Smith Explores Stories of the New South In New Book

By Chris Niles

A family reunion, a best friend’s wedding, a moment with a loved one caught on camera all provide examples of typical photographs that fill up albums and social media sites. Pinterest is even a site dedicated entirely to sharing images that tell stories about people’s lives.

Much like these contemporary examples, UNC Charlotte’s Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History John David Smith explores the distinctive stories found in photographs of the first New South in his latest book, Seeing the New South: Race and Place in the Photographs of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. Smith’s co-author is Patricia Bellis Bixel, history professor and chair of the Department of Arts and Sciences at Maine Maritime Academy.

In this book, Bixel and Smith consider “the visual record Phillips left behind, publishing many of these photographs for the first time, and integrating his photographic archive with his research and teachings on the history of the South,” according to The University of South Carolina Press, the book’s publisher. Phillips ranked as America’s foremost authority on southern history at the time of his premature death in 1934.

Images of plantation crops, machinery, white southerners and former slaves depict a time period that was once the backbone of the South. They illustrate the pain, struggle and lives of African Americans, depicting race relations and the lifestyles of blacks and whites.

“What a tour de force!” said reviewer John Herbert Roper, Sr. of Emory & Henry College. “Both Bixel and Smith are incisive historiographical students as well as imaginative interpreters of photographs.”

Smith is particularly interested in the emancipation of the slaves, the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln. He has written or edited more than two dozen books books, including Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and “The American Negro” which received The Mayflower Cup Award in 2000. He also has four other books scheduled to appear in the near future, A Just and Lasting Peace, which will be released in May , Race and Recruitment, to appear in September, Lincoln and the U.S. Colored Troops, forthcoming in October, and The Dunning School to be released in November.

In addition to publishing more than 150 articles, Smith has lectured in 11 different nations spanning the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. On January 15, 2013, Smith gave a lecture titled “As Firmly Linked to ‘Africanus’ as Was That of the Celebrated Scipio”: Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation, and the U.S. Colored Troops at Heidelberg University in Germany.

On January 17, 2013, Smith held a workshop for school teachers at a library in Freiburg, Germany. The lecture explained the bigger meaning and implications of Lincoln’s shift from opposing to supporting emancipation and arming blacks; the role of black agency in influencing that process; Lincoln’s place in the historical memory of emancipation and black enlistment; and how Lincoln’s evolution changed not only the war, but America and even Lincoln himself.

On January 26, 2013, as part of a week long series of festivities celebrating Martin Luther King Jr., Smith gave a lecture to approximately 100 people at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Public Library, discussing the shift in Lincoln’s mentality from initial opposition to emancipation to his issuing the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862.

Smith teaches courses on the American South, the Civil War, and African-American slavery and emancipation. He is also currently writing books on the Austrian anthropologist Felix von Luschan, a history of the slave reparations movement, and a book on first-person narratives of the U.S. Colored Troops.