Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney

By Charles Joyner, David Moltke-Hansen, Drew Gilpin Faust and 15 more

Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney is a collection of original essays written by some of the nation’s most distinguished historians. Each of the contributors has a personal as well as a professional connection to Sheldon Hackney, a distinguished scholar in his own right who has served as Provost of Princeton University, president of Tulane University and the University of Pennsylvania, and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In a variety of roles—teacher, mentor, colleague, administrator, writer, and friend—Sheldon Hackney has been a source of wisdom, empowerment, and wise counsel during more than four decades of historical and educational achievement. His life, both inside and outside the academy, has focused on issues closely related to civil rights, social justice, and the vagaries of race, class, regional culture, and national identity. Each of the essays in this volume touches upon one or more of these important issues—themes that have animated Sheldon Hackney’s scholarly and professional life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781603062756

Book preview

Dixie Redux

Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney

Edited by

Raymond Arsenault and Orville Vernon Burton

NewSouth Books

Montgomery

NewSouth Books

105 S. Court Street

Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright 2013 by NewSouth Books. Individual essays are copyright 2013 by the respective authors unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

ISBN: 978-1-58838-297-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-275-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013034903

Visit www.newsouthbooks.com

To Francis Sheldon Hackney

(1933–2013)

and his loving family:

Lucy Durr Hackney

Virginia Hackney (1958–2007)

Fain Hackney

Elizabeth Hackney McBride

Alexander Z Hackney

Annabelle Hackney

Lucy Hackney

Samantha Hackney

Declan McBride

Jackson McBride

Larkin McBride

Madison McBride

Contents

Introduction: Sheldon Hackney and Southern History

Raymond Arsenault and Orville Vernon Burton

1 - The Proslavery Argument and Nazi Ideology

Michael O’Brien

2 - On Judging Nat Turner

Randall Kennedy

3 - American Navies and British Neutrality During the Civil War

James M. McPherson

4 - ‘The True Picture as It Really Was’

Drew Gilpin Faust

5 - Civil Wars—Ours and Theirs

Stephanie McCurry

6 - Alabama Emancipates

J. Mills Thornton III

7 - Did the Civil War Matter?

Steven Hahn

8 - Revisiting the Black Matriarchy

Orville Vernon Burton

9 - Turn Signals

David Moltke-Hansen

10 - A Southern Radical and His Songs

Charles Joyner

11 - Lessons Along the Color Line

Patricia Sullivan

12 - ‘The Goddamn Boss’

Thomas Sugrue

13 - From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy

Lani Guinier

14 - The Montgomery Bus Boycott and American Politics

Raymond Arsenault

15 - The Double Death of Martin Luther King Jr.

Paul M. Gaston

16 - Birmingham, 1978

William R. Ferris

17 - Minority Representation in Alabama

Peyton McCrary

18 - Strange Career and the Need for a Second Reconstruction of the History of Race Relations

J. Morgan Kousser

19 - C. Vann Woodward

Sheldon Hackney

Select Bibliography of Sheldon Hackney’s Writings

Contributors

Index

About the Editors

Introduction

Sheldon Hackney and Southern History

Raymond Arsenault and Orville Vernon Burton

Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney is a book born of respect, admiration, and affection. All of the contributors to this volume are deeply indebted to Sheldon Hackney—many as colleagues, some as former students, and others as intellectual collaborators. The eighteen authors of the essays in this volume represent but a small fraction of the thousands of individuals who have benefited from his long and distinguished career as a historian, professor, university administrator, and public intellectual. Mentor, teacher, friend—he has fulfilled all of these roles with integrity, grace, and a rare intelligence leavened by wit, humility, and compassion.

Sheldon Hackney’s strength of character—why he has meant so much to so many of us—undoubtedly is rooted in both nurture and nature. But it is also firmly grounded in a lifelong inquiry related to issues of race, regional culture, civil rights, social justice, national identity, and democracy. While Sheldon was destined to spend most of his life north of the Mason-Dixon line, the American South—his native region—has always been the focal point of his search for a usable past. Fascinated by the ironies and complexities of Southern history, and keenly aware of the region’s shortcomings—especially on matters of race, class, and gender—he has pursued historical understanding of Southern myths and mores not only for the sake of scholarship but also as a means of promoting social change and humanistic values. His determination to replace self-serving mythology with truth-telling history has taken him from the darkest recesses of the region’s archives to the open debates of the academy and the national public arena. Yet in many ways he has remained a son of the South, affirming and sustaining his regional ties through vigilant criticism and concern.

It is in this spirit that we offer the essays of Dixie Redux as a reprise of the themes and questions that have propelled Sheldon Hackney through a lifetime of scholarly engagement. In Rabbit Redux—the inspiration for our title and the first of three sequels to the bestselling 1960 novel, Rabbit Run—the writer John Updike gives us a second look at the life of his harried, suburban protagonist, Harry Rabbit Angstrom.[1] Updike’s revealing continuation of the Angstrom saga represents the literary equivalent of what we are trying to accomplish in this book. By reexamining Sheldon’s South, we hope to bring fresh insight and added nuance to our understanding of regional history and culture.

While the individual essays in Dixie Redux take us down varied pathways—history and biography, analysis and narrative, humanities and social science—our common goal is to extend Sheldon’s legacy, to pay tribute to him through the practice of imaginative historical research and writing. By relating personal stories and experiences to the larger saga of regional history and by asking large questions in small places, to use a phrase popularized by the noted historian and folklorist Charles Joyner, we aim to expand the explorations initiated by Sheldon’s generation of historians.[2]

As the first cohort of regional scholars to take advantage of the interdisciplinary opportunities and methodological innovations of the 1960s, Sheldon and his peers brought enhanced explanatory power to the sub-field of Southern history. At times, these new political and social historians, as they liked to call themselves, may have strayed a bit too far from the rich tradition of storytelling that had made Southern history so compelling to the reading public. But the best among them—Sheldon included—never lost sight of the human and contingent dimensions of historical change.

Connecting the local to the universal in Faulknerian fashion, he and others mounted a broad-based and largely successful challenge to the confining dogmas of regional historiography. While some interpreters of the Southern experience remained mired in the romantic illusions of patriarchal, elitist, and white supremacist mythology, most moved towards a more inclusive and open-minded approach to historical study. By the end of the 20th century, many of the South’s most hallowed historical shibboleths had lost most of their authority among professional scholars. Relegated either to the manifestoes of reactionary politicians or to the margins of popular culture, the once-dominant interpretations of slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, Solid South politics, and a host of other topics mercifully had fallen by the wayside.

