James Carson

The Southern Soldier Boy-A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy is a classic American Civil War history/Civil War memoir by James Carson. A readable book should instruct, entertain and amuse. The author, outside of the historical interest of this little book, has aimed to cover a broad-enough field for all classes of readers to find some nourishing food--at least in the way of variety and shifting scenes--from the standpoint of a young private.

This provocative analysis of American historiography argues that when scholars use modern racial language to articulate past histories of race and society, they collapse different historical signs of skin color into a transhistorical and essentialist notion of race that implicates their work in the very racial categories they seek to transcend.