Southern History across the Color Line

Demonstrate[s] excellence marked by the transgressive verve of [an] innovative and progressive scholar. . . . An extremely successful attempt to move with intellectual rigor and consistency toward a meaningful interpretation of a world mapped in blood by cruelty and violence.--Southern Literary Journal

Bold and innovative.--Canadian Journal of History

Painter wields both a scalpel and an ax as she dissects multiple generations of southern-focused literature. . . . Compelling. . . . [Southern History Across the Color Line] provides an insightful exploration into the historical factors that have led to an incomplete literature on the mutual impact of the color line in the American South. It deserves careful study by a wide-range of scholars and students of southern history and race relations.--Gulf South Historical Review

Nell Irvin Painter is one of the major historians of our time. This invaluable collection brings together work that has influenced a generation of scholars and will continue to shape scholarship for the foreseeable future. Painter's powerful and transgressive questioning of the tenets of southern history and southern historiography has opened up new ways of understanding both the centrality of race and the necessity of moving beyond it. This is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the American condition.--Hazel V. Carby, Yale University

The theories, ideas, and analysis investigated in this text advance our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century southern culture--both black and white--in unexpected, provocative, and compelling ways. . . . A highly original and radically ambitious book. This immensely important and insightful study underscores the need for new thinking about the scholarship of southern historiography that reaches beyond race. . . . A groundbreaking contribution and a rewarding addition to the field of American history, particularly southern historiography.--North Carolina Historical Review

One cannot help but applaud the appearance of this collection, which provides a fine introduction to the ideas of an important scholar.--Journal of Southern History

Painter's thoughtful collection is the result of a career spent in close examination of Southern history. She demonstrates how that text can still reveal much but only if we sharpen and enlarge our intellectual armamentarium.--Florida Historical Quarterly

Nell Painter's Southern History across the Color Line is an important and welcome collection. Her essays are always timely, telling, and provocative. They take risks and often seek to confound categories, topically and conceptually. And they chart the intellectual range and growth of one of our leading historians and teachers.--Steven Hahn, Northwestern University