• The South in the World since 1865: A Review Essay
• Tore C. Olsson (bio)

On the evening of March 5, 1957, a jubilant crowd gathered to celebrate the birth of a new nation. In a former polo stadium in the capital of what had been Britain’s Gold Coast colony, thousands assembled to herald the creation of Ghana, Africa’s newest independent state. The ceremony was deeply symbolic. As the first sub-Saharan nation to gain its independence in the twentieth century, Ghana was a bellwether for decolonization, Black autonomy, and the dismantling of global white supremacy. Among those filling the Old Polo Grounds—and the millions watching around the world—few could deny the ceremony’s significance.

Hundreds had come to the Old Polo Grounds from the United States. Most prominent was Vice President Richard M. Nixon, whose visit represented the White House’s anxiety that the rising tide of decolonization in Africa might destabilize the geopolitical rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union. In attendance to broadcast America’s nominal support for African nations’ independence, Nixon could not help being struck by the emotional response of the cheering, singing, exuberant crowd. But when he asked a group of bystanders, “How does it feel to be free?” the vice president received an unexpected reply. “We wouldn’t know,” one told Nixon in a familiar accent; “We’re from Alabama.”¹

Yet the Alabamians who surprised Nixon were not the only representatives of their state at the Old Polo Grounds. Elsewhere in the crowd was the young pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Just weeks after the successful culmination of that city’s bus boycott, the church’s congregants had pooled their resources to pledge $2,500 to send King to Ghana for the independence [End Page 67] ceremony. Weeping and joining the crowd in shouts of “Freedom!,” King was deeply moved by the occasion. The birth of Ghana marked a new era, King believed: an era when—as he told his parishioners in Montgomery a month later—the “old order of colonialism, of segregation, of discrimination is passing away,” and “a new order of justice, freedom, and good will is being born.”²

What is the place of the American South in the larger world? The events of 1957 in Ghana suggest the region’s exaggerated prominence. Yet every southern historian has at some point confronted the stereotypical perception, shared by millions of Americans past and present, that the South has been marked by a unique degree of isolation, insularity, and provincialism. Few historians have escaped the pervasive public belief that culture, geography, or politics have sheltered and shut off the South from the world beyond the United States. Of course, serious historians have long demonstrated that since the earliest inklings of regional identity, the South has been a product of the world, whether through the transatlantic slave trade, the global market in cotton, or the Confederacy’s jockeying for diplomatic alliances. Yet until recently, there was a distinct sense that the South’s engagement with the world dramatically declined in the years between the end of the Civil War and the Sun Belt boom that began in the 1970s. The editors of The American South in a Global World (2005) argued that the end of the Civil War marked “a turning point that swiveled the South inward and inland” for nearly a century and a half. And in 2009 when Peter Kolchin reviewed scholarship on “The South and the World” in the pages of this journal, he noted only a handful of works that addressed the post-1865 period, far outweighed by the mountain of scholarship on early America and the antebellum years.³

A decade later, those historiographical scales appear far more balanced. This essay seeks to distill the outpouring of research on the post–Civil War South that has employed comparative, diplomatic, transnational, and global perspectives. These works certainly make clear that during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, southerners did not retreat from global affairs, and the South remained comparable to other societies. But rather than simply establishing the truism that the South “was...

• 自1865年以来的世界南方：评论论文
• 托尔·C·奥尔森（生物）

Ø n的夜晚中号拱5，1957年，喜庆的人群聚集庆祝一个新国家的诞生。在英国黄金海岸殖民地首府的一个前马球体育场内，成千上万的群众聚集在一起，预示着非洲最新独立国家加纳的建立。仪式具有深远的象征意义。作为20世纪第一个获得独立的撒哈拉以南国家，加纳是非殖民化，黑人自治和瓦解全球白人至上主义的领头羊。在填补旧马球场地的那些人以及全世界数以百万计的观看者中，很少有人会否认仪式的意义。

数百人从美国来到了旧马球场。副总统理查德·尼克松（Richard M. Nixon）最为著名，他的访问代表白宫担心非洲非殖民化浪潮的上升可能破坏美国和苏联的地缘政治竞争的稳定。为了表达美国对非洲国家独立的名义上的支持，尼克松忍不住被欢呼，歌唱，旺盛的人群的情感反应所打动。但是当他问一群旁观者时，“自由的感觉如何？” 副总裁收到了意外的答复。“我们不知道。”有人以一种熟悉的口音告诉尼克松。“我们来自阿拉巴马州。” ^1个

然而，令尼克松大吃一惊的阿拉巴马人并不是他们在旧马球基地的唯一代表。人群中的其他地方是蒙哥马利德克斯特大街浸信会教堂的年轻牧师马丁·路德·金（Martin Luther King Jr）博士。在该城市公车抵制成功的几周后，教堂的g众们集中了他们的资源，承诺捐出2500美元，将国王送往加纳独立[结束第67页]仪式。哭泣并加入人群，喊出“自由！”的声音，金为此感动不已。金认为，加纳的诞生标志着一个新时代：一个月，正如他一个月后在蒙哥马利对他的教区居民所说的那样，“殖民主义，种族隔离，歧视的旧秩序正在消失，”正义，自由和善意正在诞生。” ^2个

美国南方在更大的世界中的位置是什么？1957年在加纳发生的事件表明该地区过分突出。然而，每一个南方历史学家在某个时候都面临着成见，即成千上万的美国人过去和现在都认同这种成见，即南方具有独特程度的孤立性，孤立主义和地方主义。很少有历史学家能逃脱普遍的公众信仰，即文化，地理或政治已经庇护了南方并将其与美国隔离开来。当然，认真的历史学家早就表明，自最早出现地区认同以来，无论是通过跨大西洋的奴隶贸易，棉花的全球市场，还是通过联邦争取外交联盟，南方都是世界的产物。直到最近 在南北战争结束到1970年代开始的太阳带繁荣时期之间，南方与世界的交往急剧下降，这是一种明显的感觉。的编辑《全球世界中的美国南方》（2005年）认为，南北战争的结束标志着“一个向南和向内旋转的转折点”长达近半个世纪。2009年，彼得·科尔钦（Peter Kolchin）在该杂志的页面上回顾了有关“南方与世界”的奖学金时，他只注意到了一些针对1865年以后时期的著作，远远超过了早期美国和战前的岁月。³

十年后，这些史学规模显得更加平衡。本文旨在提炼对南内战后采用比较，外交，跨国和全球视角的研究的大量涌现。这些工作当然清楚地表明，在19世纪和20世纪后期，南方人并没有退出全球事务，而南方仍然可以与其他社会相提并论。但是，不只是简单地确立南方曾经是...的真理。