This is a new release of the original 1937 edition.

Relates the early history of the University of Georgia from its founding in 1785 through the Reconstruction era. In this history of America's first chartered state university, the author recounts, among other things, how Athens was chosen as the university's location; how the state tried to close the university and refused to give it a fixed allowance until long after the Civil War; the early rules and how students invariably broke them; the days when the Phi Kappa and Demosthenian literary societies ruled the campus; and the vast commencement crowds that overwhelmed Athens to feast on oratory and watermelons.

Hailed as a classic by reviewers and historians, Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor now appears in abridged form under the title Honor and Violence in the Old South. Winner of a Phi Alpha Theta Book Award and a Jefferson Davis Memorial Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, this is the first major reinterpretation of Southern life and custom since W.J, Cash's The Mind of the South. It explores the meaning and expression of the ancient code of honor as whites—both slaveholders and non-slaveholders—applied it to their lives. Wyatt-Brown ranges widely—covering topics such as childbearing, marital patterns, duelling, slave discipline, and lynch-law—to discover the role of honor in the psyche of white Southerners.

Eyewitness accounts intended to introduce readers to a wide variety of primary literary sources for studying the Old South.

Set on the antebellum southern frontier, this book uses the history of two counties in Florida's panhandle to tell the story of the migrations, disruptions, and settlements that made the plantation South. Soon after the United States acquired Florida from Spain in 1821, migrants from older southern states began settling the land that became Jackson and Leon Counties. Slaves, torn from family and community, were forced to carve plantations from the woods of Middle Florida, while planters and less wealthy white men battled over the social, political, and economic institutions of their new society. Conflict between white men became full-scale crisis in the 1840s, but when sectional conflict seemed to threaten slavery, the whites of Middle Florida found common ground. In politics and everyday encounters, they enshrined the ideal of white male equality--and black inequality. To mask their painful memories of crisis, the planter elite told themselves that their society had been transplanted from older states without conflict. But this myth of an "Old," changeless South only papered over the struggles that transformed slave society in the course of its expansion. In fact, that myth continues to shroud from our view the plantation frontier, the very engine of conflict that had led to the myth's creation.

"A major study of American cultural history, a book distinguished both for its careful research and for its innovative interpretations. . . . Professor Mathews's book is an explanation of what religion meant in the everyday lives of southern whites and blacks. It is indispensable reading not just for those who want to know more about the Old South but for anyone who wants to understand the South today."—David Herbert Donald, Harvard University "A major achievement—a magnificently provocative contribution to the understanding of the history of religion in America."—William G. McLoughlin, Book Reviews "A meticulous and well-documented study . . . In the changing connotations of the word 'liberty' lie most of the dilemmas of Southern (and American) history, dilemmas Dr. Mathews analyses with considerable penetration."—Times Literary Supplement "The most compact and yet comprehensive view of the Old South in its religious dimension that is presently available. This is a pioneering work by one who is widely read in the sources and is creative enough to synthesize and introduce fresh themes. . . . He makes a unique contribution to southern historiography which will act as a corrective upon earlier works. . . . Boldly stated, every library that consults Choice should purchase this volume."—Choice "Mathews presents us with the findest and grandest history of old southern religion that one could imagine finding in so short a book on so large a topic. . . . Here stands in its own right a masterpiece of regional historiography of religion in America."—William A. Clebsch, Reviews in American History

Celebrated as a classic work of historical literature, Life and Labor in the Old South (1929) represents the culmination of three decades of research and reflection on the social and economic systems of the antebellum South by the leading historian of African American slavery of the first half of the twentieth century. Life and Labor in the Old South represents both the strengths and weaknesses of first-rate scholarship by whites on the topics of antebellum African and African American slavery during the Jim Crow era. Deeply researched in primary sources, carefully focused on social and economic facets of slavery, and gracefully written, Phillips's germinal account set the standard for his contemporaries. Simultaneously the work is rife with elitism, racism, and reliance on sources that privilege white perspectives. Such contradictions between its content and viewpoint have earned Life and Labor in the Old South its place at the forefront of texts in the historiography of the antebellum South and African American slavery. The book is both a work of high scholarship and an example of the power of unexamined prejudices to affect such a work.