Book Reviews

January 14, 2013 Any good history of desegregation highlights the unique circumstances of a particular incident without losing sight of the general social transformation it was a part of. Rhodes College professor Stephen R. Haynes has managed to do exactly that in his new book, The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation, which provides a thorough and engaging overview of the struggle to integrate the Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis. Haynes will appear at The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis on January 22 at 6 p.m.

January 9, 2013 Historian Larry J. Daniel believes it is time to set the record straight about one of the turning points of the Civil War. In Battle of Stones River: The Forgotten Conflict between the Confederate Army of Tennessee and the Union Army of the Cumberland, Daniel details a fight that is counted as one of the ten costliest battles of the war and that firmly established Union control in Tennessee.

December 11, 2012 “The Nashville Way” is a phrase coined in the 1960s to describe the more civilized manner in which the white establishment of Nashville behaved when confronted with demands of equality from the black people of Nashville than did, say, the white establishment of Birmingham. But in his new book, The Nashville Way: Racial Etiquette and the Struggle for Social Justice in a Southern City, historian Benjamin Houston concludes that the slogan was nothing more than “a massive whitewash on multiple levels,” and he tells why in narratives from the perspective of both the white establishment and the leadership of the black community. On the whole, he writes, “it is the story of a society wrestling with yet willfully ignoring its racial reality. More fundamentally it is the story of how a racial status quo, after decades of upheaval, was both changed and yet preserved.”