In a Land of Strangers | An Evening with Michael Bernath
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🎟 This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event! An RSVP grants general entry, but seating is not guaranteed, so please try and show up early. Can't make the event?
About The Book
They came to teach—and left behind a portrait of the foreign South
What makes the American South distinctive? Is it the location, the culture, the mindset—or a story Americans learned to tell about themselves? In a Land of Strangers contends that the idea of a “distinctive” South did not crystallize out of the Civil War or politics alone; instead, it took shape decades earlier through the everyday observations of thousands of Northern teachers who lived and worked there from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War. Young, white, educated, and marked as outsiders, these men and women occupied an unusual position of trust within Southern households, classrooms, and plantations, granting them rare, intimate access to the inner workings of slaveholding society.
Michael T. Bernath offers the first full-length study of this vast group of teachers—the most sustained point of contact between North and South in the antebellum era. Bewildered, curious, and constantly translating the South for themselves and audiences back home, these educators described a strange and profoundly different place in their diaries and letters. Collectively, they fixed a shared image of the South in the national imagination. In this book, Bernath reshapes our understanding of sectional identity, American culture, and why the idea of a distinctive South endures.
About The Author
Michael Bernath specializes in 19th-Century American history with particular emphases on the Civil War Era, the South, and 19th-Century cultural and intellectual history. He received his bachelor’s degree from Brown University in 1997 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2005.
His forthcoming book, In a Land of Strangers: Northern Teachers in the Slave South (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), focuses on the experiences, perceptions, and reception of the thousands of northern men and women who lived and worked as teachers in the South during the years leading up to the Civil War. Embedded within southern slaveholding families, these uniquely positioned observers both recorded and shaped perceptions of sectional difference and the idea of a distinctive South. His first book, Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) examines the rise of Confederate cultural nationalism and the wartime efforts to construct an autonomous and distinctly southern intellectual and literary culture. He has published articles in the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of the Civil War Era, Civil War History, and Georgia Historical Quarterly, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library, the Virginia Historical Society, the Filson Historical Society, and the Boston Athenaeum. Professor Bernath teaches courses on the Civil War, the Rise of Sectionalism, the Old South, antebellum reform movements, as well as general topics in 19th-Century intellectual and cultural history.
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