Thanks to the prodigious efforts of Sheldon and other insurgent historians, the neo-Confederate meta-narrative is now all but gone from the academy. Yet, as the essays in this volume tacitly acknowledge, there is still much to do. The South, like all regions of the nation, still presents us with important historical puzzles to solve and many important and intriguing stories to tell. With this in mind, we begin with the story of the man who inspired us to write this book.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, on December 5, 1933, Francis Sheldon Hackney was the third son of Cecil Fain and Elizabeth Morris Hackney.[3] Though a child of the Great Depression, Sheldon—as he was known from early childhood—escaped the worst ravages of hard times. Throughout the 1930s, his father found steady work as a newspaper reporter and editor for the Birmingham Age-Herald, while his mother stayed at home to raise three young sons—Fain, Morris, and Sheldon (two more sons, John and Rob, were born in the 1940s). Like most of their neighbors in the Mountain Brook section of the city, the Hackneys were white, middle-class, Protestant, and solidly Democratic in their politics. Their ethnic roots were predominantly English and Welsh, and both parents could trace their regional lineage back to the antebellum South, Cecil to Georgia and Elizabeth to southern Alabama.

Though only one generation removed from the farm, Sheldon’s parents had grown comfortable with the pace of city life, developing strong ties to local institutions such as the Highland Methodist Church. The Hackneys were devout Methodists, and as a teenager Sheldon came under the influence of a liberal young preacher. This early exposure to the social gospel, he would later insist, represented one of the major formative episodes of his moral and intellectual development. As he grew to maturity, responsibility for the welfare of others and a restless questioning of orthodoxy became key elements of his character, and the spiritual basis of both remained with him throughout his life.[4]

The trajectory of that life was also greatly affected by World War II, most obviously by his father’s enlistment in the U.S. Navy following America’s entry into the war. For a time, Cecil Hackney’s duties as a political information officer took him and his family to the vibrant city of New Orleans, to which Sheldon would return many years later as president of Tulane University. But the Hackneys spent the majority of the war in Nashville, Tennessee. At the close of the war, Cecil returned to Birmingham and civilian life, but the family’s connection to Naval service was far from over. Three of the five Hackney brothers eventually joined the Navy, with Morris attending the Naval Academy at Annapolis and Fain serving in the Navy and dying in a military plane crash in 1954. Sheldon followed with five years of national service later in the 1950s.

In the immediate post-World War II years, Sheldon attended the Jefferson County public schools, where he earned a reputation as a gifted student and an outstanding athlete. At Ramsay High School, he played varsity tennis, launched a brief political career with an unsuccessful run for student body president, and graduated near the top of his class in 1951. After completing the required credits for graduation in December, he took several spring-semester classes at nearby Birmingham-Southern College before enrolling at Vanderbilt University in the fall of 1952.

One of the South’s most prestigious universities, Vanderbilt proved to be a good fit for an inquisitive but ingenuous 18-year-old boy who was not quite sure what he wanted to do with his life. Supported by a Naval Reserve Officer Training Course (NROTC) scholarship, he gained confidence, direction, and a solid general education during his four years in Nashville. Majoring in history, he took several courses from Dewey Grantham, a prominent scholar of post-Reconstruction Southern politics, and developed a parallel interest in political science.[5] Along the way he became a voracious reader and a budding writer with an appreciation for the literary arts, especially after he took a series of English courses in which he encountered vestiges of the Regionalist persuasion that had dominated the Vanderbilt humanities scene in the 1920s and 1930s. John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and their fellow Fugitive-Agrarians were no longer in Nashville, but the notion that regional history and culture should be taken seriously was still very much alive during Sheldon’s years at Vanderbilt.[6]

His intellectual engagement with the Old South vs. New South issues posed by the Regionalists would stand him in good stead in later years. Yet, for Sheldon, there would be no easy resolution of these issues, no dependable balance sheet of the costs and benefits of modernization. Indeed, how could it have been otherwise for a young man coming of age in the midst of massive and often bewildering change? By the time he graduated in the spring of 1955, in the wake of the with all deliberate speed dictum of the second Brown decision, there was no longer any doubt that the South had entered a critical period of political, social, and racial realignment. With the acceleration of urbanization and industrialization, Eisenhower Republicanism’s emerging challenge to Solid South politics, the deepening of Cold War anxieties, the recent quickening of the civil rights movement, and the looming specter of a Second Reconstruction, the proverbial center simply could not hold. Although the Korean War was over, the redemptive struggle for the soul of the South was just beginning.

Fear of impending desegregation was almost universal in the white South during these years, and college classrooms were among the few places where even a quasi-rational discussion of race could take place. In Sheldon’s case, college life reinforced his doubts about the wisdom and morality of Jim Crow institutions. Even though there were no black students at Vanderbilt, his occasional crosstown visits to the Fisk University campus gave him his first glimpses of a restive black youth culture yearning for respect. These experiences fostered a growing awareness that something important was stirring in the black South, something beyond the self-serving stereotypes perpetuated in the white community.[7]

Sheldon’s openness to racial iconoclasm and liberal ideas became even more apparent in late 1955 and early 1956, during a fateful postgraduate year at Vanderbilt. While completing the NROTC requirements for his commission as a junior naval officer, he also took an array of graduate-level history courses, several of which explored important aspects of the Southern past. This was also the year that he fell in love with like-minded Lucy Judkins Durr, a bright and precocious Radcliffe student from Montgomery, Alabama. Based in part on shared values of tolerance and social responsibility, their courtship and subsequent marriage would lead to more than a half-century of commitment and creative striving. As an admiring friend later put it, their relationship was a deeply loving one, companionate in all ways. . . . Lucy and Sheldon’s visibly abiding affection for each other, their kindred commitments, and their devoted parenting put Lucy at the very center of Sheldon’s life and vice versa.

The Vanderbilt years also laid the foundations for Sheldon’s eventual absorption with matters of race and region. However, his first direct experience with racial integration did not come until 1956, when he entered the United States Navy. The desegregation of the armed services had begun in 1948 and was not yet complete. Still, Sheldon’s five years as a junior officer took him well beyond the boundaries and cultural constraints of Alabama and Tennessee, widening his vision of the world and further opening his heart and mind to racial justice and democratic values.

