Update: Check out Drew Faust’s review of David Brion Davis’s new book.
This C-SPAN Booknotes interview with historian Drew Faust goes back to the publication of her 1996 book, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. In 1996 I was working at Borders Books & Music in Rockville, Maryland. The store included an incredible American History section, which fueled my interest in the war. This was the second book that I read after McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. It’s a wonderful book even though its central thesis has been challenged and a great place to start if you are interested in Southern women during the Civil War.
[Uploaded to YouTube on February 28, 2014]
Came across this the other day.
Connection between Faust, Mccurry, and James Henry Hammond . Mccurry singles him out in her MOOC.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/06/10/the_revisionist/?page=full
>>>Faust’s revisionist salvo brought a fierce response from her audience. Stephanie McCurry, a historian now at Penn who was moderating Faust’s panel, remembers the reaction as immediate. The audience at the talk, she says, “went nuts.” To military specialists, to historians of slavery, to economic historians, even to some feminist historians, Faust’s argument seemed at once radical and wrong-headed, and at the conference and afterward many people let her know that. Faust was verbally attacked. “I’d never seen anything like it,” McCurry recalls.
Which is exactly why the book is so important. It makes us think about important questions in a new way. Thanks for passing it along.