Southern honor : ethics and behavior in the old South Cover Image

Southern honor : ethics and behavior in the old South / Bertram Wyatt-Brown.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, 1932-2012 (author.).

Summary:

"Bertram Wyatt-Brown's wide-ranging re-examination of pre-Civil War Southern culture demonstrates the pervasiveness of the age-old code of honor in many aspects of human relations, from child-rearing habits to criminal justice and lynch law. The author shows that honor was the animating force in the antebellum South, the very keystone of the slave-holding Southern morality."--Back cover.

Electronic resources

Suggest title for digitization

Record details

ISBN: 0195031199
ISBN: 0195033108
ISBN: 9780195033106
Physical Description: xxiv, 597 pages ; 23 cm
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press, 1982.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

Part One -- Honor in literary perspective -- Primal honor : Valor, blood and bonding -- Primal honor : The tensions of patriarchy -- Gentility -- Part Two -- Family and gender behavior -- Fathers, mothers, and progeny -- Male youth and honor -- A young man's career : Cultural and familial limits -- Strategies of courtship and marriage -- Women in a man's world : Role and self-image -- Law, property, and male dominance -- Male custom in family life -- Status, law, and sexual misconduct -- Part Three -- Structures of rivalry and social control -- Personal strategies and community life : Hospitality, gambling and combat -- Honor, shame, and justice in a slavocracy -- Policing slave society : Insurrectionary scares -- Charivari and lynch law -- The anatomy of a wife-killing.