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Robert Tinkler Responds to Peter Carmichael's Remarks Concerning his Review: The value of a monograph in our discipline may be measured by its ability to open up, rather than to shut down, questions and debates about our understanding of the past. On that score, as I suggested in my review, Peter Carmichael's _The Last Generation_ is indeed a valuable contribution to southern and Civil War historiography. Especially noteworthy are his careful profiling of a particular socio-economic cohort of males over roughly two decades, his fresh views about conceptions of masculinity, his serious attention to religion, and his insights into the wartime negotiations with lower status soldiers in which his last generation engaged. Even if I have some questions about the particulars of his study, I appreciate Professor Carmichael's opening this window into the minds of young Virginians. It strikes me that I should have more explicitly praised the book before rushing on to the questions I raised (perhaps just more evidence of my being a recovering graduate student). Then again, the questions I posed acknowledge Carmichael's accomplishment in treading into new territory and opening up issues for other historians to consider. Professor Carmichael acquits himself well in his response to my review, particularly in clarifying the issue of the "softening of Southern manliness." Also, I join Carmichael in hoping that others will pursue the fascinating issue of southern Transcendentalism he has unearthed. Finally, Carmichael is quite correct that he puts critical distance between himself and his subjects in various places in the book. My point there was overstated, so allow me to try to clarify it. It seemed to me that Carmichael did not make enough of an apparent disconnect in the last generation's analysis of Virginia's economic situation. After all, its members' preferred solution to the state's perceived backwardness involved support for precisely the kind of Whiggish economic development that the penultimate generation's "market revolution" was pursuing. Why so much youthful criticism of their fathers as old fogies if, in fact, economic development was proceeding apace? Again, I thank Peter Carmichael for the prodigious research and fresh thinking involved in this book. Robert Tinkler Department of History California State University, Chico
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