This isn’t your grandparents’ antebellum South. A generation ago it was common for historians to talk about the “regressing” southern states in the decades preceding Civil War. The advent of democracy, the spread of enlightenment, and the triumph of free labor left slaveholders reeling and the slave institution crumbling. Secession, this narrative emphasized, was the last-ditch effort of a flailing boxer on the ropes. But scholarship from the past couple decades have put that myth to rest. Michael O’Brien demonstrated that southerners were intellectuals who contemplated the most sophisticated issues of modernity. Edward Baptist showed how the slave institution increased in strength as the financial staple in America’s capitalistic order. Walter Johnson and Sven Beckert displayed how slaveholders were at the forefront of an increasingly global economy. These and many other works all point to the same crucial revision: slaveholding southerners were “modern,” and their ideas and actions cannot be merely dismissed as remnants of an antiquated age.

Now Matthew Karp, in his new book This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Harvard UP), teases out how this reviled cast of characters were also at the center of modern international relations and foreign affairs. It is important, he notes, “to fathom [Southerners’] intentions and to take an accurate measure of their strength” by providing “not only an ideological but also an institutional account of proslavery internationalism” (4). Representing the slave power had global implications, and so we must grapple with the imprint they left on state power in the international world. A vast majority of Secretaries of State, Secretaries of War, and foreign diplomats prior to 1860 came from southern cultures and maintained southern interests. The desire to not only preserve but expand the slave power was central to how they cultivated international relations. After Britain announced emancipation in 1833, a move that would send shock waves throughout the Atlantic World, American southerners groped for an appropriate response. The British Empire now posed a serious thread to both the global system of slavery as well as their economic stronghold, and a number of skirmishes involving slave ships stoked the rumors, but it would have been a mistake to wage war on the imperial power. Instead, they came up with what Karp calls the “foreign policy of slavery”: forcefully represent their interests on the national stage, bolster its military capacity, and support fellow slaveholding nations throughout the Western Hemisphere. Prepare for battle, but avoid war at all costs. Whereas southern states-rights-focused politicians expressed wariness over federal power, some were leading the charge for centralizing policies like expanding the navy—a reversal John Quincy Adams rightly identified as coming “reeking hot from the furnace of slavery” (34). America’s pro-slavery empire required a robust defense.

But this argument over the expansion of naval power, the focus of chapter two, hints at a deeper current throughout this book: how large and coherent was this body of southern elites devoted to foreign supremacy? Like any good historian, Karp hedges his language with language like “a vigorous military wing of he southern foreign policy,” but the extent of pervasiveness is still in limbo (33). Virginian Abel Parker Upshur, the Secretary of the Navy, did indeed have these grand visions, but almost none of it was accomplished in his few years in office. Karp may be right that this “emergence of southern navalism,” though short-lived, helped “to broaden their view of federal powers” (48), but the question remains “who” and “to what extent?” This international mission of slaveholding imperialism never seemed to be as widespread as the book’s most provocative passages seems to let on, as a tight circle of participants are almost always center stage. And even amongst this cadre of elite politicians, their ideas and policies seemed neither fully consistent nor cohesive. In trying to make these southern internationalists exceptionally modern, it is tempting to impose our own sense of modern coherence. But even if there was no systematic “foreign policy of slavery,” the underlying tensions were clearly apparent and require this type of analysis.

