The Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives holdings support scholarship on a wide range of topics. Books listed below include a selection of recent publications by researchers who have utilized resources from our collection. This list will be updated periodically and will generally include around 15-20 books from the last four or five years.
2023
The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past, by Paul J. Gutacker (Oxford University Press, February 1, 2023)
Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and “the Bible alone.” The Old Faith in a New Nation challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals found themselves returning, time and again, to Christian history. They studied religious historiography, reinterpreted the history of the church, and argued over its implications for the present. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, American Protestants were deeply interested in the meaning of the Christian past.
Paul J. Gutacker draws from hundreds of print sources-sermons, books, speeches, legal arguments, political petitions, and more-to show how ordinary educated Americans remembered and used Christian history. While claiming to rely on the Bible alone, antebellum Protestants frequently turned to the Christian past on questions of import: how should the government relate to religion? Could Catholic immigrants become true Americans? What opportunities and rights should be available to women? To African Americans? Protestants across denominations answered these questions not only with the Bible but also with history. By recovering the ways in which American evangelicals remembered and used Christian history, The Old Faith in a New Nation shows how religious memory shaped the nation and interrogates the meaning of “biblicism.”
Paul Gutacker is part-time lecturer in American and World History at Baylor University and serves as director of Brazos Fellows in Waco, Texas.
2022
Southern Baptists Re-Observed, edited by Keith Harper (University of Tennessee Press, November 3, 2022)
In 1993, sociologist Nancy Ammerman published an edited collection, Southern Baptists Observed, that assayed the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) as the conservative takeover of the denomination was triumphant and expanding. This volume examines the state of the SBC now that it has been under conservative control for a generation. Rather than asking where that change in leadership came from, the question here is what has happened since.
The sweeping success of the conservative takeover – based on enforcing doctrinal fidelity, especially on issues like biblical inerrancy and so-called complementarianism, a rejection of modern, secular values, and advanced international missionary work – veiled a weakness at its very heart. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the conservative resurgence failed to attract new members and, even worse, the younger generation who had grown up in the SBC were fleeing the denomination – nearly half of them are leaving the church as adults and never coming back. The contributors to this volume all offer insights into the question of why. While conservatives dominate the SBC’s governance, they have failed to resolve issues that preoccupy its members and the larger society, including those related to gender, homosexuality, race, and abuse.
The essays are grouped under four broad categories: Truth and Freedom: Baptist Institutions and Contentious Issues; Defining and Defending Biblical Truth: Staking the Boundaries; Apologies, Reconciliation, and Continuing Reality; and the View from Outside. With an introduction by editor Keith Harper contextualizing the history of the movement and the issues it faces today, this collection is sure to add new insight into this influential denomination.
Keith Harper is senior professor of Baptist Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina.
The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement, by Neall W. Pogue (Cornell University Press, April 15, 2022)
In The Nature of the Religious Right, Neall W. Pogue examines how white conservative evangelical Christians became a political force known for hostility toward environmental legislation. Before the 1990s, this group used ideas of nature to help construct the religious right movement while developing theologically based, eco-friendly philosophies that can be described as Christian environmental stewardship. On the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day in 1990, members of this conservative evangelical community tried to turn their eco-friendly philosophies into action. Yet this attempt was overwhelmed by a growing number in the leadership who made anti-environmentalism the accepted position through public ridicule, conspiracy theories, and cherry-picked science.
Through analysis of rhetoric, political expediency, and theological imperatives, The Nature of the Religious Right explains how ideas of nature played a role in constructing the conservative evangelical political movement, why Christian environmental stewardship was supported by members of the community for so long, and why they turned against it so decidedly beginning in the 1990s.
Neall Pogue is Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Like a River Glorious: The Biography of John Paul Newport, by Karen O’Dell Bullock (1845Books, April 1, 2022)
John Paul Newport was perhaps the most influential American Baptist philosopher and apologist of the twentieth century. He became legendary as a Baptist statesman, scholar, peacemaker, and transformational professor, who supervised more than fifty PhD students in philosophy, apologetics, theology, biblical studies, and world religions. Written from the unpublished autobiographical papers of John Newport, this official biography, Like a River Glorious, examines the life and legacy of one of America’s premier Baptist scholars.
