The Library of Southern civilization

"Bricks Without Straw is Tourgée's fictionalized account of how Reconstruction was sabotaged. It is a chilling picture of violence against African Americans condoned, civil rights abrogated, constitutional amendments subverted, and electoral fraud institutionalized. Its plot revolves around a group of North Carolina freedpeople who strive to build new lives for themselves by buying land, marketing their own crops, setting up a church and school, and voting for politicians sympathetic to their interests, until Klan terrorism and the ascendancy of a white supremacist government reduce them to neo-slavery"--Dukeupress

A decade and more has passed since the first publication of Still Rebels, Still Yankees. During that time the book has become recognized as a classic affirmation of the necessity of tradition in conserving cultural order. Donald Davidson, a major figure in the Agrarian Movement, summed up the intent of the work this way: “The general theme that binds the essays―no matter what their specific subjects―is the conflict between tradition and anti-tradition that characterizes modern society, with tradition viewed as the living continuum that makes society and civilization possible and anti-tradition as the disintegrative principle that destroys society and civilization in the name of science and progress. The South, which has suffered most in its devoted defense of tradition, naturally offers me examples for consideration; but this is not a book about the South as such. It is as near as I can come, in essay form, to defining what I would conceive to be the true American position.” In a brilliant and graceful style, Davidson pursues his theme in a rich variety of subjects: poetry, myth, and folklore; and in the complex rivalries between nation and region, the free citizen and the Leviathan state, the values of religion and the facts of science. Order, sanity, and fullness of life are cornerstones of the tradition against which he appraises writers like Hardy and John Gould Fletcher, the historiography of Toynbee, and the social reporting of W. J. Cash.

The book itself is an event in cultural history, not to be taken as truth, but as an argument of what one man thought The South should be, highly influential in the global justification of paternalism and a self-fullfilling prophesy that inspired the culture of the Antebellum South.