Leisure, plantations, and the making of a new South : the sporting plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry and Red Hills Region, 1900-1940 /

This collection of seven essays raises important questions about the post-reconstruction and 20th-century South. Although uneven in quality, the collective contribution is to highlight the development of northern-owned hunting estates in coastal Carolina and Georgia and in the red hills of southwestern Georgia and the northern Florida panhandle. The estates were at once leisure retreats and illustrations of the early 20th-century approaches to conservation (hunting and game laws often ran counter to local economic needs) or interracial relations (work-based relationships on the estates reinforced the position of African Americans in the world of southern tenancy even as the estate owners were dependent on tenants for expertise as guides). The essays are strongest in giving detail to the patterns of estate development (architecture, purchasing, or the estates as tourist destinations) and in outlining the social or hunting activities of the owners, residents, and hunters. While the essays also demonstrate the influence of estate owners in the politics of the 20th-century South, there are potentially rewarding lines of inquiry into politics that are left unexplored. There are occasional typographical issues and other errors that detract from an important contribution. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Thomas F. Armstrong, Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, UAE