Newport studied with the best minds of his day and taught for more than fifty years in Baptist colleges and seminaries, as well as at Rice University. He was also a churchman in pulpits across the South, serving as interim pastor in more than 150 churches in four states. His best-known book, Life’s Ultimate Questions, synthesized the most-asked questions about what it means to live as a human being, and anchored his responses in a reasoned, philosophical, and biblical worldview. Newport spent most of his career at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary where he chaired the philosophy department and served as vice president of academic affairs and provost. He was also the special consultant to then-president Russell Dilday and helped to lead the institution through some of its most difficult days.
Newport was an open, approachable, and eminently constructive Christian in his day, inviting his audiences to engage with the world of ideas, other Christians, and people of non-Christian faiths. The story of his unparalleled and remarkable journey unfolds in these pages, a testament to his legacy and an invitation for future Christian leaders to follow in his wake.
Karen Bullock is Professor of Christian Heritage and Director of the Ph.D. program at B.H. Carroll Theological Institute in Irving, Texas.
2021
The Southern Baptist Convention & Civil Rights, 1954-1995: Conservative Theology, Segregation, and Change, by David Roach (Pickwick Publications, December 17, 2021)
According to conventional wisdom, theological liberals led the Southern Baptist Convention to reject segregation and racism in the twentieth century. That’s only half the story. Liberals criticized segregation before mainstream Southern Baptists. They created racially integrated ministry opportunities. They pressed the Southern Baptist Convention to reject segregation. Yet historians have discounted the role of conservative theology in the convention’s shift away from racial segregation and prejudice. This book chronicles how conservative theology proved remarkably compatible with efforts toward racial justice in America’s largest Protestant denomination between 1954 and 1995. At times conservative theology was even a catalyst for rejecting racial prejudice. Efforts to eradicate racism and segregation were, in fact, least successful when they appealed to the social gospel or appeared to draw from liberal theology.
David Roach is pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Saraland, Alabama.
The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era, by Jesse Curtis (New York University Press, November 9, 2021)
The Myth of Colorblind Christians reveals the little-known story of black and white evangelical encounters that brought us to our age of divisive politics and splintering churches. Amid the upheavals of the civil rights movement, black evangelicals insisted there must be no color line in the body of Christ. In an effort to preserve the credibility of their movement, white evangelicals discarded theologies of white supremacy and embraced a new theology of Christian colorblindness. But instead of using this colorblind theology for anti-racist purposes, white evangelicals spent decades investing in whiteness in the name of spreading the gospel.
White evangelicals’ turn to a theology of colorblindness enabled them to create an evangelical brand of whiteness that claimed the center of evangelicalism and shaped the politics of race throughout American life. Christian colorblindness became a key marker of evangelical identity and infused the politics of colorblindness with sacred fervor. Historically nuanced and as urgent as today’s headlines, The Myth of Colorblind Christians is a book that will change what you thought you knew about evangelicals and race.
Jesse Curtis is Assistant Professor of History at Valparaiso University.
In the Name of God: The Colliding Lives, Legends, and Legacies of J. Frank Norris and George W. Truett, by O. S. Hawkins (Broadman and Holman Academic, September 1, 2021)
In the Name of God tells the story of two iconic figures of national lore. George W. Truett and J. Frank Norris dominated the ecclesiology and church culture of much of the first half of the twentieth century, not only in Texas, but in the whole of America. Norris, of First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, and Truett, of First Baptist Church in Dallas, lived lives of conflict and controversy. Each led one of the largest churches in the world in the 1920s and & ’30s. Each shot and killed a man, one by accident and the other in self-defense. Together, their lives were a panoply of intrigue, espionage, confrontation, manipulation, plotting, scheming, and even blackmail – in the name of God. Yet together . . . they changed the world.