This problem of cohesion fades as the book moves more into the late 1840s and 1850s, when more concrete events and initiatives force a more collaborative slaveholding response. Even as they held the threat of abolitionist Britain at bay, they sought to strengthen ties with an bolster the slaveholding chops of Texas, Cuba, and Brazil. The latter two countries were especially important, because if the global emancipation efforts ceased slave labor in those locations, many believed America was soon to follow. Such a prospect had to be stopped at all costs. Even diplomat Henry Wise’s attack on the African slave trade in Brazil, according to Karp, was centered on his efforts to preserve slavery within the nation. The annexation of Texas, identified as “the quintessential achievement of the foreign policy of slavery” (100), is cast as a play to save a “slaveholding republic” from Britain’s abolitionist intrigue. The Mexican/American War is also seen as the staging ground for pro-slavery imperialists testing the power of a federal army. (To do so, of course, Karp has to spend a lot of words explaining why Calhoun, an otherwise stalwart figure of the pro-slavery expansionists, verbally denounced President Polk’s actions in Mexico. The result is not fully persuasive.) With the strength of the federal structure and the wealth of the cotton system, the slaveholding empire seemed strong indeed.

Even in the 1850s, when domestic debates and divisions seemed to doom southern slaveholders, many grew increasingly optimistic. The growth of free trade, Britain’s economic troubles, and South America’s slave profits were interpreted as good omens for slavery’s future. To elite southerners, coerced labor was not a antiquated relic under siege but the foundation for a modern, global industry—it was interwoven with new scientific progress, not antagonistic toward it. One reason they were so frustrated with the sectional battles was that it took attention away from the imperial scene–they were much more interested in extending state power through the purchase of Cuba than the divisive topic of Nebraska. The latter was a small potato compared to the former. What made Lincoln’s election in 1860 so threatening was not just that southern slaveholders, for the first time, lost control of state and foreign power, but also because the powerful system they had spent decades building could now be turned directly back on them as a global antislavery force. Their scheme had backfired. In response, southern states seceded and aimed to create a new centralized state that revolved around slavery and embraced the global capitalist order. “Secession did not produce a flight away from central authority,” Karp explains, “but the eager embrace of a new and explicitly proslavery central authority” (244). The myth of a states-rights agenda has never appeared so vanquished.

The implications of This Vast Southern Empire‘s tale are broad, besides cementing Karp as one of the leading young scholars of nineteenth century American politics. Pro-slavery southerners were not opposing modernity as much as they were trying to shape it. In reading Karp’s book I kept think of the closing and haunting line of my PhD advisor’s magnum opus, wherein he claimed historians have consciously rejected “the insight that the Old South had chosen its own way with clarity of mind, had even understood things about the intractability of the human condition, and had done much consistent with the later trajectory of the American Republic, which usefully flattered itself that aristocracy, illiberalism, and rapacity had died in 1865 and could be killed” (1202). Indeed, especially in the election year of 2016 we should be well aware that notions of progress and modernity are unstable. And so grappling with the quixotic confederate south once again forces us to deal with trenchant tensions within our culture that still refuse to die.

In his new book, American Universities and the Birth of Modern Mormonism (UNC Press), Thomas Simpson’s thesis is simple: in the dynamic and evolving compromise between the Mormon Church and the American nation, where the former gave up its isolationist policies and outlook in return for the former’s acceptance, universities played a central role. Young Mormon men and women flooded eastern universities to gain an education in law, medicine, economics, and, later, history, philosophy, and religion. The participants were often exuberant but the results were at times dampened. The LDS hierarchy and Mormon educational institutions were thrilled with the opportunity to prove their intellectual chops, but they were worried when the newly-degreed students returned with unorthodox beliefs. At the heart of this story was the battle between faith, intellect, and authority.

The first crop of eager students who went east left with the express encouragement of Brigham Young during the final decade of his life. The goal in sending them to external institutions was, ironically, to be more self-dependent: men studied law so that the Saints wouldn’t have to rely on gentile lawyers, and women studied medicine so they wouldn’t require gentile doctors. But the ambition blossomed. New groups of LDS students, in increasingly diverse fields, continued to migrate to Michigan, Harvard, Columbia, and Philadelphian schools. For women, the experience was empowering. LDS newspapers published gushing letters about how these educational opportunities expanded their minds and built their confidence. The Church supported these initiatives, both financially and morally, even if they retained reservations of secular learning. The academic arena allowed Mormons to test out the American world into which they would soon be assimilating.

