John Kvach is professor of history at the University of Alabama–Huntsville, USA.
"[...] [A]n indispensable source for historians studying the
economic, intellectual, and cultural life of the Old South. [...]
Based in methodical research and written in clear prose, De Bow's
Review will be the standard work on this man and his influential
paper for some time." -- Florida Historical Quarterly
"J.D.B. DeBow was the antebellum South's most prominent advocate of
economic modernization and industrialization, and one of its most
vitriolic secessionists. John Kvach explores this seeming paradox,
and gives us as well a careful description of DeBow's subsribers
and followers" -- J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan
"Kvach fills a surprising gap in the history of the
nineteenth-century South with this elegantly written biography of
the enigmatic J. D. B. De Bow. The work represents an important
contribution to a growing historiography exploring the presence of
a middle-class commercial culture in the pre--Civil War South and
challenging long-held views of a static socioeconomic world of
planters and plain folk." -- Bruce W. Eelman, author of
Entrepreneurs in the Southern Upcountry: Commercial Culture in
Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1845-1880
"Kvach introduces us to more than a mere editor. Kvach sees his
subject as a man who believed the South could use industry and
innovation to build its economy beyond plantation
agriculture...Kvach tells a compelling story." -- The South
Carolina Historical Magazine
"Kvach's account of De Bow's life and writings has tremendous
merit. Historians will especially appreciate Kvach's spadework in
finding out about the Review's readers and connecting the content
of the periodical to the concerns of its audience. This study
should be read by anyone interested in understanding how
slaveholders thought about their world and its future." -- American
Historical Review
"This is an insightful, original, deeply researched work of
scholarship. Examining not only the career of journalist J. D. B.
De Bow but also the readers who responded enthusiastically to his
call for economic diversification, John F. Kvach helps us see the
nineteenth-century South in a new way, undistorted by the stark,
artificial line so many historians have drawn to separate the
so-called Old South from the New." -- Stephen V. Ash, author of A
Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year
after the Civil War
"This is an original, well-researched, and interesting volume. The
writing is clear and smooth, the author has taken into account all
of the relevant primary and secondary sources, and the material
will influence historiographical debates on Southern political
economy and print culture. We are certainly overdue for a biography
on De Bow." -- Jonathan Daniel Wells, author of Women Writers and
Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South
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