As Samuel Eliot Morison was of Massachusetts, Bruce Catton of Michigan, and Walter Prescott Webb of Texas, so was Frank Lawrence Owsley of Alabama. There was a connection in each of these cases between the vocation of the historian and the place of origin, a link which bound native identity to the choice of subject for scholarly research. Frank Owsley came to the discipline of history out of the desire to correct and replace fashionable but abusive misunderstanding of the past of his own people. As he wrote to his friend Allen Tate, "The purpose of my life is to undermine by 'careful' and 'detached,' 'well documented,' 'objective' writing, the entire Northern myth from 1820 to 1876." Though always careful to observe the distinction between scholarship and apologetics, he wrote Southern history as an "interested party," as one conscious of the role of nationalist and sectionally motivated Northern...