AS IF NOTHING SHOULD BE LOST: MICHAEL O'BRIEN, THE AMERICAN SOUTH, AND THE COSMOPOLITAN IDEAL

When groups of historians studying the American South got together in the late 1970s there was a clannish feel, mostly white, mostly male. Mostly southern, too, and while non-southerners were not unwelcome they were noticed. Why are you interested in studying us? was asked politely, with a hint of a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Modern intellectual history 2016-04, Vol.13 (1), p.209-236
Main Author: STOWE, STEVEN M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Essay
Historians
Intellectuals
O Brien, Michael
Studies
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Summary:When groups of historians studying the American South got together in the late 1970s there was a clannish feel, mostly white, mostly male. Mostly southern, too, and while non-southerners were not unwelcome they were noticed. Why are you interested in studying us? was asked politely, with a hint of a hidden punchline, a question for outsiders. So it is a strange turn that an outsider, Michael O'Brien, a soft-spoken, level Englishman, began a career in that decade which would make him one of the leading historians of the South in the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Maybe even stranger is that he did this as a historian of southern intellectual life.
ISSN:1479-2443
1479-2451
DOI:10.1017/S1479244316000020