He spent most of these years at sea, cruising the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean on a destroyer, the U.S.S. James C. Owens. But in 1957 he came ashore long enough to marry Lucy Durr. The couple’s June wedding took place in Lucy’s hometown of Montgomery, a mere seven months after the city’s year-long bus boycott had ended in triumph for Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and the pro-desegregation Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The city was still reeling from the shock of change, and much of the white community was under the spell of reactionary politicians counseling massive resistance. Among the few local whites applauding the desegregation of Montgomery’s buses were Lucy’s notoriously liberal parents, Clifford and Virginia Foster Durr.[8]

Staunch advocates of civil rights and civil liberties, the Durrs had been involved in struggles for economic, political, and social justice since the early years of the New Deal. Closely identified with Virginia’s brother-in-law, Alabama’s stalwart New Dealer—Senator and later U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black—they became one of Washington’s most visible and controversial political couples by the late 1930s. When Cliff’s work with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation ended with a principled resignation in 1941—he objected to federal contracts favoring war profiteers—President Franklin Roosevelt promptly appointed him to the Federal Communications Commission. Seven years later he resigned again, this time after refusing to sign a loyalty oath recently imposed by the Truman administration. Returning to private law practice, he specialized for a time in defending the constitutional rights of government employees accused of disloyalty or subversion. But after discovering that he could not support his family with this kind of work, he abandoned the political hothouse of Washington, moving briefly to Colorado to assume a position with the National Farmers Union before relocating to Montgomery in 1951.[9]

Cliff had hoped to find a more peaceful style of life back home in Alabama. Yet the rising notoriety of his highly political wife foiled his escape from Cold War controversies. Full of vinegar and righteous indignation, Virginia had devoted more than a decade to a full-scale assault on racial discrimination and disfranchisement, mobilizing a circle of Washington-based Southern liberals and organizing a movement to repeal the poll tax. In the process, she had moved to the left, eventually allying herself with Henry Wallace and running unsuccessfully for a Virginia U.S. Senate seat on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948.

After their relocation to Montgomery, the Durrs remained true to their progressive principles, despite being labeled as dangerous subversives by Senate investigators and other conservative Cold Warriors. Defying regional convention, Cliff’s law practice often involved representation of black clients, including Rosa Parks, who did occasional seamstress work for the Durr household. When Parks was arrested in December 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white rider, Cliff, along with local NAACP leader E. D. Nixon, arranged for her bail.[10]

Sheldon’s marriage into the activist Durr family changed his life beyond recognition. As a boy growing up in Birmingham, and even as a college student, he had never met people with such iconoclastic convictions, people willing to speak out forcefully against injustice and intolerant orthodoxy whatever the cost. With its bracing vision of interracial democracy and cultural liberation, their worldview was new to him. It was also inspiring, and before long he, too, embraced the tradition of dissent that the historian Carl Degler would later call The Other South.[11]

Sheldon’s in-laws introduced him to a wide variety of activists and intellectuals, especially after he and Lucy moved to Annapolis and the greater Washington area in 1959. Assigned to the Naval Academy for the last two years of his enlistment, he began to think seriously about the possibility of additional graduate work and a career as a professional historian. Fortunately, the Durrs’ circle of friends included C. Vann Woodward, the dean of Southern historians and a professor at nearby Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. When Sheldon first met him in 1961, Woodward had just published The Burden of Southern History, a major collection of essays on the search for Southern identity. Already familiar with Woodward’s classic works, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913, and The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Sheldon was drawn to the idea of studying under someone who had dedicated his life to the exploration of race, class, and the paradoxes of regional politics.[12]

Sheldon’s original intention was to apply to Johns Hopkins, but when Woodward left for a position at Yale in the fall of 1961 the student followed the teacher to New Haven. The next four years in Connecticut brought a whirlwind of activity as Sheldon faced the challenges of a rigorous graduate program while he and Lucy raised a family of three small children—Virginia, Fain, and Elizabeth. Exposure to several of the nation’s best historians, including Woodward, Edmund Morgan, and John Morton Blum, sharpened his skills and deepened his interest in political history, especially the often picaresque and dysfunctional politics of his native South.[13] Intrigued by the political traditions and peculiarities of his home state, he decided to write a dissertation that examined ideological and electoral continuity between Populism and progressivism in post-Reconstruction Alabama. This dissection of sequential reform traditions led him into uncharted areas of social theory and quantitative methods, necessitating long hours in the computer lab and extended research trips to the state archives in Montgomery.

Set against the backdrop of an intensifying struggle over civil rights, Sheldon’s periodic visits to Alabama reinforced his sense of the social and political relevance of historical research. During the turbulent early 1960s, Alabamians and other Southerners seemed to be burdened with many of the same problems—most notably disfranchisement, racial bigotry, and political demagoguery—that had plagued the Populists and progressives at the turn of the 20th century. As his mentors at Yale had predicted, the task of uncovering the roots of the region’s continuing dilemmas was a worthy enterprise that would allow him to combine his dual interests in historical scholarship and social change.

In 1965, just as the voting rights struggle in Alabama and Washington was coming to a climax, Sheldon accepted an instructorship in history at Princeton. With his dissertation largely completed, he packed up his family and moved 130 miles closer to the South and a career as a professional historian. At Princeton he joined a talented cadre of historians, several of whom—Wesley Frank Craven, Arthur S. Link, James M. McPherson, Martin B. Duberman, and James M. Banner Jr.—shared his interest in Southern and regional history.[14] As a junior faculty member, he quickly gained a reputation as a dedicated and inspiring teacher, especially among the students in his popular undergraduate course on the history of the South. From his opening statements on the colonial origins of slavery to his tantalizing closing lecture—Taps for the Southern Mystique?—he held Southerners and Northerners alike in rapt attention. Every aspect of his professorial life, from mentoring graduate students and training research assistants to organizing a campus American Civil Liberties Union chapter and chairing a special task force on black life at Princeton, was conducted with genuine enthusiasm and careful attention to detail. He also taught in a special Upward Bound program, collaborated with colleagues Dorothy Ross and James Banner in the creation of an innovative team-taught course on American social history, and helped found the university’s Afro-American Studies Program in 1969.[15] And, to the amazement of friends and colleagues, he somehow managed to fit it all in without any noticeable lapses in quality or commitment. With his understated Southern manner and disarmingly unpretentious competence, Sheldon was, as one former student later put it, the quintessence of cool.