But the process was bumpy, and at times hazardous. Church leaders worried when their young academics flirted with unorthodoxy. Cycles of acceptance and rejection at BYU led the institution to at times hire these graduates and grant them surprising freedom, followed by moments of reversal when they forced them out of the university. This was not a slow trajectory of progress; rather, it was a roller coaster of assimilation and retrenchment. The LDS Church never, from the period of this book all the way to the present, fully accepted or rejected secular education, but has instead maintained a high-stakes tango dance that goes around, around, and around.

Readers will be introduced to a host of new and interesting characters. Besides the familiar James Talmadge and John Widtsoe, I loved learning about Ellis Reynolds Shipp’s quest to reconcile faith and intellect as well as Romania Pratt’s attack on simplistic populism. Benjamin Cluff was a paradoxical figure who enthusiastically pushed for higher education while simultaneously participating in post-manifesto polygamy. Karl Maeser appears as a frustrated villain who worries that the eastern universities would corrupt Utah institutions. Harvard President Charles Ellis was a surprising defender of Mormons in eastern universities. And of course we get our intellectual martyrs in the professors who were expelled from BYU in 1911. The book ends on an ominous note with J Reuben Clark’s “chartered” course, which rejected the “worldly” education of elite universities. Mormonism’s quest to Americanize was nothing if not uneven.

The story of the Americanization of Mormonism at the turn of the twentieth century is old hat. Thomas Alexander’s famous book, published a quarter-century ago, laid out the general contours of the framework. Yet Simpson adds a new prism through which to view the process. This is done by focusing on Mormon students and academic administrators. Typical characters in the well-worn drama of assimilation are reluctant pragmatists, polygamists who refuse to give up their practice until threatened with extinction or American politicians willing to challenge Mormon citizenship until they agreed to national standards. This may be a two-person dance, but it’s a dance full of angry participants who are only there because their parents forced them. In Simpson’s story, though, the participants are eager to get along. The students wanted a place at the academic table in order to gain respectability. The administers were anxious to welcome Mormons as a sign of American unity. These are people who want to be together and work things out. As Simpson himself wrote, the university provided a safe space for Mormon/non-Mormon diplomacy.

Further, Simpson’s Americanization process, which centered on the internal battle over secular knowledge, adds new wrinkles to the story.  The real conflict, he argues, came not between Utah and America, but within the Mormon community. LDS students had to spend more time defending their intellectualism to other Mormons than defending their Mormonism to other intellectuals. Indeed, it is on this point of internal conflict that Simpson offers his major historiographical revision: we typically see the transition period as one in which Mormons became more inclusive and ecumenical, but viewed from the academic perspective the first few decades of the twentieth century were a string of retrenchments. The trajectory to modern Mormonism was far from linear.

One impressive aspect about this volume is the archival research. The difficulty with a project that focuses on individuals is that you have to mine individual collections. Simpson, however, was able to track down loads of LDS college students and scour their diaries, journals, and other private writings. The mountain of material Simpson found, therefore, was astounding, and it enables us to see Mormonism’s transition period through the eyes of non-leaders. Another impressive element of the book is its length: excluding endnotes and the immensely helpful appendixes, the main body of the text runs less than 130 pages. I love short books. First, because you can read them in one or two sittings. And second, the book will work well in an undergrad class.

My only hesitancy with the book is the comfy reassurance it provides readers like me. As an academic, I love it when the protagonists are scholarly inclined, when academic institutions are the triumphant spaces, and when the heroes of the tale are martyred for a worthy cause. I sympathize with the modernists, therefore I mourn their expulsion. And as someone with a university education who teaches university education, of course I appreciate the idea of university education as Mormonism’s transformative pivot. But is the fact that the narrative is so appealing blinding my sight of other historical instigators? Am I less anxious to sympathize with the “populists” who serve the role of spoilers in this story? I don’t have definite answers to these questions, and therefore have limited critiques of the book, but I can’t shake these anxieties from my mind.

