Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

J U L Y 2 0 0 8 235 1976, efforts to turn a commuter undergraduate campus into a more coherent community took hold in every area, including intercollegiate athletics, student organizations, interdisciplinary research, and academics (particularly the school’s University College, which offered a range of disciplines in the arts and sciences). Capital campaigns and construction managed to keep pace as UAB continued to grow in size and stature, as well as in importance as Alabama’s largest employer, throughout the twentieth century. As an in-house history by virtue of its author’s employment at UAB, this volume is not without signs of subjectivity. The author, for example, concludes that UAB has reached research heights that place it alongside the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. Such lofty claims are few, however; and the ﬁnal result is comprehensive documentation that reﬂects extensive and thorough research, as well as highly readable writing. KATHERINE REYNOLDS CHADDOCK University of South Carolina Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South. By Robert F. Pace. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. xii, 152 pp. $34.95. ISBN 0-8071-2982-8. Robert F. Pace rescues the college man of the Old South from obscurity , presenting this book as a successor to E. Merton Coulter’s enduring classic, College Life in the Old South: As Seen at the University of Georgia, ﬁrst published in 1928. Coulter’s lively book, although based on only one institution and full of the racial assumptions of his day, paints college life in broad strokes, attending not only to students and student life but also to the institutional and political contexts in which students operated. Pace, on the other hand, deals almost exclusively with the culture of student life, giving relatively little attention to broader contexts. His brief book is essentially an extended essay that probes the importance of the culture of southern honor and the stages of adolescence to a fuller understanding of college students in the pre-war South. T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 236 Chapters focus on the academic side of student life, the environment in which students lived, how they entertained themselves and built relationships, their often raucous behavior, and how they were affected by the coming of the Civil War. Halls of Honor is an interesting book, ﬁlled with charming anecdotes of nineteenth century college life sure to amuse readers and excite their interest in the topic. Pace’s book complements Coulter’s earlier work, which remains in print and can still be enjoyed, as well as Christie Anne Farnham’s more recent study of college women in the Old South, The Education of the Southern Belle (New York, 1994). Taken together, the Pace and Farnham books present a highly informative picture of regional collegiate education in the pre-war South, helping to lay the basis for a fuller understanding of southern higher education in that critical era. By one scholar’s account, ninety-eight degree-granting colleges existed in the South in 1850, nearly one-half the total number of such institutions in the United States. By today’s standards, most of these institutions were tiny, with enrollments rarely exceeding one hundred students. The South included more state universities than other regions, large numbers of denominational colleges, and a few military colleges. Pace studies student cultures in all types of institutions. By ferreting out manuscript collections with importance to the topic, he provides a particularly laudable and time-saving service to other researchers. Nevertheless, he gives special weight to a relatively small number of those collections and leans, perhaps excessively, on the experiences of Robert Dabney, a student at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. (Unfortunately, Hampden-Sydney is misspelled throughout the text as “Hampden-Sidney,” although, curiously, not in the bibliography). The list of secondary sources that undergirds the books is also impressive , but Pace does not integrate much of the literature into the text. For example, many histories of individual colleges are included in the bibliography but few are cited in the text. Institutional histories are often dismissed by historians as “court history,” based upon the...