Becoming Southern Writers

Description

Southern writers, historians, and artists celebrate the life and career of a beloved mentor, friend, and colleague

Edited by southern historians Orville Vernon Burton and Eldred E. Prince, Jr., Becoming Southern Writers pays tribute to South Carolinian Charles Joyner's fifty year career as a southern historian, folklorist, and social activist. Exceptional writers of fact, fiction, and poetry, the contributors to the volume are among Joyner's many friends, admirers, and colleagues as well as those to whom Joyner has served as a mentor. The contributors describe how they came to write about the South and how they came to write about it in the way they do while reflecting on the humanistic tradition of scholarship as lived experience.

The contributors constitute a Who's Who of southern writers—from award-winning literary artists to historians. Freed from constraints of their disciplines by Joyner's example, they enthusiastically describe family reunions, involvement in the civil rights movement, research projects, and mentors. While not all contributors are native to the South or the United States and a few write about the South only occasionally, all the essayists root their work in southern history, and all have made distinguished contributions to southern writing. Diverse in theme and style, these writings represent each author's personal reflections on experiences living in and writing about the South while touching on topics that surfaced in Joyner's own works, such as race, family, culture, and place. Whether based on personal or historical events, each one speaks to Joyner's theme that "all history is local history, somewhere."

Contributors:

Raymond Arsenault
Jack Bass
Orville Vernon Burton
Dan Carter
Richard Carwardine
Walter B. Edgar
David Hackett Fischer
William W. Freehling
Rod Gragg
Josephine Humphreys
John C. Inscoe
Hank Klibanoff
Robert Korstad
Daniel C. Littlefield
Valinda Littlefield
Hayes Mizell
David Moltke-Hansen
Maggi M. Morehouse
John J. Navin
James Peacock
Eldred E. Prince, Jr.
Theodore Rosengarten
Dale Rosengarten
John A. Salmond
Roy Talbert
Natasha Tretheway
Anne M. Wyatt-Brown
Bertram Wyatt-Brown
William Ferris

Sujets

• Educators
• Essays
• EDUCATION
• Southern Student Organizing Committee
• Southern Historical Association
• South Carolina Historical Society
• Southern Historical Collection
• Biography
• Culture of the Southern United States
• Black Reconstruction
• God Knows (novel)
• Institute for Southern Studies
• Southern literature
• Coastal Carolina University
• New South
• Origins of the American Civil War
• Teacher
• Autobiography
• William Styron
• Tennessee Valley Authority
• William Faulkner
• Tennessee Williams

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611176537
• Langue: English

Extrait

Becoming Southern Writers
Becoming
Southern Writers
Essays in Honor of Charles Joyner

Edited by
Orville Vernon Burton and Eldred E. Prince, Jr.
This festscrift in his honor is, of course, dedicated with great respect and affection to Charles Joyner .
2016 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-652-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61117-653-7 (ebook)
Front cover photograph: istockphoto.com/stonena7
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Down by the Waterside: Family, Identity, and Maritime History
Raymond Arsenault
How Charles Joyner Changed My Life
Jack Bass
Stranger Redux
Orville Vernon Burton
Becoming a Southern Historian
Dan Carter
About the South
Richard Carwardine
It Wasn t in the Plan
Walter B. Edgar
The Maryland Design: Toward the Cultural History of a Border State
David Hackett Fischer
Balance, Schlesinger, and Chaz Joyner
William W. Freehling
Southern History as Family History
Rod Gragg
Fiction, History, Murder, and the Book of Truth
Josephine Humphreys
Feeling Awful Southern . . . or Not?
John C. Inscoe
Writing the South in Fact
Hank Klibanoff
Curing My Historical Schizophrenia
Robert Korstad
Down Home
Daniel C. Littlefield
Researching and Writing Southern History from Close Encounters
Valinda Littlefield
Memories
Hayes Mizell
When Does a Microscope Become a Telescope or a Telescope a Microscope?
David Moltke-Hansen
Shared Traditions
Maggi M. Morehouse
A New England Yankee Discovers Southern History
John J. Navin
Recollections
James Peacock
A Personal Odyssey: Discovering Local History
Eldred E. Prince Jr .
The Philosophy Shop, Part I
Theodore Rosengarten
The Philosophy Shop, Part II
Dale Rosengarten
A New Zealander Becomes a Southern Historian
John A. Salmond
Chaz Joyner at Coastal: Bargain or Burden?
Roy Talbert
The Soul Sings for Justice: Why I Write about the South
Natasha Trethewey
An Accidental Scholar
Anne M. Wyatt-Brown
C. Vann Woodward and Me
Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Charles Joyner: A Photographic Homage
William Ferris
Publications by Charles Joyner
Index
Acknowledgments
The conference to honor Charles Joyner, and where these essays originated from, was made possible through the generosity of the Humanities Council of South Carolina, Coastal Carolina University s Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts, department of history, and offices of the executive vice president and university relations. Coastal Carolina s Waccamaw Center for Cultural and Historical Studies and the Clemson University Cyber Institute contributed both to the conference and the production of this book. The editors want to especially thank history department administrator Stephanie Freeman, Georganne B. Burton, and Alice Burton Traetto for help with the conference organization, administration, and transporting speakers. University of South Carolina Press director Jonathan Haupt and editor Alex Moore championed this project from the beginning. The anonymous reviewers made this a better book. The editors greatly appreciate all the work and effort on behalf of this book by the University of South Carolina Press s assistant director of operations, Linda Fogle, marketing director Suzanne Axland, and editorial assistant Elizabeth Jones. Beatrice Burton compiled the index, and we especially appreciate her keen eye for catching errors and rectifying other problems.
Introduction

