Volume 32, Number 15 · October 10, 1985
District of Devils
By C. Vann Woodward
In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina
by Orville Vernon Burton
University of North Carolina Press, 480 pp., $29.95
'One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. Sense of place gives equilibrium; extended, it is sense of direction.' Taking off from this maxim of Eudora Welty's, Orville Vernon Burton has chosen Edgefield County, on the western border of South Carolina, across the Savannah River from Augusta, as his place to comprehend. The comprehending is encyclopedic and promises to be unprecedented for exhaustiveness, for this is the first of several works planned on this one county. But there are more than three thousand counties in the United States, forty-six of them in South Carolina alone. Why single out Edgefield? And how can one county possibly justify all this attention?
Review, 2454 words
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