The peculiar intellectual: in the antebellum South, scholars made serious contributions to their fields, at least until they turned to defending slavery.

CONJECTURES OF ORDER: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1819-1860

By Michael O'Brien University of North Carolina Press | $95

Until recent decades the suggestion that the antebellum South might have possessed a robust and cosmopolitan intellectual life worth studying would have been greeted in many quarters with disbelief. The prevailing attitude, long held and often repeated, asserted that southerners, tied to an unchanging agrarian order, devoted more time to sociability than to science, and more effort to pleasure than to original thought. Scholars challenging that stereotype have been, in the words of Michael O'Brien, the author of this monumental study of antebellum intellectual life, "vexed by the suggestion that they spend their time among phantom documents and people, and ruminate on thin air," since "it has been familiarly objected that the South has no intellectual history, or one so etiolated that the effor...

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