Does "Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South" need any more 5-star reviews to convince readers that it may just be the best historical account of an American tragedy ever written? More than seventy years have passed since nine blacks were wrongfully accused of raping two white women on board an Alabama freight train and the event still rings in the ears as if it happened yesterday. Professor Dan T. Carter has remained the preeminent expert on the Scottsboro case for more than thirty years and his extensive research is evident in this book. Never dry or dull, Professor Carter guides the reader through a harrowing story that must be read to be believed. If you're not familiar with the Scottsboro case and its important role in American and more essentially pre-Civil Rights history, this should be the first book on your list. I also recommend James Goodman's superbly written "Stories of Scottsboro" and Quentin Reynolds' "Courtroom," the biography of Scottsboro defense attorney Samuel S. Leibowitz.

I love reading history books, especially when they read like a novel. Carter has produced a detailed account of this nearly forgotten episode in American History and he has done it with so much energy that one can not help but be swept up in his telling of the story. He traces the episode from its hobo origins. A freight train that carried two women and several black young men was stopped. The women, when taken from the train accused all the black men of rape and from here the stories of these rail riders takes off. Working with facinating material, the segregation of the deep South, the idea of a woman's honor, the Communist and NAACP rivalry over the case, the Jewish NYer who comes to represent the boys, the racist judges and the status quo governor and the one judge who martyrs his carreer to stand up for what he believes is right,Carter shows that the tale of Scottsboro is stranger than fiction. Not only is the story itself excellent, but Carter also brings the story up to date. For anyone interested in this time period, this is a must read!

Dan Carter has done a superb job in this study of the miscarriage of justice that took place in the Alabama of the 1930's. His picture is so complete and enlightening and he has attacked all the issues from all sides. If you want to get a very different picture of the atrocities capable in the U.S. of the 20th Century, read this book. I could say so much more.....

This book focuses on a neglected chapter of reconstrution, the period of "presidential recontruction" which preceded "congressional" or "radical recontruction." Carter gives a detailed picture based almost entirely on primary sources of the south immediately after the civil war and the hosts of dilemmas that confront both the region and the nation as a whole. In the process, Carter gives the most sympathetic picture of southern conservatives who lead reconstruction efforts since the school of Dunning, perhaps since Dunning himself. In contrast to the characterization of them being unreconstructed rebels, Carter illustrates that while many of them were confederates, most were reluctant confederates who either opposed secession until after the election of Lincoln or until their states seceded. (Contrary to unionist myth making at the time, the bulk of white southerners were not "straight-sect" unionists, oppressed by a miniscule "slavocracy." After war's end there was just not enough of them to reestablish elected government.)

Indeed this book it almost a companion piece to Croft's RELUCTANT CONFEDERATES, as most of these "conservatives" were old whigs and constitutional unionist, just as Croft's subjects, who were conscious of the south's backwardness before the war and dreamed of south with manufacturing, infrastructure, diversified agriculture, and public education. To all advocates of the "failure of southern leadership" to explain everything that's gone wrong with the region since antebellum, Carter makes a compelling case, that these were the best, most far sighted men the south could have chosen.

But in Carter's book, this is almost to damn them with faint praise for as a group they are blinkered by notions of negro inequality, "the sanctity of debt", and a positive horror of confiscation. As the south refuses to be suitably "penitent" for their past sins of slavery and secession as well as enacting "black codes" that, at best, make freedmen "wards of the state" and less than truly free, the north becomes more open-ended in their demands for re-admission to the union. Carter's "old whigs" end up being overcome, as "reasonable, moderate" men often do, by inexorable events, losing support in the south *and* the north.

Along the way Carter illustrates the collapse of social order, familiar to any observer of South Africa after aparthied or Russia after communism, interracial conflict, especially fears of an black insurrection to confiscate land, the debate over "wartime debts," strangely pertinent today with the issue of "third world debt," not to mention the difficult (and not wholly successful) transition from slave labor to free labor, which ultimately results in the tenant/sharecropping system. In sum this book presents what Barabara Tuchman would call "a distant mirror", not with contemporary U.S. but the *world* at the turn of the millenium.

Carter writes excellently and as mentioned above depends heavily on primary materials. This does however bias the books perceptions toward the perceptions of conservatives, the "mobs" of white southerns demanding debt relief or the unionist who rather liked the idea of confiscation of plantation lands, have little or no voice in the debate. (They left little in the way of personal letters or published opinion, and even less that found its way into a university collection.) Hence in his conclusion, Carter glumly writes that while their were options "not all things were possible." Without a doubt, but by seeing things through elite southerners eyes, Carter seems to limit the range of possibilities to what was acceptable to *them.*

Perhaps, political theorists and historians expect too much from leaders. Perhaps at this time the wisest course was one, unthinkable to the old "whigs" but endorsed by a nameless north GA farmer after reconstruction. "We could've tuk the land. Split it. Gi'n some to the [freedmen], 'n' some to me 'n' t'other union fellers." (Quoted in McMath's AMERICAN POPULISM)

A program of debt relief, land re-distribution (to whites and blacks alike), public education, and federal investment in infrastructure (like that promised by the Hayes administration as part of the compromise of 1877, but never enacted) would have gone a long way to both "binding up the wounds" *and* guaranteeing equal rights for african americans. But that's hindsight speaking...

