Drew Gilpin Faust

""Drew Gilpin Faust writes about coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America. A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial hierarchy proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become "well adjusted" and to fill the role of a poised young lady...

When Confederate men marched off to battle, white women across the South confronted unaccustomed and unsought responsibilities: directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. As southern women struggled "to do a man's business," they found themselves compelled to reconsider their most fundamental assumptions about their identities and about the larger meaning of womanhood. Drew Faust offers a...

For more than 40 years, Sally Mann has made experimental, elegiac, and hauntingly beautiful photographs that explore the overarching themes of existence: memory, desire, death, the bonds of family, and nature's magisterial indifference to human endeavor. What unites this broad body of work-portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and other studies-is that it is all "bred of a place," the American South. Mann, who is a native of Lexington, Virginia, has...

Essays by noted historians, folklorists, and archaeologists portray the broad contours and details of African American life under slavery, both on the plantation and in Southern cities. Color and black and white images abound.