I suspect that most of us, at least by a certain age, feel an urge to rake the leaves of our lives into a single pile.
Charles Joyner, Comrades and Confederates: Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
This volume of essays in honor of Charles Joyner, affectionately known by some of us as Chaz, gathers the work of scholars, novelists, and poets of the American South-only a few of his extensive network of colleagues across the academic spectrum on several continents. Most of the contributed essays to this volume relate their writers experiences of engaging the American South, whether exclusively or occasionally.
Joyner s career is not easy to summarize because, to employ one of his own phrases, it stubbornly resists synthesis. 1 Charles Joyner has lived in the South most of his life-writing, teaching, and lecturing on southern history from slavery and the Civil War to segregation and the civil rights movement, from politicians and generals to rebels and reporters; southern literature from William Faulkner to William Styron, Julia Peterkin to Natasha Trethewey; southern folk culture from tales and legends to music and material culture; and southern music from ballads to blues, spirituals to classical, country and bluegrass to rock and jazz. Much of his work has explored what he has described as pursuing large questions in small places. He has pursued some of the most important questions close to his home, such as the influence of folk culture on the civil rights movement on Johns Island, the influence of assimilation on identity in the Jewish community of Georgetown, and the emergence of Gullah culture in the slave communities along the Waccamaw River.
His father, Winston Joyner, was a Mississippian who was mustered out of the U.S. Marine Corps in Charleston and stayed on to work for the South Carolina Highway Department. He met Kelly Paul, a native of the Bucksport area of Horry County, while he was helping build the first paved highway between Conway and Georgetown. They married in 1930, and Charles, the first of their six children, was born in 1935. He grew up all over the state, upcountry and lowcountry, experiencing both South Carolina s beauty and diversity.
The family moved to Mt. Pleasant during World War II. Joyner vividly recalls his visits with Petrona Royall McIver, local historian there. She inspired him with her stories about the Gullah people and the sweetgrass baskets they made and sold along U.S. 17. She explained how their language had influenced the lowcountry accent. For the first time, Joyner heard about the cultural intersection of three continents-Europe, Africa, and North America.
The Joyners moved to Myrtle Beach, in his mother s home county of Horry, in 1947. The family liked the Grand Strand, and his father accepted a job there as superintendent of the Street and Sanitation Department. Myrtle Beach offered plenty of summer jobs for a clever lad willing to work hard. At the age of thirteen Charles worked in the print shop of the Myrtle Beach News . At fourteen he got his driver s license and a job driving a dump truck. In his senior year of high school, he worked for a new real estate and investment company. Creating a card file from public records gave him valuable research experience. The income from these jobs enabled him to become the first of his family to graduate from college.
After graduating from Myrtle Beach High School in 1952, Joyner entered Presbyterian College, in Clinton, South Carolina, where his history professor, Newton Jones, invited him to join him on research trips to the South Caroliniana library at the University of South Carolina. That was where Chaz learned that history is more than just interesting stories of famous people. His research paper on Henry Woodward won the Frank Dudley Jones History Award at commencement, when he graduated in 1956 with a double major in English and history.
In the fall of 1956, Joyner entered graduate school at the University of South Carolina under the tutelage of Howard Quint and the visiting professors John Roberts from Oxford and William Best Hesseltine from the University of Wisconsin. After completing the master s degree, Joyner was inducted into the army in 1958. He was assigned to the Historical Office of the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood, Maryland, where he was part of a team researching and writing a multivolume history of the Chemical Corps during World War II.
Completing his active duty in 1960, Joyner returned to the University of South Carolina to pursue a doctorate. There he studied with visiting professor Avery Craven from the University of Chicago, who supervised his seminar paper on southern reaction to John Brown s raid. Robert Ochs supervised his dissertation, a study of John Dos Passos s participation in World War I and the impact of that historical experience on his literary achievements.
Joyner shared an apartment at 1015 Henderson Street with fellow historians Selden Smith, a close friend since 1956, and new friends Hayes Mizell and Dan Carter (whose reminiscences of the period appear in both of their essays in this volume). The four shared more than a house. It was the early 1960s, and cracks were appearing in Columbia s great wall of segregation. The Henderson Street historians were committed to widening those cracks. Their efforts were noticed. A friend working as a page in the governor s office told them that he had seen their photographs on the governor s desk.
Life is often marked by trial and uncertainty, and Joyner has shown wisdom, courage, and strength in the most trying of times. In 1963 Charles married Jeannie Dusenbury, a Myrtle Beach native and a Columbia College graduate. It helps to have a partner and soul mate, and one of the best and wisest decisions Joyner ever