ABSTRACT
Steven M.Stowe's Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters, (Baltimore) is a study “of the interior lives of certain planter families.” Based primarily on diaries and letters, this book focuses on family life and social rituals—duels, courtship, and “coming of age”. Stowe's goal was to understand the perceptions that planters had of themselves and their culture and thereby discover how the “intimate understandings” of planters “reappeared in the public rituals that proclaimed their social power” (ix-x).