Only the members of his immediate family had any real sense of the difficulty of balancing the demands of professional and personal life, of attending to the needs of students while raising a young family that included a developmentally challenged daughter. Despite these stresses and strains, he finished his thesis with a flourish during his first year on the faculty and with hardly a break began the long process of turning the completed manuscript into a book. Three years later, in 1969, Princeton University Press published Populism to Progressivism in Alabama, a gracefully written 390-page exposition of the complexity of Southern politics in the decades following Reconstruction.

Several reviewers marveled at the book’s innovative blend of traditional narrative and quantitative voting analysis and praised its highly nuanced treatment of the relationship between agrarian radicalism and progressive reform. The Progressives of the early 20th-century South, Sheldon concluded, were not neo-Populists, as John D. Hicks and several other historians had argued.[16] While they sometimes borrowed specific programs from the angry farmers who had challenged the ruling Bourbon Democrats of the 1880s and 1890s, they were actually harbingers of a new reform tradition, an urbanized and essentially forward-looking, Main Street version that would come to fruition during the New Deal. This argument was consistent with the Woodwardian view that discontinuity has been an essential element of Southern history.[17] But in other ways, particularly in its reliance on quantitative data, Sheldon’s book represented a new departure in Southern political historiography. Both the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association duly recognized and applauded its originality by awarding the book the prestigious Albert J. Beveridge and Charles S. Sydnor prizes, respectively.

This spectacular debut between hard covers confirmed Sheldon’s reputation as a pioneering practitioner of quantitative history. Earlier in the year, he had already published a landmark quantitative article in the American Historical Review. Southern Violence, which appeared in February 1969, also demonstrated his skills as an essayist, a forte that connected him to his mentor, Woodward, an acknowledged master of the essay form. Not even Woodward, however, had accepted the truly daunting task of melding hard data with lucid exposition and soaring prose. Relying on logic as well as multiple regression analysis, Sheldon set about to explain why Southerners have maimed and murdered one another with more regularity than have other Americans. Comparing state-level data on homicide and suicide, he measured the relative importance of the factors generally associated with the high level of violence in the South.

This led to the striking conclusion that, while a significant portion of the South’s proclivity for violence could be explained by these various measurable factors, the most important determinant of Southern violence—an insecure regional culture linked to a siege mentality—could not be measured statistically.[18] In effect, the very nature of Southern history, with its long string of peculiar institutions and lost causes, had inspired a violence-prone social psychology. As he put it so elegantly in the essay’s final paragraph, Being Southern, then, inevitably involves a feeling of persecution at times and a sense of being a passive, insignificant object of alien or impersonal forces. Such a historical experience has fostered a worldview that supports the denial of responsibility and locates threats to the region outside the region and threats to the person outside the self. From the Southern past arise the symbiosis and intense hostility toward strangers and the paradox is at the same time one of grace and violence.[19]

Sheldon’s exploration of violence below the Smith and Wesson line, a phrase he gleefully borrowed from the sociologist H. C. Brearly, earned him kudos from the historical profession and a pile of angry letters from his fellow Southerners.[20] One unreconstructed graduate student from Arkansas even wrote a letter of protest to the editors of the American Historical Review dismissing Sheldon’s essay as Yankee propaganda.[21] The young historian from Birmingham accepted this bit of irony with his usual grace and good humor and pressed on with his studies of the South’s paradoxical past. In 1971, during a year-long sabbatical leave, he returned to the subject of his dissertation and edited Populism: The Critical Issues, an anthology of articles that extended the debate over the causes and consequences of the Populist revolt and its relationship to traditions of reform and regional and national political culture. [22]

A year later, Sheldon followed up with "Origins of the New South in Retrospect," a Journal of Southern History article that surveyed an important part of his mentor’s legacy. In the article’s opening paragraphs, he offered a brilliant synopsis of Woodward’s interpretation of the post-Reconstruction South. Of one thing we may be certain at the outset, he insisted. "The durability of Origins of the New South is not a result of its ennobling and uplifting message. It is the story of the decay and decline of the aristocracy, the suffering and betrayal of the poor white, and the rise and transformation of a middle class. It is not a happy story. The Redeemers are revealed to be as venal as the carpetbaggers. The declining aristocracy are ineffectual and money hungry, and in the last analysis they subordinated the values of the political and social heritage in order to maintain control over the black population. The poor whites suffered from strange malignancies of racism and conspiracy-mindedness, and the rising middle class was timid and self-interested even in its reform movement. The most sympathetic characters in the whole sordid affair are simply those who are too powerless to be blamed for their actions."[23] The insights and elegant prose continued for more than 20 pages, closing with one of the most memorable passages in all of Southern historical writing. Woodward is certainly a humanizing historian, the former student wrote of his teacher, "one who recognizes both the likelihood of failure and the necessity of struggle. It is the profound ambiguity that makes his work so interesting. Like the myth of Sisyphus, Origins of the New South still speaks to our condition. And who knows? Perhaps some day we will get that rock to the top of the hill. But, having learned my skepticism at the master’s knee, I doubt it."[24]

In 1973 Sheldon demonstrated his intellectual versatility by producing two strikingly different publications. The first was Understanding the American Experience: Recent Interpretations, co-edited with James M. Banner Jr. and Barton J. Bernstein, two volumes that took a comprehensive look at modern American historiography, and the second was a brief but provocative essay published in The American Scholar.[25] In the essay, The South as a Counterculture, he explored the theme of regional identity through the lens of 1960s-style popular culture. With wide-ranging allusions to New Left radicals, the pop sociologists Theodore Roszak and Charles Reich, the novelists Donald Barthelme and Jerzy Kozinski, the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, and even the Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel, he arrived at the conclusion that the key to the Southern past is that Southerners are Americans who have taken on an additional identity through conflict with the North. Extending the argument first developed in Southern Violence, he declared that the Southern sense of separateness has been constructed on many layers of defensiveness, particularism, isolation, guilt, defeat, and the reactions to changes initiated from without: abolitionism, the Civil War, Reconstruction, poverty, depressions, industrialization and lately the civil rights movement.[26]

