Masters of Small Worlds

Reviews / Votes

"Masters of Small Worlds...is of interest not only for the local matter of South Carolina, but as one test of whether `race, class, and gender' can...make a history and not just a battlecry....McCurry offers an abundance of insight, information and anecdote. She is a gifted historian, engaging large questions."--The Times Literary Supplement "...a well-researched and detailed study....Masters of Small Worlds is an extremely valuable work....a bold and convincing history...that will clearly be required reading for Southern historians, women's historians, and American social historians."--Southern Historian "The subtlety and texture of her interpretations offer a model for future studies of this class elsewhere in the antebellum South."--American Historical Review "Stephanie McCurry's superb study of antebellum South Carolina deserves a place on the shelves and reading lists of all historians of the South and the Civil War....This is one of the best books on Southern social history I have ever read. Sophisticated in technique and subtle in analysis, Masters of Small Worlds carries that analysis into politics to produce strikingly original insights that will have an impact on Southern historiography for years to come."--H-Net Book Review Project "Masters of Small Worlds is a strikingly original work, one which manages to say important new things about subjects that have attracted the attention of generations of scholars--the foundations of proslavery thought and the road to the Civil War. It is difficult to think of a work of American history that more successfully integrates the "public" and "private" realms of life, or that demonstrates more persuasively the centrality of gender as a category for understanding American political thought."--Eric Foner, Professor of History, Columbia University