After reading this book, you truly will see the impact Wallace has had on politics and the right. Goldwater and Nixon obviously took their cues from this man. Carter has presented an excellent portrait of Wallace and the lengths he went to in order to be elected. My only regret in this book is a very small portrait of his terms as the chief executive of Alabama, but this is a minor quibble. A very enjoyable read.

Every year I teach this book for about 125 undergraduates in a course called "Race and American Politics from the New Deal to the New Right." Though it is a course that welcomes controversy, one thing that virtually all of my students agree upon is that this is a GREAT book. Carter, the dean of Southern historians, is a masterful storyteller with a matchless eye for detail and a balanced political judgment. He shows how Wallace, far from being just another Southern demogogue, opens the way to the transformation of American politics and the rise of a new conservatism whose wellsprings are the rage and fear of white Americans in the face of the civil rights revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s. It's a brilliant, absorbing book and every year when I read it again I am struck by the rich craft of Carter's prose and the deep thoughtfulness of his assessments.

George Wallace was not an evil man, just an opportunist. He was a liberal on racial issues until he lost his first race for the Alabama governorship because of race baiting. Carter relates these surprising facts and documents how Wallace's brand of conservatism became adopted by mainstream candidates such as Ronald Reagan and also how an assassain's bullet pushed him toward that path of asking for redemption from the very people he had previously villified. Carter is an excellent biographer, and "The Politics of Rage," is well worthy of its subject.

This is a poorly written book on the important subject of race in politics. Carter spends the entire book blaming conservatives' exploitation of race for their recent resurgence. In many examples, he is outright wrong(such as his analysis of the Willie Horton debacle), and in others he dramatically overstates the significance of the particular action. The only credible observation is that of the evolution of a new form of politics, a political system in which "image is everything". However, Carter complete ignores liberal manipulation of race in politics, and this book subsequently comes off as being very biased. If you're looking for a good book on race in politics, I suggest reading The End of Racism by Dinesh D'Souza or Hating Whitey by David Horowitz.

This book is four essays that deal with ideological drift of the GOP towards rightist and culturally conservative themes, and the appeal to white racism that underlies much of the GOP's appeal to the voters. The essays are chronological, the first one deals primarily with George Wallace, the others with Nixon, Reagan, and Gingrich.

Carter uses George Wallace's presidential campaigns of 1968 and 1972 as his starting point - how a racist demagogue from a cultural backwater quickly develops a national constituency, appealing to whites who feel threatened by the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. He then analyzes Nixon's exploitation of the same fears in his building of his "Silent Majority", and Nixon's important role in transitioning the Wallace voter to the GOP in 1972 and after.

The last two essays focus on Reagan and Gingrich, and how they in essence "deconstruct" racism to better fit their conservative ideologies and broaden the GOP's appeal. Nixon, Reagan, and Gingrich are far more circumspect in displaying overt racism than a Wallace, but Carter's arguement that their focus on exploiting the fears of middle class voters has its roots in the racism of George Wallace and his ilk is fairly compelling.

Carter sometimes seem to take this theory a bit too far, but that will happen in a short four essay book. Carter is troubled by the GOP's appeal to white racial fears, and his viewpoint that the GOP is 'playing with fire' around these fears is always evident, and sometimes heavyhanded.

This is a very readable thought provoking book.

In four clear, well-written essays, Carter shows how the conservative counter-revolution had its origins in white revulsion against the gains of the civil rights movement. From Montgomery to Milwaukee, whites found the prospect of racial equality frightening and unacceptable. In response to this--and, Carter acknowledges, other issues--a political realignment emerged. No one was more telling and important to this conservative backlash than George Wallace, the Dixiecrat from Alabama whose independent campaigns for the White House showed the Republican Party how to employ coded racial appeals to go from the party of the country club to the party of country music. This is a lively, thoughtful book with hard evidence and engaging anecdotes. And Carter is one of the best literary stylists writing history today. Better still is his magnificent biography of George Wallace, THE POLITICS OF RAGE, which describes the same transformations through the biography of a fascinating Southern demagogue who once received 34 per cent of the vote in my home state of Wisconsin!