The last of these was an intensely personal matter for Sheldon, and he did what he could to maintain his ties to the ongoing civil rights struggle and related movements for peace and social justice, including the movement to end the war in Vietnam. While he believed that a measure of detachment is essential to good scholarship, he did not hesitate to speak out on public issues or to become involved in the broader Princeton community during the turbulent early 1970s. Indeed, beginning in 1971, he chaired the American Historical Association’s special committee on Academic Freedom and oversaw the preparation of its highly influential report, On the Rights of Historians.[27]

By this time, Sheldon had safely cleared the tenure hurdle and had actually moved on to the challenging and sometimes baffling world of academic administration. After cutting his administrative eye teeth by serving as associate chairman of the history department and by helping the distinguished British historian Lawrence Stone oversee the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, in 1972, at the academically tender age of 39, he accepted an appointment as Princeton’s provost. As the university’s chief academic officer, he was entrusted with the maintenance of high educational and scholarly standards, not to mention the well-being of students, staff, and faculty, including young colleagues who, like him, had been at Princeton for less than a decade. Indeed, his rise to academic leadership was so rapid that, during much of his tenure as provost, he and Lucy were still trying to pay off the balance of his graduate student loans.

Sheldon served as provost for three fruitful years, working closely with President William Bowen, a distinguished economist who happened to share Sheldon’s love of competitive tennis. A good team on and off the court, they steadily advanced the university’s interests during a time of bewildering flux in higher education. Combined with his calm and reasoned manner, Sheldon’s perspective as a professional historian served him well during this period of deep change, as he dealt with significant shifts in everything from student rights and faculty expectations to federal regulations and financial exigencies. Of course, the greatest challenge was to oversee Princeton’s long-delayed transition to coeducation, to integrate women into the life of the university and to make them feel welcome. Once again Sheldon’s sensibilities as a scholar and a Southerner—as someone who had devoted a great deal of attention to the process of social integration—came in handy on more than one occasion, especially when he had to deal with unreconstructed male alumni.

Sheldon’s administrative success at Princeton quickly led to other opportunities, and in 1975 he left ivy-covered Nassau Hall to assume the presidency of Tulane University in New Orleans. A century-old private university sometimes known as the Princeton of the South, Tulane nonetheless faced severe economic and administrative challenges that tested Sheldon’s stamina and ingenuity. During his six years in Louisiana, while Lucy earned a Tulane law degree, he worked tirelessly to place the university on a solid economic and academic footing, in part through a series of innovative partnerships with private corporations. In 1983, his creative approach to academic funding was highlighted in an edited volume, Partners in the Research Enterprise: University-Corporate Relations in Science and Technology.[28]

The Tulane years were rewarding, both professionally and culturally, as Sheldon and Lucy experienced the social whirl and culinary adventures of the Big Easy and the presidential residence at Audubon Place. Nevertheless, in 1980 they began to entertain thoughts of moving on to new challenges. Sheldon’s rising profile in the upper echelons of higher education brought new options, and in 1981 he accepted an offer to succeed Martin Meyerson as the president of the University of Pennsylvania. Leaving New Orleans was difficult, but he could not resist the dual lure of simultaneously leading one of the nation’s premier universities and joining a truly distinguished history and American Civilization faculty.[29]

Unfortunately, Sheldon did not begin his tenure in Philadelphia under the best of circumstances. Selected from a list of finalists that included a popular internal candidate, Provost Vartan Gregorian, he had to win over a somewhat recalcitrant faculty. Even more daunting was the challenge of reversing Penn’s declining overall condition. Despite its Ivy League status, the university was severely burdened by an aging campus infrastructure in need of restoration and by the deteriorating condition of West Philadelphia, the crime-infested neighborhood that surrounded the university.

No one, not even Sheldon, could fix all of these problems at once. But over the next twelve years, he gradually and painstakingly turned the university and its environs around. Drawing upon his knowledge of urban sociology and African American history, he recast the town-gown relationship in West Philadelphia by reaching out to local leaders and partnering with local agencies and businesses. The results were dramatic, with a positive spillover into all aspects of campus life. At the same time, he conducted an ambitious fundraising campaign—unprecedented in the university’s history—that generated more than a billion dollars in four years. This infusion of funds facilitated a makeover of everything from dormitories to research labs, and a notable expansion of Penn’s general education, hiring, and recruiting initiatives. He also allocated considerable time and money to controversial but highly successful efforts to bring gender equity and multi-cultural diversity to the university’s faculty, student body, and curriculum. Under his leadership, the proportion of women on campus and in positions of administrative authority reached historic levels, minority enrollment rose from 13 to 30 percent, and international student enrollment jumped from 1.2 to more than 10 percent. At the same time, admission standards became significantly more competitive, the amount of sponsored research doubled, and the size of the university’s endowment quintupled. Thus, by the time he stepped down in the summer of 1993, the struggling institution of the early 1980s had been transformed into a school on a definite upswing.

During his years at Penn, Sheldon developed a national reputation for creative and effective academic leadership and was in constant demand as a speaker and advisor on a wide range of issues related to higher education. He also served on national boards and committees including the NCAA President’s Commission and the boards of the Educational Testing Service, the Rockefeller Commission on the Humanities, the American Council on Education, the Association of American Universities, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. At one time or another during the 1980s and 1990s, he chaired the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching, and the Council of Ivy Group Presidents.

Sheldon found this whirl of activity to be fulfilling. But, at the age of 59—with the university he had grown to love on a secure footing—he left Philadelphia and the Penn presidency for Washington and the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an agency much in need of strong academic leadership after a decade of thinly veiled politicization. Retaining his tenured faculty status at Penn, he took an indefinite leave to become part of the new Clinton administration. Bill Clinton, the first Southern-born president since Jimmy Carter, had selected Sheldon, whom he had met on several occasions over the years, as the best choice to replace NEH chairperson Lynne Cheney, the wife of Republican insider and future vice president Dick Cheney. But during the confirmation process, several ultra-conservative Republicans, including Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, used Sheldon’s nomination as a convenient symbol of what they viewed as a misguided and dangerous turn toward secular humanism and multiculturalism. All of the nominee’s past actions and statements, including several recent decisions involving Penn students and free speech issues, were examined in the light of a Republican orthodoxy that all but rejected the core values of the humanities.

