Recovering the history of an often-ignored landmark Supreme Court case, William P. Hustwit assesses the significant role that Alexander v. Holmes (1969) played in integrating the South's public schools. Although Brown v. Board of Education has rightly received the lion's share of historical analysis, its ambiguous language for implementation led to more than a decade of delays and resistance by local and state governments. Alexander v. Holmes required "integration now," and less than a year later, thousands of children were attending integrated schools. Hustwit traces the progression of the Alexander case to show how grassroots activists in Mississippi operated hand in glove with lawyers and judges involved in the litigation. By combining a narrative of the larger legal battle surrounding the case and the story of the local activists who pressed for change, Hustwit offers an innovative, well-researched account of a definitive legal decision that reaches from the cotton fields of Holmes County to the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington.

Between 1815 and 1861 thousands of planters formed a unique emigrant group in American history. A slaveholding, landholding elite, southerners from Georgia and South Carolina uprooted themselves from their communities and headed for their society’s borderlands with a frequency and intensity unsurpassed by any comparable class. A phenomenon of such singularity and significance preoccupied many of the South’s leading citizens and generated a great deal of interest and discussion among movers and prospective movers, as well as among those who stayed behind. While many wondered what emigration could do for them as individuals or households, others engaged in a public debate as to what emigration said about them as a class and as a society. That multilayered debate surrounding the personal and social, spiritual and ideological meanings of emigration is at the very center of James David Miller’s study. In exploring what planter mobility reveals about planter identity and culture, South by Southwest blends analysis of both public and private responses to emigration and in so doing illuminates the ways in which elite southerners themselves understood the connections between emigration as private conduct and as a public phenomenon. In bringing together these two spheres of inquiry, Miller examines the diverse geographical, cultural, and intellectual meanings that elite southerners gave to their private and public journeys and what those meanings reveal about their broader attitudes regarding the people and places of slaveholding society.

Planters' Progress is the first book to examine the profoundly transformative industrialization of a southern state during the Civil War. More than any other Confederate state, Georgia mixed economic modernization with a large and concentrated slave population. In this pathbreaking study, Chad Morgan shows that Georgia's remarkable industrial metamorphosis had been a long-sought goal of the state's planter elite. Georgia's industrialization, underwritten by the Confederate government, changed southern life fundamentally. A constellation of state-owned factories in Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, and Macon made up a sizeable munitions and supply complex that kept Confederate armies in the fields for four years against the preeminent industrial power of the North. Moreover, the government in Richmond provided numerous official goads and incentives to non-government manufacturers, setting off a boom in private industry. Georgia cities grew and the state government expanded its function to include welfare programs for those displaced and impoverished by the war. Georgia planters had always desired a level of modernization consistent with their ascendancy as the ruling slaveowner class. Morgan shows that far from being an unwanted consequence of the Civil War, the modernization of Confederate Georgia was an elaboration and acceleration of existing tendencies, and he confutes long and deeply held ideas about the nature of the Old South. Planters' Progress is a compelling reconsideration not only of Confederate industrialization but also of the Confederate experience as a whole.

Along the fertile banks of the Mississippi River across from New Orleans, planter Camille Zeringue transformed a mediocre colonial plantation into a thriving gem of antebellum sugar production, complete with a columned mansion known as Seven Oaks. Under the moss-strewn oaks, the privileged master nurtured his own family, but enslaved many others. Excelling at agriculture, business, an ambitious canal enterprise, and local politics, Zeringue ascended to the very pinnacle of southern society. But his empire soon came crashing down. After the ravages of the Civil War and a nasty battle with a railroad company the family eventually lost the great estate. Seven Oaks ultimately ended up in the hands of distant railroad executives whose only desire was to rid themselves of this heap of history. Lost Plantation: The Rise and Fall of Seven Oaks tells both of Zeringue's climb to the top and of his legacy's eventual ruin. Preservationists and community members abhorred the railroad's indifferent attitude, and the question of the plantation mansion's fate fueled years of fiery, political battles. These hard-fought confrontations ended in 1977 when the exasperated railroad executives sent bulldozers through the decaying house. By analyzing one failed effort, Lost Plantation provides insight into the complex workings of American historical preservation efforts as a whole, while illustrating how southerners deal with their multifaceted past. The rise and fall of Seven Oaks is much more than just a local tragedy-it is a glaring example of how any community can be robbed of its history. Now, as parishes around New Orleans recognize the great aesthetic and monetary value of restoring plantation homes and attracting tourism, Jefferson Parish mourns a manor lost. Marc R. Matrana, Westwego, Louisiana, is a local historian and preservationist. See the author's site.