I enjoyed the book. It was readable and fascinating. And it gives context to the intellectual struggles that still persist today.

While an undergrad at BYU I had the privilege to work as an intern for the LDS Church’s Historic Sites Committee. For two summers I assisted them in their preparation to restore Joseph and Emma’s home in Harmony, PA. (The home was completed last year.) My primary job was to investigate the translation of the Book of Mormon, which gave me the chance to dig into all the sources related to Joseph Smith’s seer stones. (I was thrilled to see that the restored Harmony home features a seer stone and hat to represent this more historically-accurate understanding of this important event.) It was not a shock for me, then, when the LDS Church released high-resolution photos of one of those stones, accompanying a new volume in the Joseph Smith Papers Project. I was even invited on RadioWest to discuss these stones and their importance. It was exciting to see us reckon with this history.

But this was likely new information for a majority of Mormons. Shocking, even. The Book of Mormon’s translation process had long been depicted as something that happened without such “folkloric” elements, and seer stones were of the realm of Mark Hoffman and South Park. But there it was: the seer stone, in all its glory. A carefully-written Ensign essay accompanied the images, but a lot of explanation was still required.

That’s where Joseph Smith’s Seer Stones comes in. The authors, Michael MacKay and Nicholas Frederick, both teach religious education at BYU. They are used to explaining difficult topics to church members. And their primary goal, as I see it, is to “domesticate” controversial matters. Mark Ashust-McGee used this word in his preface, where he calls the book a “friendly introduction” for Latter-day Saints (xiii). The fact that copies of this book, whose cover displays a bright image of the seer stone, will be front and center in Deseret Book, is a work of domestication indeed. (And something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago!) And the numerous images commissioned for the volume don an excellent job depicting what a faith-promoting vision can look like, which should hopefully replace the embarrassingly outdated illustrations that still appear in official sources.

But the book does more than just domesticate the stone itself. It also works to domesticate controversial sources. This includes contemporary accounts from Joseph Smith’s day that discuss his treasure-digging, as well as scholarly work written in recent decades by historians like Michael Quinn and Dan Vogel. These works used to be dismissed as mere anti-Mormonism. There is something striking about finding a chart that traces Joseph Smith’s treasure-digging expeditions, based on the work of Dan Vogel, in a book published by Deseret Book.

The book is at its best when it is translating historical lessons to Mormon readers. The rhetoric invoked by the authors is one of a friendly tutor, introducing Mormons to what “scholars” have said on this or that. Readers become well familiar with Nathan Hatch, Jon Butler, and Alan Taylor. Chapter 3, which spends a lot of time on the sources documenting how Smith found his various seer stones, is an excellent walk-through of the historical method. Rather than trying to give definitive answers to various perplexing questions, the authors are satisfied with presenting the evidence and competing interpretations and then allowing the readers to decide. This, I think, is the right approach. We, as an LDS community, need to learn to embrace the messiness of history.

There are certain points in the book where the goal is not just to translate scholarly literature to faithful saints, but also to explore “what the future of scholarly literature may look like” concerning the stones and their meanings (45). It is here that I thought the authors came up short. Attempting to speak to two audiences is a daunting and nearly impossible task. One example of these irreconcilable approaches is seen in the rigorous investigation into who possessed which seer stone on the one hand, followed by the highly speculative section that attempt to determine which seer stone in the Book of Mormon was the one Joseph Smith inherited on the other. Scholars will appreciate the former, but likely raise an eyebrow to the latter. Which is fine—I’m of the opinion that books work best when they have a well defined audience. The problem arises when you claim to have two.

That isn’t to say scholars won’t find good use in this volume. The tedious overview of primary sources is a wonderful introduction to the topic. And the annotated bibliography at the end of the book, one of many helpful and overly-nerdy appendixes over which source geeks can unite, is worth the price of the volume. At the least, this book is an immensely helpful reference book for historians. It’s just that historians aren’t the primary audience.

