at his father’s elaborate mansion on Atlanta’s Peachtree Street, reading Marx and giving lectures on working-class virility and the virtues of socialism at local theaters.² Raoul remembered, “What was I going to do? I certainly couldn’t live off my father and work for...

One of the challenges to theorizing masculinity in relationship to history is the way in which historical narratives are often implicitly gendered as masculine. Typically, this gendering takes the form of allegory, in which the imagined subject of a period is presented as implicitly or, less often, explicitly male.¹ Such a subject, then, becomes the bearer of temporality in the narrative constructed by the historical text. The modern male subject, for example, becomes imagined as exemplary of the universal modern experience. In such a context, temporality and narrative history become gendered, and it becomes a challenge to imagine other forms...

On 5 December 1910, William Alexander Percy toiled unhappily all day in his law office in Greenville, Mississippi. Twenty-five years old and a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, he had returned home to practice law with his father and write poetry. Greenville was a prosperous port city on the Mississippi River with its own opera house and a new four-story grand hotel. For a small southern town it was bustling and diverse. Russian and Greek and Chinese immigrants ran many of the storefronts downtown. Steamboats docked at the landing and offloaded whiskey and burlap and dry goods from New...

A religious revolution seemed to strike the United States in the mid-1960s. While the champions of civil rights blasted away at the legal, economic, and cultural bases of white supremacy, long-held conceptions of Jesus Christ came under fire. The notion that Jesus was white with blue eyes and blonde hair became anathema for many black power leaders. Long a dominant visual and sacred image in American culture, the white Christ now found himself besieged on all sides, especially in northern cities. On the streets of Detroit, bands of black men repainted statues of white Christs with black paint; black Madonnas...

On 6 February 1993, Arthur Ashe died due to complications from HIV/AIDS. The tennis champion, activist, writer, and Richmond, Virginia, native was forty-nine years old. National newspapers reported his passing with pronounced mourning and loss. Along with a standard obituary, the Washington Post recalled Ashe in an editorial as “a legendary figure in modern American history.” The Post’s Tony Kornheiser lauded Ashe as “my hero. He was a man of grace, of intellect, of moral purpose, of courage and integrity.” Kornheiser’s fellow sports columnist Michael Wilbon wrote that “nobody brought more dignity or honor than Arthur Ashe” and defined his...

With voyeuristic delight, I ask you to picture, dear readers, two sexual acts that American legal officials have zealously attempted to suppress and that liberal reformers have consistently tried to obscure: oral and anal sex between men. Let’s look together, if you will, at two particular instances: a gay Atlantan giving a blowjob to a friend and a gay suburban Houston couple having intercourse. These are two particularly important instances, for each resulted in a United States Supreme Court ruling of sweeping significance. The first, Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), upheld the constitutionality of state sodomy laws. The second, Lawrence v....

When Dr. Rufus S. Rice died in March 1923, he left behind a most curious photograph in which he is decked out in a white bridal gown, complete with train and veil, white gloves, and patent-leather shoes. Born in 1863 Arkansas, Rice became a highly successful small-town physician, widely known for his mischievous sense of humor and his soft spot for treating local children to candy and sodas. He also, at least once, was the bride in a womanless wedding (see figure 1).

Photographs like Rice’s may be found in family albums across the twentieth-century South and, to a lesser...

In 2003, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Paige Patterson identified a “war against boys” as “America’s No. 1 problem.” He made this comment at an Arkansas evangelistic meeting on a stage flanked by animal trophies. A noted hunter and gun enthusiast, Patterson began his talk by regaling the all-male throng with tales of African safaris. But he quickly moved to his main point: American culture, said Patterson, pressed parents “to make little girls out of your little boys.” Feminist-inspired developments, including the vilification of superheroes and the eradication of playground games, threatened to eliminate differences between the sexes. Patterson would...