ABSTRACT
International affairs and comparisons often figured in the public life of a state like Georgia. Elite southern whites prided themselves on their education and sophistication, which implied some familiarity with the world at large. Southern leaders had to be effective public speakers; although the region’s statesmen often fell back on bombast, at times they had to know what they were talking about. In the South during the last decades of the nineteenth century, college men were keenly aware of developments abroad that bore on interpretations of race. If still essentially conservative on that subject and most other matters, southern universities could not and did not try to ignore the many new currents of thought that swept through the period.
