Dissertation Information for Nicholas Wolfe Proctor NAME: - Nicholas Wolfe Proctor
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (1998)
ADVISORS: - James L Roark
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Dan T. Carter - Patrick N. Allitt
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Bathed in blood: Hunting in the antebellum South
Abstract: The hunt, like the church, courthouse, and family, played an integral role in southern society and culture during the nineteenth century. Regardless of color or class, southern men hunted. Their participation in the rituals of the hunt helped construct ideas of race, class, gender, and community. While hunting provided members of the elite with opportunities for legitimizing their membership in the upper reaches of society, slaves and poor whites also followed certain forms of behavior in the field, which defined their position in southern society and within their families. In all of these groups, hunting helped define masculinity and community.
My dissertation first describes the essential components of hunting by examining the reasons Southerners hunted. Several concerns remain fairly constant throughout the period. At the center lie questions of mastery. Since hunting helped define one's station within the community, differences in hunting methods closely mirrored definitions of gender, class, and race. For many Southerners, this cultural posturing paralleled more utilitarian concerns. For a significant proportion of poor Southerners (black and white), hunting provided supplemental provisions and income.
This dissertation draws on a variety of sources. A variety of nineteenth-century publishers printed large number of hunting stories. Most of these stories originally found print in the varied array of nineteenth-century magazines, including several, such as The Spirit of the Times, that devoted themselves exclusively to sport. Unpublished slaveowner papers and diaries and correspondence hunters give their work a greater depth the published accounts, and create a context for the rollicking excitement of the field described in print.
Government documents like the Works Progress Administration ex-slave interviews and the transcripts of court records help contrast the planter vision. The supernumeraries of the slaveowner drama subsequently gain a measure of agency and autonomy. In these visions of southern hunting, the players often occupy the same spaces, but meanings often change, as the planter's grandiloquent monologue--as it appears in the sporting press--becomes a conversation of sportsmen, guides, pot-hunters, and poachers.
By representing a variety of sources, my dissertation will present a balanced description and discussion of the elements that composed the southern hunt and their influences upon society at large. This, in turn, will provide a deeper understanding of the interaction between the different sections of antebellum society as defined by class, gender, race, and community.
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calculated 2008-03-24 09:23:55
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