O. S. Hawkins is President Emeritus of GuideStone Financial Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Southern Baptists: A History of a Confessional People, by Slayden A. Yarbrough and Michael Kuykendall (McFarland and Company, Inc., August 26, 2021)
Southern Baptists have a unique and colorful story. Birthed in the time of slavery controversy, their theology on this and human rights issues has changed as cultural and societal developments occurred. One thing that never changed, however, was their zeal for evangelism. They eventually grew to become the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Later, a major controversy in the late twentieth century pitted conservative Baptists against moderates. Both sides, however, wrote histories of the controversy from their own perspectives. These histories were significant for understanding how each side interpreted the events. These pages attempt to fill a missing gap. Readers will hear the Southern Baptist story from both sides. Understand from this how Southern Baptists work, think, grow, argue, and have changed over time. They have weathered the ups and downs of history to reveal an ever-growing heritage.
Slayden A. Yarbrough is a Professor Emeritus of Religion at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Michael Kuykendall is a Professor of New Testament Studies Gateway Seminary in Ontario, California.
Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism, by Nicholas T. Pruitt (NYU Press, June 22, 2021)
Open Hearts, Closed Doors uncovers the largely overlooked role that liberal Protestants played in fostering cultural diversity in America and pushing for new immigration laws during the forty years following the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. These efforts resulted in the complete reshaping of the US cultural and religious landscape.
During this period, mainline Protestants contributed to the national debate over immigration policy and joined the charge for immigration reform, advocating for a more diverse pool of newcomers. They were successful in their efforts, and in 1965 the quota system based on race and national origin was abolished. But their activism had unintended consequences, because the liberal immigration policies they supported helped to end over three centuries of white Protestant dominance in American society.
Yet, Pruitt argues, in losing their cultural supremacy, mainline Protestants were able to reassess their mission. They rolled back more strident forms of xenophobia, substantively altering the face of mainline Protestantism and laying foundations for their responses to today’s immigration debates. More than just a historical portrait, this volume is a timely reminder of the power of religious influence in political matters.
Nicholas Pruitt is Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts.
The Strangers in Our Midst: American Evangelicals and Immigration from the Cold War to the Twenty-First Century, by Ulrike Elisabeth Stockhausen (Oxford University Press, June 22, 2021)
Evangelical Christians in the United States today are known for their hard-line, restrictive approach to immigration and refugees. This book shows that this has not always been the case and is, in fact, a relatively new position. The history of evangelical involvement with refugees and immigrants has been overlooked in the current debate. Since the early 1960s, evangelical Christians have been integral players in US immigration and refugee policy. Motivated by biblical teachings to “welcome the stranger,” they have helped tens of thousands of newcomers by acting as refugee sponsors or providing legalization assistance to undocumented immigrants. Until the 1990s, many evangelicals did not distinguish between documented and undocumented newcomers DS all were to be loved and welcomed. In the last decade of the twentieth century, however, a growing anti-immigrant consensus in American society grew alongside evangelicals’ political alignment with the Republican Party, leading to a rethinking of their theology.
Following the GOP’s lead, evangelicals increasingly emphasized the need to obey American law, which many argued undocumented immigrants failed to do. Today, the evangelical movement is more divided than ever about immigration policy. While conservative evangelicals are often immigration hard-liners, many progressive and Latinx evangelicals hope to convince their fellow evangelicals to take a more welcoming approach. The Strangers in Our Midst argues that the key to understanding evangelicals’ divided approaches to immigration is to look at both their theology and their politics. Both of which have shaped how – a d especially to whom – they extend their biblical values of hospitality.
Ulrike Elisabeth Stockhausen is Digital Science Communication Officer at the Max Weber Stiftung Foundation German Institutes in the Humanities Abroad in Bonn, Germany.
Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era, by Daniel R. Bare (NYU Press, May 11, 2021)
Black Fundamentalists challenges the idea that fundamentalism was an exclusively white phenomenon. The volume uncovers voices from the Black community that embraced the doctrinal tenets of the movement and, in many cases, explicitly self-identified as fundamentalists. Fundamentalists of the early twentieth century felt the pressing need to defend the “fundamental” doctrines of their conservative Christian faith – doctrines like biblical inerrancy, the divinity of Christ, and the virgin birth – against what they saw as the predations of modernists who represented a threat to true Christianity. Such concerns, attitudes, and arguments emerged among Black Christians as well as white, even as the oppressive hand of Jim Crow excluded African Americans from the most prominent white-controlled fundamentalist institutions and social crusades, rendering them largely invisible to scholars examining such movements.
Black fundamentalists aligned closely with their white counterparts on the theological particulars of “the fundamentals.” Yet they often applied their conservative theology in more progressive, racially contextualized ways. While white fundamentalists were focused on battling the teaching of evolution, Black fundamentalists were tying their conservative faith to advocacy for reforms in public education, voting rights, and the overturning of legal bans on intermarriage. Beyond the narrow confines of the fundamentalist movement, Daniel R. Bare shows how these historical dynamics illuminate larger themes, still applicable today, about how racial context influences religious expression.
Daniel Bare is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.
Unthinkable: The Triumph and Endurance of Forgotten American Hero T. J. Bowen, by Jim Hardwicke (Xulon Press, April 24, 2021)
After leading soldiers in the Creek Indian War and as an original Texas Ranger, missionary T. J. Bowen’s adventures in the interior of Africa (1850-1856) made him a national hero. His explorations were compared to David Livingstone and his conquests were compared to Alexander the Great. He testified before Congress and was in demand as a speaker nationwide. His account of his exploits became an immediate best seller and his linguistic work was published by the Smithsonian. His denomination hailed him as their greatest missionary, yet less than twenty years later he would be almost forgotten, die alone, and be buried in an unmarked grave. Bowen’s story unfolds on three continents, involves four wars, and is remarkable, inspiring, and instructive.
Jim Hardwicke teaches New Testament at Lucent University in Ennis, Texas.
2020
God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America, by Aaron Griffith (Harvard University Press, November 10, 2020)
An incisive look at how evangelical Christians shaped – and were shaped by – the American criminal justice system. America incarcerates on a massive scale. Despite recent reforms, the United States locks up large numbers of people – disproportionately poor and nonwhite – or long periods and offers little opportunity for restoration. Aaron Griffith reveals a key component in the origins of American mass incarceration: evangelical Christianity.
Evangelicals in the postwar era made crime concern a major religious issue and found new platforms for shaping public life through punitive politics. Religious leaders like Billy Graham and David Wilkerson mobilized fears of lawbreaking and concern for offenders to sharpen appeals for Christian conversion, setting the stage for evangelicals who began advocating tough-on-crime politics in the 1960s. Building on religious campaigns for public safety earlier in the twentieth century, some preachers and politicians pushed for “law and order,” urging support for harsh sentences and expanded policing. Other evangelicals saw crime as a missionary opportunity, launching innovative ministries that reshaped the practice of religion in prisons. From the 1980s on, evangelicals were instrumental in popularizing criminal justice reform, making it a central cause in the compassionate conservative movement. At every stage in their work, evangelicals framed their efforts as colorblind, which only masked racial inequality in incarceration and delayed real change.
Today evangelicals play an ambiguous role in reform, pressing for reduced imprisonment while backing law-and-order politicians. God’s Law and Order shows that we cannot understand the criminal justice system without accounting for evangelicalism’s impact on its historical development.
Aaron Griffith is Assistant Professor of Modern American History at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington.
A Marginal Majority: Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists, edited by Elizabeth H. Flowers and Karen K. Seat (University of Tennessee Press, November 9, 2020)
In step with the #MeToo movement and third wave feminism, women’s roles provoke lively debate in today’s evangelical sphere. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has a complicated past regarding this issue, and determining what exactly women’s roles in home, church, and society should be, or even what these roles should be called, has been a contentious subject. In A Marginal Majority: Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists, editors Elizabeth H. Flowers and Karen K. Seat and eight other contributors examine the SBC’s complex history regarding women and how that history reshapes our understanding of the denomination and its contemporary debates.
