Volume 4, Number 2 · February 25, 1965
An Old Story
By Eric L. McKitrick
Rehearsal For Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment
by Willie Lee Rose
Bobbs-Merrill, 442 pp., $6.50
A proper 'case study' in history or the social sciences really should not be a 'sample' of something; it should be a metaphor of something else. It should have not the abstractness of a construct, but the concreteness of a story; in it, the issues ought to be acted out, if not by ourselves at least by people we know. Willie Lee Rose knows all the people in her story, though it happened a hundred years ago. Some of them she loves; all of them she understands. She tells about them, or rather manages them, with such wonderful circumspection that the whole interlude takes on a life of its own.
Review, 2460 words
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