In Reconstructing the Household, Peter Bardaglio examines the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners struggled with the conflicts and stresses that surfaced within their own households and in the larger society during the Civil War era. Based on literary as well as legal sources, Bardaglio's analysis reveals how legal contests involving African Americans, women, children, and the poor led to a rethinking of families, sexuality, and the social order. Before the Civil War, a distinctive variation of republicanism, based primarily on hierarchy and dependence, characterized southern domestic relations. This organic ideal of the household and its power structure differed significantly from domestic law in the North, which tended to emphasize individual rights and contractual obligations. The defeat of the Confederacy, emancipation, and economic change transformed family law and the governance of sexuality in the South and allowed an unprecedented intrusion of the state into private life. But Bardaglio argues that despite these profound social changes, a preoccupation with traditional notions of gender and race continued to shape southern legal attitudes.

Here is the story of the long interaction between humans, land, and climate in the American South. It is a tale of exploitation and erosion, of destruction, disease, and defeat, but also of the persistent search for knowledge and wisdom. It is a story whose villains were also its victims and sometimes its heroes. Ancient forces created the southern landscape, but, as Albert E. Cowdrey shows, humankind from the time of earliest habitation has been at work reshaping it. The southern Indians, far from being the "natural ecologists" of myth, radically transformed their environment by hunting and burning. Such patterns were greatly accelerated by the arrival of Europeans, who viewed the land as a commodity to be exploited for immediate economic benefit. Cowdrey documents not only the long decline but the painfully slow struggle to repair the damage of human folly. The eighteenth century saw widespread though ineffectual efforts to protect game and conserve the soil. In the nineteenth century the first hesitant steps were taken toward scientific flood control, forestry, wildlife protection, and improved medicine. In this century, the New Deal, the explosion in scientific knowledge, and the national environmental movement have spurred more rapid improvements. But the efforts to harness the South's great rivers, to save its wild species, and to avert serious environmental pollution have often had equivocal results. Originally published in 1983 and needed now more than ever, This Land, This South was the first book to explore the cumulative impact of humans on the southern landscape and its effect on them. In graceful and at times lyrical prose, Albert Cowdrey brings together a vast array of information. Now revised and updated, this important book should be read by every person concerned with the past, present, or future of the South.