Table of Contents

Preface to Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition
Part One: Origins and Definitions
1: Honor in Literary Perspective
2: Primal Honor: Valor, Blood, and Bonding
3: Primal Honor: The Tensions of Patriarchy
4: Gentility
Part Two: Family and Gender Behavior
5: Fathers, Mothers, and Progeny
6: Male Youth and Honor
7: A Young Man's Career: Cultural and Familial Limits
8: Strategies of Courtship and Marriage
9: Women in a Man's World: Role and Self-Image
10: Law, Property, and Male Dominance
11: Male Custom in Family Life
12: Status, Law, and Sexual Misconduct
Part Three: Structures of Rivalry and Social Control
13: Personal Strategies and Community Life: Hospitality, Gambling, and Combat
14: Honor, Shame, and Justice in a Slavocracy
15: Policing Slave Society: Insurrectionary Scares
16: Charivari and Lynch Law
17: The Anatomy of a Wife-Killing
List of Abbreviations and Short Titles
Notes
Index

About the Author

Bertram Wyatt-Brown is Richard J. Milbauer Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida and a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. The author of House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family and The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, he is past president of the Southern Historical Association, the Society for Historians of Early American History, and the St. George Tucker
Society. He lives in Baltimore.

Reviews

"A remarkable achievement--a re-creation of the living reality of the antebellum South from thousands of bits and pieces of the dead past."--Walker Percy
"A work of enormous imagination and enterprise. Employing a beautifully woven fabric of traditional storytelling and contemporary social science, Bertram Wyatt-Brown has altered and deepened our understanding of the Southern past--and thus, inevitably, of the American past as well."--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
"Unlike so many historians who have been interested in handing down judgments, favorable or unfavorable, on the Old South, Mr. Wyatt-Brown has studied Southerners much as an anthropologist would an aboriginal tribe. An important, original book which challenges so many widely held beliefs about the Old South."--David Herbert Donald, The New York Times