||Introduction: Southern communities during the long nineteenth century / Steven E. Nash and Bruce E. Stewart -- Creating communities. Gullah and Ebo: reconsidering early Lowcountry African American communities / Ras Michael Brown ; The ties that bind: slaveholding kinship networks in the Toe Valley / Kevin W. Young ; Divided loyalties: the Fain family in an East Tennessee civil war / Katharine S. Dahlstrand ; An emotional rebellion: wrecking the Old South's emotional community / Kyle N. Osborn -- Conflicting communities. A slaveholding unionist in the secession crisis: Reverend Dr. George Junkin and Lexington, Virginia, in peace and civil war / Barton A. Myers -- "In search of all that was near and dear to me": desertion as a window into community divisions in Caldwell County during the Civil War / Judkin Browning ; Fighting the "Laurel War": the Civil War inside the Henry household / Steven E. Nash ; Reinterpreting John Noland: community coercion theory and the black Confederate debate / Matthew C. Hulbert ; "Full of danger to the community": driving the Mormons from Brasstown in late nineteenth-century North Carolina / Mary Ella Engel -- Community and the commons: Richmond Pearson and the Buncombe County stock law revolt of 1885-87 / Luke Manget -- Re-creating communities. Too south of the South: a Louisiana family searches for community in Cuba / Robert C. Poister ; "Yankees invade the South again": race, reconciliation, and the 1913 national Grand Army of the Republic encampment at Chattanooga, Tennessee / Samuel B. McGuire ; The Lucy Cobb Institute: Mildred Lewis Rutherford and her mission to preserve an idealized southern community / Katherine E. Rohrer -- Rocks in a whirlwind: protest and alienation in southern autobiography / George W. Justice -- Afterword: The Inscoe connection / Stephen Berry.
||"Building upon recent scholarship, this anthology explores the nature of community in the American South during the long nineteenth century. The fourteen essays, written and compiled in honor of historian John C. Inscoe, define community as more than a place or a nostalgic longing for a lost way of life; instead, they view community as a web of social relationships, both voluntary and coercive. Importantly, the contributors recognize that there was never a singular Southern community. A diverse population of Southerners built a multitude of communities across the region. Neither do the contributors romanticize nineteenth-century communities, pointing out that they were often rife with discord and competition. The collected essays analyze Southern communities through identity formation, conflict, and memory. The essays in the first section chronicle the construction of four communities before and during the Civil War: the enslaved, the slaveholding, the Confederate, and the emotional. The second section includes six essays that examine the role that civil war, emancipation, and modernization played in challenging community cohesion, while the final section explores how white southerners often turned to memory and nostalgia to reconstruct communities in ways that preserved the Old South's racial and gender status quo well into the twentieth century. Stephen Berry's afterword highlights the career of John Inscoe"-- Provided by publisher.