Word: antebellum
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There is a withering crossfire of pedantries in nearly all academic discussions of slavery and American blacks. Two years ago, in a book called Time on the Cross, Economist-Historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman accumulated a mass of data on antebellum life in the South. They fed their statistics into computers and came up with an astonishing portrait of slavery as a highly rational and efficient system that gave the South considerable economic growth and a high standard of living for all Southerners, both black and white. While admitting the immorality of slavery, Fogel and Engerman found that blacks...
Since the setting is a splendid antebellum mansion, it lacks that faint, haunting perfume of defeat that ought always to cling to a work of Tennessee Williams. But perhaps the Deep South is not ante-or postbellum any more. T.E. Kalem
...getting your head together" and then never doing it. In New York it's fashionable to decry the physical deterioration of "landmark" buildings and then forget about them on the way to your air-conditioned office. But in Charleston, S.C., citizens' groups have restored entire blocks to antebellum splendor...
Literature still provides the dominant myth of Dixie. Tennessee Williams' hostile parlors, James Dickey's blood rites. William Faulkner's epic feuds, Margaret Mitchell's antebellum aristocrats, Richard Wright's mangled blacks supply the melodramatic leads. Popular culture contributes the script. Barrelbellied redneck sheriffs and chanting, chain-gang Negroes have been staples of films since...
...dwindling few, the good life is still dictated by the exclusionary standards of an antebellum aristocracy. The great Mardi Gras balls of New Orleans are reserved for the private delectation of the old Creole coterie. Charleston's St. Cecilia Society demands stiffer credentials of a would-be member than the upper-crustiest men's club in London. But in most of the South, as one historian has observed, noblesse oblige has yielded to bourgeoisie oblige-even at the country club, traditionally the most closely guarded bastion of upper-class Southern Waspdom. Richmond's Country Club of Virginia...