Which is, I think, how it should be. The LDS community needs this book. It is a model of how responsible and faithful scholarship should be written. Let’s hope it gets the audience it deserves.

It only takes two long sittings to make it through prolific author Jill Lepore’s recent book, Joe Gould’s Teeth (Knopf, 2016). Which is fitting, because it only took Lepore a year to write it. The book is an extension of her New Yorker essay by the same name, which gives you a taste of the tale’s intrigue as well as Lepore’s masterful style.

The story is fascinating enough. Raised by a privileged family and prepared for a Harvard-trained medical career like his father and grandfather before him, Gould’s life was driven by two characteristics: his madness and  obsession with writing. (Lepore speculates he suffered from hypergraphia.) He was kicked out of college (and still later got his degree through special arrangements), got caught up in the eugenicist movement, walked the length of Canada, and eventually settled down in New York where he personally witnessed the Harlem Rennaissance. Gould became close friends with leading modernist figures like Ezra Pound and EE Cummings, primarily because they were impressed with his grandiose project: an oral history of their time. He (and they) proclaimed that he had written millions of words and that the manuscript was one of the most important initiatives of the century.

The problem was that outside of a small circle, and besides a few excerpts published in various venues, the manuscript seemed non-existent. Gould became increasingly insane later in life, moving in and out of asylums. The New Yorker essayist who made Gould a national figure in 1942, Joseph Mitchell, later came to regret taking Gould’s word for granted and wrote another essay, after Gould’s death, announcing he was a fraud. A movie was made based on Mitchell’s work. Gould was now dismissed and tucked away to irrelevancy.

Yet Lepore was not convinced. She started pulling at the threads to get a better perspective of what actually happened. She discovered that after Mitchell published his exposé he was inundated with letters from people who insisted there was an oral history. And through even more scavenging—there is a lot of impressive archival research for such a small book—she was able to discover there was a multi-volume history. Kind of. Portions were tucked away in various collections. But they were odd. Gould was never as consistent as he claimed (he started and stopped many times, and most of the notebooks were lost or destroyed), and the history was never what most people thought. Rather, it was tied into a deeper, darker part of Gould’s past: his obsession with Augusta Savage.

Savage was an African-American sculptor at the heart of the Harlem Rennaisance. She was talented and respected, and was even trained in Europe, but was never able to achieve permanent success. She died in poverty and obscurity. She also spent a considerable amount of time trying to dodge Gould, who was obsessed with her. He told people they were engaged. He stalked her. Perhaps molested her. Possibly raped her. All this even after he believed blacks to be an inferior breed and decried interracial relationships. He was a creep. By the time she finished researching the book, you could tell Lepore was repulsed by her subject and refused to chase down more leads.

And yet Gould was frequently enabled by powerful figures. Even after he groped women. Even after he devolved into an unreliable beggar. He was still given chances. Savage wasn’t. The injustice of these comparative lives is stark in the narrative. This is a story of how the stories we tell can either hide or expose the unfair nature of American life.

I noticed an interesting continuity I found between this book and Lepore’s last, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (published way back in 2014). Both books traced the secret (and sexual) lives of eccentric men who were around Harvard around the 1910s and later (and remarkably) developed practices that became quite popular and important, but also divorced from their controversial founders and founding moments. In Wonder Woman, it was William Mouton Marston and the lie detector; in the most recent work, it’s Joe Gould and the recording of oral histories. I don’t know what the overall meanings or importance of these similarities are, but I’m excited to see what Harvardian eccentric Lepore finds next!

