Volume 16, Number 3 · February 25, 1971
Slave Masters, Women & Northern Nationalists
By Eric Foner
Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina
by Stephen A. Channing
Simon & Schuster, 315 pp., $7.95
The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930
by Anne Firor Scott
Chicago, 247 pp., $5.95
The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840-1870
by William G. McLoughlin
Knopf, 276 pp., $7.95
What a historian looks for in the past is often shaped by his concerns in the present. This is particularly true when he is confronting an event which involves great and unresolved questions of national life. The American Civil War is a classic case in point, and the new books by Stephen Channing, Anne Firor Scott, and William McLoughlin illustrate how contemporary concerns—in these cases racism, the role of women in American society, and the ideology of American imperialism—help shape our perceptions of the past.
Review, 3066 words
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