A New History of the American South ed. by W. Fitzhugh Brundage (review)

Reviewed by: A New History of the American South ed. by W. Fitzhugh Brundage Maggi M. Morehouse (bio) A New History of the American South. Edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 616. Cloth, 45. 00. ) This new history is indeed a reflection of recent scholarship about the American South, replete with maps and images that show the changing nature of the geography and the region's people over time. The South has existed as a "zone of interlocking connections" among Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans, with a geographic expanse that includes the southeast section of North America all the way to the Caribbean (121). The reader is guided through the changes and transformations of the region through fifteen essays arranged in roughly chronological order. As Fitzhugh Brundage details in the brilliant introduction, these changes over time have been contradictory and "only sometimes have fostered progress, prosperity, or expanded freedoms" (xiv). Each essay delves into how particularities came to identify and sometimes unify people and politics across the region. The "shape-shifting" nature of the region reveals that the South has never had a "stable identity" (xxiii). The work begins with several essays that push our understanding of the region to its earliest peoples and developments before the Europeans claimed large sections in the colonial era. When placing the Native South along the trajectory of continuous history, Robbie Ethridge demonstrates how archeological studies and Indigenous accounts broaden our understanding of the region so that there is "no discontinuity between history and so-called prehistory" (3). The river floodplains that predominantly mark the region provided a lush landscape of vegetation and plenty of animal life that enriched the lives of the Paleoindians who lived in bands or small communities. Archaic peoples developed homestead sites in the coastal regions of the South, and like their earlier counterparts they built middens or mounds using discarded shells. This monumental construction upon the landscape represented "community planning and beauty" although they were not continuously lived-in spaces (15). With the Mississippian peoples, developments in spiritual and artistic habits demonstrate communities of consciousness in a new world order, as well as agricultural practices that reach back to traditions of older societies. Maps built on recent archeological and new interpretive historical data illustrate how European explorations and settlements disrupted and transformed End Page 249 Native peoples' lives; we see the decimation of the Native populations, and yet there were trading agreements and townlike developments that brought all these peoples into something of a cohesive, albeit disputatious, South. European contact was just one of many changes that transformed Native American history and the history of the South overall. Early on, people of African descent were enslaved and brought into the colonies to replace the labor of the diminishing Native peoples. This is how slave labor first equates to southern identity. What has recently been disputed in K–12 school curriculum is the skills enslaved African people "learned" as a "benefit" of their enslavement. As Jon Sensbach illustrates in his essay about the early South, African people from the rice-growing regions of West Africa were "preferred" because of their knowledge of the complex engineering techniques required of rice cultivation. "Africans therefore contributed knowledge and intellectual mastery, " he writes, "as well as hard work to the enterprise of making a small group of white colonists very rich" (100). It is at this time that we see the peoples and practices of racial hierarchy solidifying—the whiteness of the planter elite above the Blackness of the enslaved. In his essay on the Revolutionary era, Michael McDonnell notes the fraying relationship among the people located in the South. Divided by agricultural practices and differing colonial authorities, with white elites encircled by Indigenous and enslaved people, it was not automatic or natural to coalesce together to overthrow the British. McDonnell argues that "had the powerful and populous Native peoples in the region been as unified as the catch-all term 'Indian' implied, the American Revolution might have been a remarkably short-lived event" (137). Laura Edwards shows how the burgeoning nation with its laws based on hierarchical gender and race-based divisions anchored the South. . .