In a series of hearings reminiscent of the investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s, Sheldon suddenly became a whipping boy for essentially the same forces of reaction that he had often written about in his essays on Southern politics and culture. In the end, he received enough Senatorial support to sustain his nomination, but the experience of encountering the siege mentality at such a personal level was sobering to say the least. In 2002, he responded to his right-wing critics in a book-length chronicle, The Politics of Presidential Appointment: A Memoir of the Culture War.[30] During his four-year tenure as NEH chairman, he did his best to calm the waters of political controversy with a judicious and even-handed approach to the agency’s activities. Unfortunately, no amount of restraint or reasoned dialogue could deter the repeated attempts by Senator Helms and others to defund the NEH. Forced into a holding action, Sheldon was able to save the Endowment from extinction. But many of the bold humanities initiatives that he had hoped to bring to the fore died for lack of funding. His greatest success was an extensive series of public programs that generated a National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity. Sheldon himself contributed greatly to the conversation with a number of speeches and essays, many of which became part of his 1997 book One America Indivisible. Weaving together sectional and national themes, he advanced the dialogue on American identity to a new plane of sophistication and involvement with the humanities.[31]

All of this was worthwhile, and the years in Washington provided Lucy with the opportunity to work with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund. Eventually, however, Sheldon decided it was time to leave the Washington scene to return to teaching. On August 1, 1997, he resigned from the NEH and in September returned to Penn as a full-time member of the history faculty. To his delight, the university and the department welcomed him back with open arms and in 2003 honored him with an appointment as the inaugural David Boies Professor of History. Returning to his first loves of teaching and scholarship at an age when many others would have chosen retirement, he set out to disprove the old adage that there are no second acts in American life. While he studiously avoided any involvement in the affairs of central administration—he did not want to undercut his successor’s authority—he embraced his professorial duties with the alacrity of an untenured rookie. Determined to do his fair share, he took on a large number of advisees, willingly taught new courses requiring considerable preparation and planning, and even served a term as departmental chair. According to Drew Gilpin Faust, who co-taught a course with him, the former president did everything but sweep the floor. In 2001, he won the university-wide Lindback Award for distinguished teaching, a degree of honor conferred on precious few ex-presidents at Penn or anywhere else.

Sheldon also returned to the world of academic research and writing, re-engaging with the discipline of history at conferences and on the printed page. In 1999, he published an essay on Little Rock and the Promise of America, originally delivered as a paper at a conference marking the fortieth anniversary of the 1957 Central High School desegregation crisis, and a year later, following C. Vann Woodward’s recent death, the Journal of Southern History published Sheldon’s moving tribute to his cherished mentor, C. Vann Woodward, 1908–1999: In Memoriam. In 2001, he contributed a lively essay titled The Contradictory South, to the winter issue of Southern Cultures. Revisiting and refining some of themes in his 1972 essay, The South as a Counterculture, he concluded: The South is full of exemplary Americans and of alternative Americans at the same time. The American identity is multifaceted, and it changes over time, but whatever it is at any one time, the South is both American and its opposite, both endorser and critic. In short, Southerners, both black and white, live with paradox.[32]

Woodward was no longer around to take part in the dialogue that he had inspired so many years before, but Sheldon carried on as best he could with a 2003 essay "Origins of the New South in Retrospect: Thirty Years Later. In 2004, he went on to explore the contemporary implications of persistent regional distinctiveness in Identity Politics, Southern Style," one of several hard-hitting think pieces to appear in Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent, a volume of opinion edited by Anthony Dunbar, the son of Leslie Dunbar, the long-time executive director of the Southern Regional Council and close friend of the Durrs. In the dispiriting Age of Bush, it seemed, the Age of Roosevelt was mercifully still relevant—as was the work of a senior scholar at the top of his game.

In 2005, most of Sheldon’s historical essays, new and old, were collected and published under the title Magnolias Without Moonlight: The American South from Regional Confederacy to National Integration. The consistently eloquent and insightful quality of the collection alerted his fellow Southern historians to just how much he and the profession had sacrificed during his years as an administrator. Paul Gaston of the University of Virginia spoke for many when he offered an admiring but bittersweet blurb for the back cover: These wise and elegant essays on what it means and has meant to be both Southern and American should remind us of how fortunate we are to have Sheldon Hackney back among us, instructing us as historian and writer, after his long sojourn as university president and NEH chairman. He unravels ironies and complexities, reveals the bright moon that sometimes has shone on us, but always keeps his eye on the defeat, failure, and downright meanness that has been part of our history. These essays may help us to lighten the burdens.[33]

Fortunately, the bright moon of Sheldon’s scholarship, to borrow Gaston’s apt phrase, continued to shine during his final years at Penn. Moving into his seventies with no letup, he undertook the ambitious new project of writing an intellectual biography of Woodward. Thinking that this effort to comprehend and explain the special genius of his mentor might close the circle, personally as well as professionally, he revisited many of the probing and unsettling questions that he had first encountered in Woodward’s seminars 40 years earlier. When Sheldon finally retired from Penn in 2010, at the age of 76, he was still hard at work unraveling the complexities and paradoxes of the outsider as insider, as he came to describe Woodward’s distinctive perspective.[34]

Sheldon’s retirement years, if they can be called that, have been spent on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where he and his family have been summer residents since the mid-1960s. The early purchase of a seaside house in the village of Vineyard Haven led to a web of close friendships and inclusion in a community of writers and artists, several of whom have strong ties to the South. Next-door neighbors Bill and Rose Styron, in particular, were at the center of a lively group of Southern expatriates that gave (and continue to give) the Hackney family’s summers a twist of regional familiarity (offset only by Sheldon’s deepening involvement in Yankee history as a volunteer at the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society). This nurturing southern Massachusetts enclave has become home, not only for Sheldon and Lucy, but also for their children and grandchildren.[35] As with the real South, their sense of place on the Vineyard carries elements of joy and sorrow, and in 2007 Sheldon and Lucy suffered the loss of their beloved eldest daughter, Virginia, who had spent most of her life on the island. But not even pain of this magnitude could break the spirit of a man of uncommon character who has blessed us all with his wisdom and fortitude. This strength of character, above all else, surely will be his greatest legacy.[36]

In recognition of Sheldon’s long life as a gentleman and a scholar, and of his wise counsel and innumerable kindnesses, we offer this volume as an expression of our gratitude and respect. Each of us enjoys a close connection with Sheldon, and taken together the individual essays below demonstrate the breadth and depth of his influence.