This comprehensive volume starts with women as SBC fundraisers, moves to the ways they served Southern Baptist missions, and considers their struggles to find a place at Southern Baptist seminaries as well as their launching of “teaching” or “women’s” ministries. Along the way, it introduces new personalities, offers fresh considerations of familiar figures, and examines the power dynamics of race and class in a denomination that dominated the South and grew into a national behemoth.
Additionally, the essay collection provides insights into why the SBC has often politically aligned with the right. Not only did the denomination become increasingly oriented toward authoritarianism as it clamped down on evangelical feminism, but, as several contributors reveal, even as Southern Baptist women sought agency, they often took it from others. Read together, the chapters strike a somber tone, challenging any triumphal historiography of the past.
By providing a history of contentious issues from the nineteenth century to the present day, A Marginal Majority provides invaluable context for the recurrent struggles women have faced within the United States’ largest Protestant denomination. Moreover, it points to new directions in the study of American denominational life and culture.
Elizabeth Flowers is Associate Professor of American Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Karen Seat is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.
Guided by Grace: The Kathleen Mallory Story, by Rosalie Hall Hunt (Courier Publishing, October 2020)
Kathleen Mallory, the woman who led Woman’s Mission Union for a remarkable thirty-six years, was lovely, graceful and charming – the epitome of Southern graciousness. But it was the depth of her spiritual gifts that influenced a generation of women and, indeed, the entire Southern Baptist Convention. Deceptively dainty, never pushy yet amazingly resilient, she led WMU through two world wars and the Great Depression. With her incisive skill and tenacity, she led women to rescue the denomination’s two mission boards from crushing debt. Over her tenure, Mallory came to be known among leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention as the “Tiny Dynamo.”
Rosalie Hunt is a retired Baptist missionary who served with her husband, Bob, and has taught in Myanmar, South Asia, Australia, the Philippines, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Home without Walls: Southern Baptist Women and Social Reform in the Progressive Era, by Carol Crawford Holcomb (University of Alabama Press, April 7, 2020)
The Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), founded in 1888, carved out a uniquely feminine space within the Southern Baptist Convention during the tumultuous years of the Progressive Era when American theologians were formulating the social gospel. These women represented the Southern Baptist elite and as such had the time to read, write, and discuss ideas with other Southern progressives. They rubbed shoulders with more progressive Methodist and Presbyterian women in clubs and ecumenical missionary meetings. Baptist women studied the missionary publications of these other denominations and adopted ideas for a Southern Baptist audience.
Home without Walls: Southern Baptist Women and Social Reform in the Progressive Era shows how the social attitudes of women were shaped at the time. By studying primary documents – including personal letters, official exchanges and memoranda, magazine publications, newsletters, and editorials – Carol Crawford Holcomb uncovers ample evidence that WMU leaders, aware of the social gospel and sympathetic to social reform, appropriated the tools of social work and social service to carry out their missionary work.
Southern Baptist women united to build a financial empire that would sustain the Southern Baptists through the Great Depression and beyond. Their social attitudes represented a kaleidoscope of contrasting opinions. By no stretch of the imagination could WMU leaders be characterized as liberal social gospel advocates. However, it would also be wrong to depict them as uniformly hostile to progressivism or ignorant of contemporary theological ideas. In the end, they were practical feminists in their determination to provide a platform for women’s views and a space for women to do meaningful work.
Carol Crawford Holcomb is Professor of Church History and Baptist Studies at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor and Director of the UMHB Center for Baptist Studies in Belton, Texas.
Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel, by Walker Robins (University of Alabama Press March 17, 2020)
One week after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) repeatedly and overwhelmingly voted down resolutions congratulating fellow Southern Baptist Harry Truman on his role in Israel’s creation. From today’s perspective, this seems like a shocking result. After all, Christians – particularly the white evangelical Protestants who populate the SBC – are now the largest pro-Israel constituency in the United States. How could conservative evangelicals have been so hesitant in celebrating Israel’s birth in 1948? How did they then come to be so supportive?
Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel addresses these issues by exploring how Southern Baptists engaged what was called the “Palestine question”: whether Jews or Arabs would, or should, control the Holy Land after World War I. Walker Robins argues that, in the decades leading up to the creation of Israel, most Southern Baptists did not directly engage the Palestine question politically. Rather, they engaged it indirectly through a variety of encounters with the land, the peoples, and the politics of Palestine. Among the instrumental figures featured by Robins are tourists, foreign missionaries, Arab pastors, converts from Judaism, biblical interpreters, fundamentalist rebels, editorialists, and, of course, even a president. While all revered Palestine as the Holy Land, each approached and encountered the region according to their own priorities.
Nevertheless, Robins shows that Baptists consistently looked at the region through an Orientalist framework, broadly associating the Zionist movement with Western civilization, modernity, and progress over and against the Arabs, whom they viewed as uncivilized, premodern, and backward. He argues that such impressions were not idle – they suggested that the Zionists were bringing to fruition Baptists’ long-expressed hopes that Israel would regain the prosperity it had held in the biblical era, the Holy Land would one day be revived, and biblical prophecies preceding the return of Christ would be fulfilled.
Walker Robins is Lecturer in history at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts.
2019
Doing the Word: Southern Baptists’ Carver School of Church Social Work and Its Predecessors, 1907–1997, edited by T. Laine Scales and Melody Maxwell (University of Tennessee Press, December 30, 2019)
In the pantheon of publications related to women’s educational history, there is little research concerning women’s education in the context of the Baptist church. In Doing the Word: Southern Baptists’ Carver School of Church Social Work and Its Predecessors, 1907–1997, T. Laine Scales and Melody Maxwell provide a complete history of this unique institution. By exploring the dynamic evolution of women’s education through the lens of the women’s training program for missions and social work at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the authors show how the institution both expanded women’s education and leadership and also came into tension with changes in the Southern Baptist Convention, ultimately resulting in its closing in 1997. A touchstone for women’s studies and church history alike, Doing the Word reopens a lost chapter in the evolution of women’s leadership during the twentieth century – a tumultuous period in which the Carver School, under significant pressure to reverse course, sought to expand the roles of women in leading the church.
T. Laine Scales is Professor of Social Work at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Melody Maxwell is Associate Professor of Christian History at Acadia Divinity College and Director of Acadia Centre for Baptist and Anabaptist Studies in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory, by Chris Moore (University of Tennessee Press, October 10, 2019)
Perhaps no person exerted more influence on postwar white Southern memory than former Confederate chaplain and Baptist Minister J. William Jones. Christopher C. Moore’s Apostle of the Lost Cause is the first full-length work to examine the complex contributions to Lost Cause ideology of this well-known but surprisingly understudied figure. Commissioned by Robert E. Lee himself to preserve an accurate account of the Confederacy, Jones responded by welding hagiography and denominationalism to create, in effect, a sacred history of the Southern cause.
In a series of popular books and in his work as secretary of the Southern Historical Society Papers, Jones’s mission became the canonization of Confederate saints, most notably Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, for a postwar generation and the contrivance of a full-blown myth of Southern virtue-in-defeat that deeply affected historiography for decades to come. While personally committed to Baptist identity, Jones supplied his readers with embodiments of Southern morality who transcended denominational boundaries and enabled white Southerners to locate their champions (and themselves) in a quasi-biblical narrative that ensured ultimate vindication for the Southern cause.
In a time when Confederate monuments and the enduring effects of white supremacy are in the daily headlines, an examination of this key figure in the creation of the Lost Cause legacy could not be more relevant.
Chris Moore is an Instructor of History and Religion at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, North Carolina.
