Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character

by William R. Taylor

Overview

William Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee was one of the most famous works of American history written in the 1960s. The book is an intellectual history of the South before the Civil War, the perception of it in the North, and the effect it had upon the nation in the years from 1800 to 1860. First published in 1961 and out of print for several years, Taylor's classic study remains essential to the study of the pre-Civil War South.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195082845
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/17/1993
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

State University of New York at Stony Brook

Editorial Reviews

"An extremely important book, a brilliant and original contribution to America's understanding of itself."—Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker

"Anyone seriously interested in the development of American culture will be grateful for the new insights, the fresh conceptions, and the deep probings of national character that enrich this study of an American myth."—C. Vann Woodward, New York Times Book Review

"Taylor's study is intellectual history, I think, of the most imaginative and convincing kind. His book seems greatly superior to almost everything else that has been done about the state of mind of the antebellum South....It is indeed something of a landmark in the writing of Southern cultural history."—Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

"A worthy addition to the personal library of anyone interested in southern history. Cavalier and Yankee is a brilliant and original contribution to America's understanding of itself. It reflects the mind of the South, its anxieties and consolations, its questionings and self-justifications, and its reactions to social change....Taylor's work is the best chronicle we have of the social thinking and fictional sociology which went into the framing of the antipodal myths of the Cavalier and the Yankee. In Short, Cavalier and Yankee is a must for anyone interested in antebellum American thought, culture, and letters."—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

From the Publisher

It is the gift of certain historians to be able to put the reader back into the moment of the past they are dealing with, and to make him accept its assumptions, experience its fears and confusions, vibrate to its irrational impulses and follow its rational gropings, as if he did not know what was going to happen, had not yet heard the rest of the story. Mr. Taylor possesses this gift, and Cavalier and Yankee owes much of its effectiveness to this.
—The New Yorker

Edmund Wilson