The intellectual historian Michael O’Brien and Sheldon share an interest in the life and thought of C. Vann Woodward, and O’Brien has recently edited a selection of Woodward’s letters. In The Proslavery Argument and Nazi Ideology, he revisits a theme often hazarded but seldom analyzed in depth, the question of whether the antebellum white South and the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler had much in common. On the whole, O’Brien concludes that they did not, a conclusion that aligns him, at least for this purpose, with Hannah Arendt.

After Randall Kennedy completed an undergraduate lecture course on the American South with Sheldon at Princeton, the teacher and former student remained in contact and Sheldon became an encouraging cheerleader for the emerging legal scholar and public intellectual. In On Judging Nat Turner, Kennedy returns to a challenging undergraduate assignment—exploring the ethical and moral implications of the Nat Turner rebellion by examining issues raised by William Styron’s controversial 1968 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Asking whether Nat Turner should be viewed as a hero, Kennedy concludes that anyone who deploys violence excessively should not be deemed heroic. Even slaves, he argues, must be held to fundamental ethical norms.  

James M. McPherson, like Sheldon, was a student of Woodward’s, but at Johns Hopkins. In 1965, McPherson welcomed Hackney as a colleague at Princeton, where as intellectuals, tennis players, and co-teachers, they became a remarkable team. At Princeton the students sometimes got a special treat when the two professors held joint sessions of their respective graduate seminars on the history of African Americans, the Civil War and Reconstruction, or the South. In a fitting tribute to Sheldon’s years in the navy, the McPherson essay below deals with American Navies and British Neutrality during the Civil War. Because the Civil War spilled over onto the high seas and involved serious interruptions to foreign trade by both the Union navy and Confederate commerce raiders, these naval actions threatened to bring foreign intervention. McPherson discusses the reasons why that intervention did not happen.

When Sheldon became president at the University of Pennsylvania, he found a kindred spirit in the talented, young historian, Drew Faust. Their friendship and a shared love of Southern history found expression in a graduate course they co-taught on Gender and Southern History after Sheldon returned to Penn from the NEH in 1997. In The True Picture as It Really Was: Seeing the Civil War in Art and Experience, Faust explores the challenge of how participants and creative artists struggled in parallel ways to represent the Civil War and its horrors. The difficulty of capturing war’s experience in existing verbal or visual forms led to innovations in artistic genres—and in human expression and understanding, as soldiers and artists alike strove to develop, in the words of one Confederate, the true picture as it really was of the horrific realities of war.

Sheldon was chair of the University of Pennsylvania history department when Stephanie McCurry became a new member of the history faculty. From the outset, he took great pride in her accomplishments and later worked to keep her at Penn when other schools called. Prompted by an implicit challenge from historians of other civil wars in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, McCurry’s Civil War—Ours and Theirs reflects on what is exceptional about the U.S. Civil War and what is not. Her comparative perspective throws into relief some discernible patterns (secessionist origins and state centralizing tendencies, for example) and challenges the romantic and exceptionalist assumptions that underlie so many histories of the American Civil War. Ultimately, she suggests, it is the postwar history—particularly the flourishing of a commercial culture of remembering, Union and Confederate—that makes our Civil War different.

As a Princeton undergraduate during the mid-1960s, J. Mills Thornton III studied and wrote his senior thesis under Sheldon’s direction and then followed his mentor’s path to Yale to study for his PhD under Woodward. Also sharing Sheldon’s Alabama roots—and Lucy Hackney’s hometown of Montgomery—he used his home state as a laboratory to understand the American South. In Alabama Emancipates, he explains that the timing of the emancipation of Alabama’s slaves was a matter of heated debate, initially at the state’s constitutional convention of 1865, and subsequently within the state Supreme Court, during both Presidential and Radical Reconstructions. These debates cast a revealing light on the efforts of Alabama’s whites to understand the meaning of emancipation.

Steven Hahn joined the History Department of the University of Pennsylvania when Sheldon, a fellow student of Southern Populism, was departmental chairman. Colleagues and close friends, they co-taught a seminar on the American South. In Did the Civil War Matter? Hahn notes that in recent sesquicentennial-related discussions there has been surprisingly little interest in the war’s legacy. Examining the West as well as the South, Hahn shows the impact the war had on the course of American development, especially in the composition of class power. Looking at the ways in which the world, and the United States, would have been different if the Civil War had not occurred, Hahn concludes with a set of counterfactuals to emphasize his exciting points and suggestions.

When trying to decide which graduate school to attend, Orville Vernon Burton received a long and encouraging personal letter from Sheldon Hackney at Princeton. In one of the best decisions he ever made, Burton chose to study Southern history at Princeton with Sheldon, who became the co-advisor (with James McPherson) of his dissertation. In Revisiting the Black Matriarchy, Burton returns to that dissertation and earlier work to explore why scholars and the public have argued that there was a matriarchy. Burton finds the answer in how scholars went about doing their research—how their methodology often led to confusion and an inability to discern the difference between the social dynamics and demographic realities of rural towns and the countryside.

After David Moltke-Hansen moved to Philadelphia to become president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in August 1999, he and Sheldon became friends and collaborators. The two Southern historians worked together on the planning and organization of two important conferences, the 2003 annual meeting of Southern Intellectual History Circle held in Philadelphia and the 2006 meeting of the Saint George Tucker Society held in Augusta and Thomson, Georgia. In his essay, Turn Signals: Shifts in Values in Southern Life Writing, Moltke-Hansen begins with that 2006 conference, which had facilitated an extended discussion of Tom Watson and his biographer C. Vann Woodward, both of whom saw the South as a place of conflict—although they understood those conflicts very differently. Reflecting on a subject that has yet to receive its due from the scholarly community—the complex interplay between biographers and their subjects—Moltke-Hansen examines the often deep personal, ideological commitments of life-writers. Ranging across the broad sweep of Southern history and biography, he offers provocative and thought-provoking commentary on several related genres.

Woodward introduced his student Sheldon Hackney to Charles Joyner after a history conference panel in the early 1970s, and nearly a quarter century later, in 1993, Sheldon, as NEH chairman, presented Joyner with the South Carolina Humanities Council’s Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities. Joyner’s A Southern Radical and his Songs, follows the career of the Arkansas-born singer and songwriter Lee Hays from his youthful experiences organizing a biracial labor union in the 1930s, through his performing as part of the Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie in the 1940s, to the Weavers’ popular stardom and blacklisting in the 1950s. Hays’s communal living and communal composition, and his complex relationship with the Communist Party, are explored with candor and compassion.

