Spying on the South : an odyssey across the American divide

Title:

Author:

Horwitz, Tony, 1958-2019, author.

Personal Author:

Horwitz, Tony, 1958-2019, author.

ISBN:

9781101980286

Physical Description:

476 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

Contents:

American nomad -- Yeoman Olmsted: "An enthusiast by nature" -- Over the Alleghenies: gateway to the Rust Belt -- Ohio River: mutants making tow -- Kentucky: "A balance sheet of good against evil" -- To Tennessee and back: a thorough aristocrat -- Mississippi River: Steamboat blues -- Lower Mississippi: the absolute South -- New Orleans: the gumbo city -- Into the bayou: "Dat's how we roll" -- Central Louisiana: the unreconstructed South -- The Red River; heard of mudness -- Across the Sabine: "Gwine to Texas" -- Gulf Coast: oil and water -- Crockett, Texas: "The drift of things" in ruby-red America -- Austin and beyond: the Loon Star Republic -- San Antonio: high holy days at the Alamo -- German Texas: Olmsted in Arcadia -- The Hill Country: true to the Union -- Upper Guadalupe: and Absalom rode upon a mule -- To the Rio Grande: border disorder -- La Frontera: days of the dead -- Central Park ramble.

Abstract:

"The author retraces Frederick Law Olmsted's journey across the American South in the 1850s, on the eve of the Civil War. Olmsted roamed eleven states and six thousand miles, and the New York Times published his dispatches about slavery and its defenders. More than 150 years later, Tony Horwitz followed Olmsted's route, and whenever possible his mode of transport--rail, riverboats, in the saddle--through Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi, through Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and across Texas to the Rio Grande, discovering and reporting on vestiges of what Olmsted called the Cotton Kingdom"-- Provided by publisher.

Personal Subject:

Horwitz, Tony, 1958-2019-Travel-Southern States.

Olmsted, Frederick Law, 1822-1903-Travel-Southern States.

Subject Term:

Plantation life.

Slavery -- Southern States -- History.

Southern States -- Social life and customs.

Geographic Term:

Southern States -- Description and travel.

Southern States -- History.

Genre:

Travel writing.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

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Summary

The New York Times -bestselling final book by the beloved, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Tony Horwitz.

With Spying on the South , the best-selling author of Confederates in the Attic returns to the South and the Civil War era for an epic adventure on the trail of America's greatest landscape architect. In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extraordinary journey, as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times.

For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name "Yeoman," the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. His vivid dispatches about the lives and beliefs of Southerners were revelatory for readers of his day, and Yeoman's remarkable trek also reshaped the American landscape, as Olmsted sought to reform his own society by creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. The result: Central Park and Olmsted's career as America's first and foremost landscape architect.

Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country? In search of answers, and his own adventures, Horwitz follows Olmsted's tracks and often his mode of transport (including muleback): through Appalachia, down the Mississippi River, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican borderland. Venturing far off beaten paths, Horwitz uncovers bracing vestiges and strange new mutations of the Cotton Kingdom. Horwitz's intrepid and often hilarious journey through an outsized American landscape is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains , Bad Land , and the author's own classic, Confederates in the Attic.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist wanders Dixie in search of what makes it so intractably un-American.Picking up, in a sense, where Confederates in the Attic (1998) left off, Horwitz (Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, 2011, etc.) follows a fruitful trail in the footsteps of one-time journalist Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled through the South reporting on the region for the precursor to the New York Times before reinventing himself as "a visionary architect of New York's Central Park, among many other spaces." Olmsted found a land bent on racial suppression, even as blacks and whites lived side by side, as well as one on the brink of civil war; Horwitz wonders how much things have changed since then. He discovered plenty of difference. For example, in West Virginia, a state that seceded from secession to rejoin the Union, the author passed time with coal miners who have been perfectly happy to destroy their almost-heaven while complaining that federal environmental scientists "find a puddle in your yard and call it a wetland." Like Olmsted, Horwitz's circuitous path took him along the Mississippi River and into Texas, perhaps the most schizophrenic of states today. As the resident of one East Texas town told him, after the author witnessed one scene after another of casual racism punctuated by an oddly easy mixing of black and white residents, the place is "somewhere between Mayberry and Deliverance." Horwitz seldom reaches deep; his book is casually observed and travelogue-ish ("Eagle Pass was no longer a mud-and-whiskey bedlam at the edge of the American frontier"), more Paul Theroux than de Tocqueville. Still, one can't help but notice that the things that occupied Olmsted's attention haven't changed much in the years since the earlier traveler toured a region that sometimes defies description.Not as sprightly as some of the author's past reports from the fringes but provocative and well worth reading. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.