Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South Candace Bailey.

UNC Libraries · 2025-05-10

Review of "Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South" by Candace Bailey.

Alrutheus Ambush Taylor

The American Historical Review · 2024-12-01

How teachers can stay true to history without breaking new laws that restrict what they can teach about racism

2023-06-02 · 1 citations

<i>Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South</i> Candace Bailey.

Music and Letters · 2022-04-15

Candace Bailey has written an impressive book that achieves its stated aim to challenge assumptions about music-making by women in the nineteenth-century United States. Unbinding Gentility is, above all, an ethnographic foray into performance traditions and the acquisition of music skills in the American South between roughly 1830 and 1880. Despite the parsimonious attention hitherto devoted to women performers during the nineteenth century, Bailey convincingly demonstrates that they, white and black, were committed, proficient, and ambitious music-makers. Similarly, both because and in spite of ideals of feminine gentility, women were conversant with a wider variety of music than we may have hitherto assumed. In both its larger findings and details, this book is full of surprises. Unbinding Gentility is a model of creative archival archaeology. Undergirding the book (and inspiring its title) is Bailey’s mining of the binders of sheet music compiled for and by women music-makers. In addition to offering important insights into nineteenth-century repertories, the binders also include telling annotations by their owners and other revealing ephemera. Bailey augments her deep dive in the binders with thoughtful readings of private correspondence, contemporary newspapers, published travel accounts, and memoirs. Weaving together these disparate materials, she reconstructs surprising details about the barely discerned world of women’s music-making.

‘Social movements, white and black

2021-03-18

For more than a century and a half a variety of social groups in the American South have disputed the commemoration of the American Civil War and slavery in the region. White Southerners took full advantage of their disproportionate power to ensure that the region’s civic traditions and public spaces enshrined their favored version of history. African Americans, nevertheless, continuously contested the glorification of the ‘Old South,’ slavery, the Confederacy, and white supremacy. After the restoration of political and civil rights to African Americans during the 1960s, southern blacks expanded and escalated their campaign to revise the region’s public memory. In recent decades, a coalition of white southerners has mobilized to defend symbols of white memory and southern ‘heritage,’ but they, in turn, have been challenged by a diverse social movement with unprecedented influence intent on transforming the region.

The Press and Lynching

University of Illinois Press eBooks · 2021 · 4 citations

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History

This chapter documents the complex relationship between lynching and newspapers, which has received inadequate attention. As the author writes, “any understanding of the phenomenon of lynching in the United States must begin with news accounts of lynchings.” Between 1890 and 1920, newspapers in America carried news and discussions about lynching on an almost daily basis. White papers legitimized and at times even incited lynching through the use of sensationalism, melodrama, and racist stereotypes of white female victimhood and “Black brutes.” The Black press, including Ida B. Wells and John L. Mitchell, fought back, documenting lynchings, exposing the racist lies used to justify them, and organizing public protest and support for federal anti-lynching bills.

Meeting the Enemy

Reviews in American History · 2021-01-01

Meeting the Enemy W. Fitzhugh Brundage (bio) Stephen Huggins, America's Use of Terror: From Colonial Times to the A-Bomb. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. vii + 380 pp. Tables, illustrations, notes, select bibliography, and index. $39.95. The repercussions of 9/11 continue to ripple through the historiography of the United States. The terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington D. C. and the subsequent war on terror have revealed, in high relief, threads in American history that had hitherto been overlooked, ignored, or dismissed. So too, they have eroded many inherited verities. The United States adopted methods to wage its war on terror that seemingly would have been inconceivable a decade or two prior. The use of torture by the United States is a case in point. During the early days of the war on terror, critics attacked the Bush administration's use of "enhanced interrogation" as an unprecedented deviation from the established course of American history. Before 9/11, torture was a practice popularly associated with premodern societies and modern totalitarian regimes. Previously historians had acknowledged that Americans committed torture, but the practice here was dismissed as extra-legal, exceptional, and peripheral to the nation's history. In keeping with the idea that torture was committed by other people elsewhere, the New York Times dogmatically embraced the Bush administration's neologism "enhanced interrogation" to describe violence that the newspaper otherwise labelled torture when perpetrated by other nations. Since 9/11, we also have witnessed the widespread and seemingly unchecked adoption of "targeted killings" in the war on terror. High-technology American drones have carried out thousands of attacks on individuals and small groups of purported terrorists. Hitherto, such killings would have sparked intense debate over their legitimacy; they likely would have been denounced as assassinations if they had been conducted by our enemies. But the thousands of "targeted killings" have failed to prompt national outrage, even when, for example, the killing of Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020 was deemed unlawful by the United Nations.1 [End Page 198] As the war on terror and the debate over the nation's embrace of torture continued, activists, legal scholars, and historians revealed the long backstory of the use of torture by American state agents (and their predecessors) that extended from the age of conquest to the Central American civil wars of the 1980s. This tradition, we learned, informed and emboldened the Bush administration at the dawn of the twenty-first century.2 Broadly speaking, 9/11 and the nation's response to those events appears to have delivered the coup de grace to "American exceptionalism" as it was understood by previous generations of Americans. With origins in Reformation Europe, the idea matured during the Enlightenment and was burnished further by the Founders. Abraham Lincoln embraced it, while Woodrow Wilson and his ilk used it to justify the nation's global ambitions. Later yet, during the Cold War, historians and social scientists embedded the notion in the foundations of the nation's intellectual life. From our vantage point on the other side of 9/11, it is clear that the idea of American exceptionalism rested on selective definitions that flattered Americans. The manner in which the United States has conducted itself has been less exceptional than the ways in which the nation has justified itself. For instance, from the nation's founding until World War Two, the United States boasted that it was one of the least militarized societies in the advanced world. Similarly, much was made of the American contribution to the laws of war and of nations. The so-called Lieber Code, issued during the Civil War by the Lincoln administration, became a cornerstone of modern efforts to curtail the carnage of war. Yet even while Americans recoiled at European militarism, they conquered a continent, displacing or subsuming millions who never sought to become members of the "Novus ordo seclorum." So too Americans waged a vicious civil war that mobilized both warring sides to an unprecedented degree and in exceptional ways. The acclaimed Lieber Code codified the primacy of "military necessity" as the ultimate loophole for the...

Closing Reflections

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era · 2020-12-01

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Death at the Edges of Empire: Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863-1921

Civil War Book Review · 2020 · 1 citations

• History
• Ancient history
• Psychology

Shannon Bontrager has written an intricate, impressive book about mourning, memory, and national identity. Some facets of his story are familiar, but he extends the sweep of his analysis in fresh and provocative directions, enlarging it, as the title suggests, to the edges of the American empire. At the core of the book is the evolution of the commemoration of the fallen citizen soldier from the advent of mass casualties during the American Civil War through the carnage of World War One. Keen to honor dead soldiers who had been deprived of the comforts of death within the bosom of their families, the Civil War generation expended impressive energy and resources to consecrate their graves through a system of national cemeteries...

The New South

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History · 2020-01-30

Abstract Rapid and far-reaching environmental, economic, and social transformations marked the New South (1880–1910). Substantial industrialization and urbanization followed the expansion of rail networks across the region, and produced unprecedented changes in daily life for both urban and rural residents. White southern elites embraced these innovations and worked to ensure that state governments evolved in order to advance them. One of their most significant endeavors was the institutionalization of white supremacy in virtually every facet of public life. Black and white voluntary organizations complemented, and sometimes contested, the emerging economic and social order in the New South. Similarly, while many contemporary representations of the region in national culture trivialized the scale and costs of the changes underway, some artists offered revelatory portraits of a region consumed by upheaval.