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Apr. 7 | MAASA Joint Conference—April, 2011
Joint conference on material culture, April 7-11, 2011, UW-Madison
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Green, Jennifer R. "Books and Bayonets: Class and Culture at Antebellum Military Academies," American and New England Studies, Boston University, January 2001.
Focusing on the antebellum South, this dissertation uses a combination of economic, demographic, and social characteristics to examine military education to explore the important role of education, specifically in fostering an emerging southern middle class. The dissertation examines archival sources and more than eight hundred cadet histories to explore southern education, mobility, and society. Educators founded almost one hundred private and state-sponsored military academies between 1819 and 1861. The funding and curriculum of such schools, including the Virginia Military Institute, allowed men with fewer resources and more interest in professional advantage to employ southern schooling as an alternative path of social mobility. Military academy cadets and alumni connected to national middle-class ideals with changing cultural definitions of honor, duty, and masculinity. Thus, military academies and their matriculates suggest that a separation between the southern elite and an emerging professional middle class began to develop in the generation before the Civil War.
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