The 1997 Porter L. Fortune Jr. History Symposium will examine the topic "Gender and the Southern Body Politic." The symposium will take place October 1-3 and consist of five panels plus the keynote address by Jacquelyn Hall, Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Nancy Bercaw, who teaches in the History Department at the University of Mississippi, is in charge of the program. "The purpose of this year's symposium is to bring together recent work using gender to challenge our understanding of how power was constituted in the South from the colonial period to the present," Bercaw said. "In particular, we are interested in an analysis of the relationship between domestic relations and the exercise of power in the public sphere."

In the last five years, work by new scholars points to the importance of gender in the construction of power and politics in the South. This symposium will bring these scholars together to address this new direction in Southern history.

Hall's keynote address, scheduled for the evening of Wednesday, October 1, will be followed the next day by three sessions on the 19th-century South. Kathleen Brown of the University of Pennsylvania will begin the day with a paper titled "Nathaniel Bacon and the Dilemma of Colonial Masculinity." Brown is the author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. "When Physical Violence Is Not Assault: Domestic Relations, Legal Personhood, and Political Discourse in the Antebellum South" will be presented by Laura Edwards, University of South Florida. She is the author of Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Stephanie McCurry, University of California, San Diego, will speak on nonelite women's challenges to citizenship during Secession and the Civil War. She is the author of Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum Household.

"Scalping New Men: The Civilian Conservation Corps and Male Bodies" and "Redesigning Dixie: The Reconstruction of Race, Gender, and Culture in the South through Affirmative Action on the Job" are topics to be addressed on Friday. The "Scalping of New Men" paper is by Bryant Simon, University of Georgia. He is author of A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Textile Workers in State and Nation, 1918-1948. The other paper is by Nancy MacLean, Northwestern University. She is author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.

Each session will include a formal comment and informal discussion. Among the commentators for the symposium are Peter Bardaglio, Goucher College; Winthrop Jordan, the University of Mississippi; Tera Hunter, Carnegie-Mellon; and Louise Neuman, University of Florida. As in the past, the director of the symposium will edit both the papers and the comments in a book to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. Information about the symposium is available from the History Department, The University of Mississippi, University, MS 38677; telephone 601-232-7148.