This is an invitation to experience history from a unique perspective. It will be the story of an entire generation; a chronicle of Tennessee’s Confederate soldiers told in their own words. It will also be the tale of a young historian, a freshly minted PhD from the University of Tennessee, who stumbled upon a rare and rich set of documents – The Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires; his analysis of them thrusted him into a controversy as old as the Civil War itself. That historian was “me”.

Collected between 1913 and roughly 1924, the Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires represented more than a simple attempt to record the personal memories of aging veterans; the project was designed to provide a basis for a “true history of the Old South,” one that would cast a positive image of the South’s aristocratic class. More than 1600 men responded. They were wealthy, impoverished, and everything in between. They revealed their lifestyles, their social attitudes, their Civil War experiences, and their postwar dynamics; and for more than a half  century their testimonies sat largely unnoticed in the Tennessee State Libraries and Archives. Published in 1986, my work revealed sharp contrasts in lifestyles and social attitudes unanticipated by the questionnaire’s creators. The series will contain four lectures:

• A True History of the Old South: The Controversy

• Old South Men: Planters and the Plain Folk

• Social Class and Civil War

• Old South Men in a New South World