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The University of North Carolina Press
1360 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 100 illus., notes, bibl., index
Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860
2006 American Studies Network Book Prize, American Studies Network
Winner of the 2005 Bancroft Prize, Columbia University
2005 Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Book on the History of the United States
Co-Winner of the 2005 Merle Curti Award, Organization of American Historians
Winner of the 2005 Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award, Southern Historical Association
Winner of the 2005 C. Hugh Holman Award, Society for the Study of Southern Literature
In this magisterial history of intellectual life, Michael O'Brien analyzes the lives and works of antebellum Southern thinkers and reintegrates the South into the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history.
O'Brien finds that the evolution of Southern intellectual life paralleled and modified developments across the Atlantic by moving from a late Enlightenment sensibility to Romanticism and, lastly, to an early form of realism. Volume 1 describes the social underpinnings of the Southern intellect by examining patterns of travel and migration; the formation of ideas on race, gender, ethnicity, locality, and class; and the structures of discourse, expressed in manuscripts and print culture. In Volume 2, O'Brien looks at the genres that became characteristic of Southern thought. Throughout, he pays careful attention to the many individuals who fashioned the Southern mind, including John C. Calhoun, Louisa McCord, James Henley Thornwell, and George Fitzhugh.
Placing the South in the larger tradition of American and European intellectual history while recovering the contributions of numerous influential thinkers and writers, O'Brien's masterwork demonstrates the sophistication and complexity of Southern intellectual life before 1860.
"Provides the most ambitious, sophisticated, and detailed intellectual history of the Old South yet written. Its scale and scope are astonishing, its analysis illuminating, and its prose graceful."
--Journal of the Early Republic
"[A] truly magisterial and encyclopedic study."
--Amerikastudien
"A deeply impressive effort. It will stand as one of the most important books in antebellum Southern intellectual life for a long time."
--Civil War History
"'Magisterial,' 'Masterpiece,' and 'tour de force' are some of the words reviewers have already employed to describe this work, the most important study of southern history and intellectual life since Jay B. Hubbell. . . . . O'Brien's remarkable scholarship helps us to understand the individual achievements of these southern thinkers."
--H-South
"Conjectures of Order is an astonishing book. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, it chronicles the lives, thoughts, and varying fortunes of intellectuals in the Old South from early in the nineteenth century up to the Civil War. . . . Michael O'Brien addresses not only what rendered Southern thinking distinctive, but the entire tapestry of intellectual life as it was conducted in the Old South. . . . O'Brien's work is distinguished from anything that has gone before by his command of detail."
--Times Literary Supplement
"O'Brien's massive 1,202 page work is a great achievement. It is hard to imagine anyone matching it for depth, scope and subtlety of analysis as a whole or in its parts."
--Journal of American Studies
Cloth: $125.00
© 2009 The University of North Carolina Press
116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808
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