and his elegant literary craftsmanship. Woodward was (to my knowledge)
never termed an environmental historian, yet it was hisOrigins of the New
South() that first informed me that after the Civil War, distant bank-
ers exploited landlords, who exploited sharecroppers, who had only the soil
to exploit. Also Avery Craven, who while in error, I believe, about antebel-
lum southern farming, was never wronghearted, and whose first book, pub-
lished nearly eighty years ago, anticipated by half a lifetime what we now
call environmental or ecological history. I remain an admirer, too, of Wal-
ter Prescott Webb, whoseThe Great Plains() may have made excessive
claims about landscape’s and climate’s dictation of human improvisation
but remains so vivid and suggestive to me.
Among southernistsvivantare several whose works have helped shape
and fill more than a few of these pages: Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-
Genovese made writing about the South in isolation impossible. Bertram
Wyatt-Brown and Michael O’Brien have exfoliated generations of distract-
ing discourse to reveal white (especially) Souths of mind, culture, and
deliberation. Ed Ayers, a lovely writer and lately wizard of digitized his-
tory, is master of all southern cultures from the late antebellum into the
twentieth century. Don Doyle has illuminated the declines and arrivals
of nineteenth-century southern seaport and railroad cities (respectively),
as well as the demographic chaos of Lafayette County, Mississippi. Pete
Daniel, Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, and Lu Ann Jones—themselves natives of
the southern countryside—persist in imaginative research and passionate
revelation of a region that was overwhelmingly rural until the day before
yesterday. Ted Ownby’s first book (Subduing Satan[]) offers profound
insight into the entanglement of modernization with a feminized, sectarian
reformism that, as I read it, achieved a peace and order (of sorts) in a new
southern world of lost commons. I still think Grady McWhiney’s Celtic cen-
trism (inCracker Culture[]) misguided, yet his treatment of herdsmen,
and their business and pleasures, remains not only accurate but essential
to understanding antebellum southern landscapes. Steven Stoll, a Califor-
nian with the West Coast first on his mind, has lately come to the antebel-
lum East, including the South, with refreshing perspective on upper-class
would-be improvers of agricultural landscapes.
Development of flat-out environmental history of and in the South was
much retarded for some time after the appearance of Albert Cowdrey’s pio-
neeringThis Land, This Southin . Finally came marvelous first books
by Timothy Silver (on southeastern forests, in ) and Mart Stewart (on
Georgia islands and Low Country, in ). Then suddenly and (to me) un-
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