| Frank Lawrence Owsley |
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Frank Lawrence Owsley ( January 20 , 1890 — October 21 , 1955 ) was an American historian and member of the Nashville Agrarians . LIFE AND CAREER Born in rural Alabama, he attended Auburn University and received his Ph.D. in history at the University Of Chicago in 1924 with Professor William E. Dodd . Owsley specialized in Southern history, especially the Antebellum and Civil War eras, and pioneered in developing quantitative social history. His dissertation was published as ''State Rights and the Confederacy'' (1925). His argument that the Confederacy "died of states' rights" was and remains highly influential. Owsley showed that key Southern governors resisted the appeals of Richmond for soldiers in the name of states rights. Owsley's most important book, ''King Cotton Diplomacy'' (1931), remains the major study of Confederate diplomacy. As an active member of the Southern Agrarians group based in Nashville, Owsley contributed "The Irrepressible Conflict," to the famous manifesto ''I'll Take My Stand'' (1930). He lashed out at the North for attempts to dominate the South spiritually and economically. In "Scottsboro, the Third Crusade: The Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction," (in the ''American Review'' {Link without Title} : 257-85), he criticized northern race reformers as the "grandchildren of abolitionists and reconstructionists," he announced that the South was white man's country and that African-Americans must accommodate to that reality. Serving as president of the Southern Historical Association in 1940, Owsley castigated the North for assuming it represented the entire nation and for violating what he called "the comity of section." After 1940 Owsley and his wife Harriet pioneered what came to be called the "new social history." They were leaders in the use of quantification and manuscript censuses, helping create the study of the historical demography of the South, and the study of social mobility. Owsley's ''Plain Folk of the Old South,'' says Vernon Burton, is "one of the most influential works on Southern history ever written." Using their own newly invented codes they turned into databases the manuscript federal census returns, tax and trial records, and local government documents and wills. ''Plain Folk'' argued that Southern society was not dominated by planter aristocrats, but that yeoman farmers played a significant role in it. The religion, language, and culture of these common people created a democratic "plain folk" society. Critics say he overemphasized the size of the Southern landholding middle class while excluding the large class of poor landless and slaveless white southerners. Owsley assumed that shared economic interests united Southern farmers without considering the vast difference inherent in the planters' commercial agriculture versus the yeomen's subsistence life style. At Vanderbilt University (1920-49), Owsley directed nearly 40 Ph.D. dissertations and was a popular teacher of undergraduates. In 1949 he went to the University Of Alabama to build its history program. Reacting to multiple attacks upon the South by hostile northerners, liberals, modernizers, neoabolitionist historians, civil rights activists, and left wing writers, Owsley tried to refute their misunderstanding of the true South. He regarded the future of American civilization as dependent on the survival of southern regionalism. Owsley's masterpiece, ''Plain Folk of the Old South'' (1949), was an answer to principles (though Owlsey did not use the word "republicanism.") Agrarianism in the 20th century was a response to the industrialism and modernism that had infiltrated the South. According to Owsley, the position of the South vis-à-vis the North was created not by slavery, cotton, or states' rights, but by the two regions' misunderstanding of each other. 1995 REFERENCES
PRIMARY SOURCES
Books and articles by Owsley
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