One quick word on method. This book is as much about the historical craft as it is about a historical tale. Lepore invites the reader into her investigative process of peeling back layers of illusion. It is about staring at the ugliness of the past, feeling the weight of historical distance, and trying to make sense of it. The book is more a New Yorker essay than a scholarly monograph, but it’s also an essay about the process of writing a scholarly monograph. (Her description of tangled balls of yarn on page 47 is an apt metaphor for the whole book.) I actually think this would be a great book to assign in a methods class for undergraduates. At the least, it’s a terrific choice to recommend to friends who are interested in knowing what a historian does.

And the fact that it’s a helluva story, written by one of the masters of the craft, helps all the more.

I’ve already mentioned White Trash twice before, but I’ve been meaning to put up a brief review as well.

The book begins with the original colonizing goal of the British: to use the new American continent as a “wasteland” for unwanted people. From the very beginning, then, the idea of a degraded class inhabiting the geography was central to the American image. That image, however, transformed over the years as people sought new ways to redeem, reform, and re-train these people to perhaps be contributing members of society. Yet even the most literal thinkers who searched for ways to transform these idle and landless people often fell back on common tropes that took for granted the poor would always be with them and forever be a thorn in their side. It wasn’t until the presidential election of 1840 that the “squatter” gained a more romantic lore and a key pandering piece to democratic politics, and it wasn’t until the sectional crisis that “white trash” became both a common phrase and a potent political concept during the debates over slavery. Northerners argued that the poor white population in the south was indicative of slavery’s corrosive effects; conversely, southerners provided scientific arguments for a pure genetic American “breed.”

One thing that really stood out to me was that the confederate ideology, brilliantly covered in chapters 6 & 7, was based as much on class as it was race. Southern intellectuals and leaders conceptualized visions of society that halted any form of social mobility, thereby cementing the presence of the poor. That gives context to later formulations of neo-confederacy beliefs, and adds irony to appeals to this past age.

After the Civil War and reconstruction era, where southerners despised both “mongrels” (who mixed races) and “scalawags” (who were traitors to both race and class), eugenics mania swept the nation. It was sobering read about all the “purebred” efforts, like sterilization laws, as people pushed for perfect heredity. Moving into the twentieth century, the source base for Isenberg expands as she is able to draw from the rich paradoxes of popular media: television shows, movies, pastor’s wives, singers—all of these identities worked to both add new wrinkles to the white trash narrative while still cementing their class status in stone. The Duck Dynasty men, for instance, she’s their business attire to “look” the part of hillbillies. What I found fascinating was how the white trash image worked in seeming direct opposition to the American belief in social mobility: they have always been at the lower end of the American hierarchy, and there they will always remain, seemingly by choice. The very presence and perpetuation of white trash symbolism is the reaffirmation of class in America.

Yet for a book whose topic acknowledges and engages the great spectrum of class in America, it certainly spends most of its time looking in one direction. That is, a lot of the analysis is focused on how elites understood the downtrodden population. The first quarter of the book focuses on people like John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson—not exactly the most representative bunch. When Isenberg turns her attention to the actual people categorized as “white trash,” it is often an abstract and ominous “them” who are always just a step beyond the particulars. “White Trash” the concept gets a lot of fascinating detail, impressive specificity, and documented transformation, but the “white trash” as an actual class remain a group in the shadows awaiting molding by those who seek to take advantage of them.

This is probably due to sources, however, because as the chronology advances the subject base expands. Starting with the chapter on Andrew Jackson’s Cracker Country, the demeaned populace come into clearer view, and they indeed take a more prominent role in the twentieth century when they had the tools to celebrate and promote their heritage.

One final note of praise: the challenge of writing this kind of broad-sweeping book, as far as I understand it, is to cover such a large literature in such short a space. There is a lot of historiography on the 400 years in question. But Isenberg is a master historian, not only in demonstrating a depth in knowledge but also a skill in digesting so much material in a readable way. Her endnotes are a testament to the amount of work that goes into every paragraph:

It is easy to skim across the surface of four centuries, but difficult to actually immerse yourself in their intricacies. White Trash is an embodiment of the latter.