In 1978, while researching her PhD dissertation, Patricia Sullivan met Lucy Hackney’s mother, Virginia, an encounter that would turn into a friendship and ultimately lead to the edited volume, Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years. Virginia Durr spent the summers on Martha’s Vineyard with Lucy and Sheldon, and after a number of visits to the Vineyard to work on Freedom Writer with Virginia, Pat bought a house on the island, becoming part of the local Durr-Hackney circle. In "Lessons Along the Color Line: Radicals, New Dealers and Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel," Sullivan considers how Woodward’s 1938 book on the Populist movement influenced a generation of Southerners as they worked to organize a cross-racial movement for economic justice and civil rights. In exploring how these Southerners viewed the struggles of the 1930s through their understanding of the fleeting experiment in interracial alliance of the 1890s, Sullivan offers a fresh look at the efforts to advance economic and political democracy in the South during the New Deal.

Lani Guinier began teaching in the law school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, when Sheldon was president. In 1993, the same year that Sheldon was subjected to the grueling but ultimately successful confirmation hearings on his appointment as NEH chairman, Guinier had an even tougher time as an unsuccessful nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Nonetheless, five years later, she became the first tenured black female professor at Harvard Law School. In "From Racial Liberalism to Racial Literacy: Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Divergence Dilemma," an essay previously published in the Journal of American History in 2004, she argues that the cause of racial discrimination in America was not segregation per se, but rather the important role that race played (and still plays) in diverting attention away from the economic burdens suffered by poor and working class whites. Instead of linking racial prejudice to class injustice, the authors of the Brown decision focused on the centrality of race alone in the formulation of prejudice among working-class whites. Guinier proposes a paradigm shift away from the racial liberalism that has dominated political thought since Brown; in the interests of true equity, she would substitute a new way of thinking that recognizes race’s interplay with class and geography.

For more than a decade, Tom Sugrue was a colleague of Sheldon’s in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania where both taught the history of America in the 1960s and shared personal and scholarly interests in civil rights history. Sugrue currently holds the David Boies Professorship of History and Sociology, formerly held by Sheldon. A specialist in the history of the civil rights struggle north of the Mason-Dixon line, Sugrue examines a little-known aspect of this struggle in ‘The Goddamn Boss’: Cecil B. Moore, Philadelphia, and the Reshaping of Black Urban Politics. Exploring the transformation of black urban politics through the controversial career of Cecil B. Moore, Sugrue follows Moore’s life from his service in the segregated Marine Corps during World War II, to his shift from Republican to Democratic Party affiliation, to his insurgency in the local NAACP, to his embrace of the rhetoric of black self-determination and militancy, and to his belated career as an elected official. Moore’s trajectory, Sugrue suggests, underscores the improvisational nature of the black freedom struggle, highlighting both the gains and limitations of grassroots black activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Raymond Arsenault studied Southern history with Sheldon as a Princeton undergraduate. From 1967 to 1969, he served as Sheldon’s research assistant, and he also wrote his senior honors thesis on Southern Populism and progressivism under Sheldon’s direction. One of his first tasks as a research assistant was to compile a book of documents dealing with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–56, so it is fitting that his contribution to the present volume is The Montgomery Bus Boycott and American Politics. Arsenault addresses the local politics of white segregationists and the political activism of the Montgomery Improvement Association, but his primary focus is the broader regional and national political context of the boycott. Public opinion, the role of the press, and the responses—or in some cases the lack of responses—to the boycott by Southern Democrats and the leaders of the Republican Eisenhower Administration are viewed as important elements of the Montgomery story.

Sheldon and Paul Gaston have enjoyed a long friendship based on mutual respect and common intellectual and political interests. Since the 1960s, Sheldon has admired Gaston’s engaged scholarship and the dedication to racial justice expressed in his long-time association with the NAACP and the Southern Regional Council. In The Double Death of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gaston displays a keen analytical eye in examining how conservatives and the New Right in politics have manipulated King’s story and legacy. Gaston warns of the counterproductive ways in which some Americans have reacted to the thrust for freedom that King and the civil rights movement represented.

William R. Ferris, who succeeded Sheldon as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1997, offers a multi-media contribution in Birmingham, 1978: A Photographic Homage to Sheldon Hackney. In the text, Ferris discusses his associations with Sheldon and offers some insights on what Sheldon has meant to education in the United States. He then turns to a series of photographs that he took in 1978 while visiting Sheldon’s hometown of Birmingham. Through these powerful images, he speaks to the power of place in one of the South most hidebound communities.

Peyton McCrary was a history graduate student at Princeton in the 1960s, and Sheldon served on his PhD dissertation committee, which was chaired by James McPherson. McCrary’s "Minority Representation in Alabama: The Pivotal Case of Dillard County v. Crenshaw County" explores the key role played by historical evidence of racially discriminatory intent in a significant voting rights case. This case ended the use of discriminatory at-large elections in 176 counties, municipalities, and school boards in Sheldon’s home state of Alabama in the 1980s. By the end of the decade African American voters in Alabama were represented on local governing bodies by their preferred candidates at a rate approximating their proportion of the voting-age population in their community. McCrary thus views the case as one of the signal achievements of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

J. Morgan Kousser was a Princeton undergraduate in the 1960s, and like Sheldon, he wrote his PhD dissertation at Yale under the supervision of Woodward. Both Woodward students were pioneers in quantitative history, applying this new methodology to the study of Southern politics and disfranchisement. In Strange Career and the Need for a Second Reconstruction of Race Relations, Kousser shows that Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow was not only an effort to rewrite the history of segregation in broad strokes, emphasizing the importance of laws in maintaining white supremacy; it was also an attempt to launch a history of race relations that would help to bring about a more egalitarian society. In recent years, Kousser believes, historians enthralled with cultural approaches to history have largely dismissed the relevance of history to public policy debates. More specifically, they have misread and wrongfully criticized Woodward’s history of Jim Crow, all but abandoning his larger projects. Discussing trends in different aspects of race relations research and in various historians’ approaches to the subject since the 1955 publication of The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Kousser calls for a revival of the Woodward thesis and a rededication to Woodward’s public policy orientation.

In the volume’s final essay, Sheldon Hackney himself offers a brief intellectual biography of his mentor. In this overview of Woodward’s life, C. Vann Woodward: The Outsider as Insider, Sheldon gives us a