Carl N. Degler

The author of this work argues that if one is to understand who southerners were and are today, southern dissent of the 19th century must be understood and appreciated, since those years shaped southern ideas, customs, and values.

Nearly twenty years after its original publication, Place Over Time remains an influential work in an ongoing debate at the heart of southern historiography—what is the South and how is it different from other parts of the country?Carl N. Degler takes issue with historians C. Vann Woodward, Eugene Genovese, and others who view the Old South as a fading memory overtaken by a bold New South, with the Civil War and its aftermath as the sharp dividing point between the two eras. He also challenges the conventional wisdom that the South is fundamentally different from the rest of the country. Instead, Degler makes an eloquent and thought-provoking argument for a narrowly limited but persistent southern cultural identity that shares common values with the rest of the country while retaining its own distinctiveness and continuity with the past.

In his historical perspective on the changes in scientific thought over the last 100 years, Carl N. Degler explores the study of social evolution and the ongoing search for human nature. In Search of Human Nature provides a detailed perspective on the reasons behind the shifting emphasis in social thought from biology, to culture, and again to biology. Degler examines why these changes took place, the evidence and people fostering these changes and why students of human nature decided to accept this momentous change in thought. He suggests varying ideologies as the underlying force behind this shift in the study of social science. From Darwin's theory that human social behaviour has drastically evolved from animals, to the belief that human experience serves as the basic differentiating factor in humans, Degler provides a thorough and captivating examination of the roots of human behaviour.

The original edition of this now classic work was hailed by Jacob Cohen in The Nation as "the finest one-volume interpretation of American history extant." For this Third Edition of Out of Our Past, Carl Degler has added a comprehensive new chapter on the historical development of American families, brought up to date the discussion of U.S. foreign policy, greatly expanded sections dealing with the place and history of women in our past, and made numerous changes throughout the text in light of scholarship published since the appearance of the 1970 Revised Edition.

Bringing into historical perspective the critical conflict between woman's right to equality of opportunity and the demands of the family, Degler shows how the modern family has been shaped by woman's search for greater autonomy.