A Sacred Circle: Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860

by Drew Gilpin Faust

A Sacred Circle has been widely acclaimed as the first full treatment of the existence of a Southern reform impulse that offers a new explanation of the proslavery argument. The book demonstrates the widespread similarities between the cultural tensions that plagued North and South and documents the existence of critical thinking in a region too often considered monolithic. The ambivalent feelings of this group of men for their region, their need both to justify and to return, embody the dilemma not just of Southerners from Jefferson to Quentin Compson and C. Van Woodward but of the intellectual throughout history.

Genres: American History, History, Nonfiction

208 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1977

About the author

Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian who served as the 28th president of Harvard University, the first woman in that role. She was Harvard's first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard and the first to have been raised in the South. Faust is also the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has been ranked among the world's most powerful women by Forbes, including as the 33rd most powerful in 2014.

Reviews

[Rosa King · Rating 4 out of 5]

I chose to read A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South 1840-1860 by Drew Gilpin Faust because I wanted to better understand the perspectives and collective world view that informed ante-bellum attitudes among its leading thinkers. A Sacred Circle is a thoroughly researched and carefully sourced book that proved more of an academic read for me because I made a lot of notes and often needed to refer back to earlier passages. Ultimately, I found the answers I wanted in this insightful book. Egregious though they were, the misguided genius of the Sacred Circle of five self-professed intellectuals that justified proslavery thought in the South, made sense only after having considered the well-developed arguments presented earlier in the book. I would recommend A Sacred Circle as an authoritative book on the topic of critical thought and culture in the ante-bellum South.