I see from the Southern Intellectual History Circle page on facebook that distinguished historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown passed away on November 5. Wyatt-Brown was educated at Sewanee, Cambridge University, and Johns Hopkins and taught from many years at the University of Florida (and before that Case Western, the University of Colorado, and Colorado State). He had recently completed his final book, A Warring Nation: Honor, Race, and Humiliation in America’s Wars, which sounds absolutely fantastic. It sounds like a fitting capstone to a career that spanned serious work on anti-slavery as well as pro-slavery thought. His best-known book is Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, which influenced a generation of historians of the south to focus on the role of honor in southern life and action. It is a powerful volume that repays multiple readings -- and I think I shall go off now and spend some time with it this evening in honor of Dr. Wyatt-Brown.
Like many other legal historians -- Ariela Gross and Timothy Huebner come immediately to mind -- I have engaged Wyatt-Brown's focus on honor, though I remain rather more skeptical about its power in explaining southern behavior than many legal historians. I'm more on the economic side of things as an explanation for southern law. But then again, one of my current objects of study was in a duel in 1834!
This has been a year of significant loss for southern intellectual history.
Since the publication of Wyatt-Brown's book, it is interesting to trace the emergence of a fairly sophisticated and wide-ranging body of literature dealing with "honor" (and 'shame' for that matter) from psychological, moral, and philosophical perspectives (e.g., Alexander Welsh's 2008 volume, What Is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives), the latest of which I hope to read shortly is Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (Norton, 2010). Faculty Lounge readers would probably also be interested in Nate Oman's paper, "The Honor of Private Law," available at SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1792467
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | November 12, 2012 at 02:18 AM
I knew him somewhat socially--we belonged tp the same club in Baltimore. He was a fine person as well as an outstanding historian, His father-in-law, William Marbury, was one of the outstanding legal figures in the country in the middle third of the last century
Posted by: Bill Reynolds | November 12, 2012 at 11:07 AM