A Sacred Circle: Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 by Drew Gilpin Faust

A Sacred Circle: Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 Reviews

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  Rosa King

  I chose to read A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South 1840-1860 by Drew Gilpin Faust because I wanted to better understand the perspectives and collective world view that informed ante-bellum attitudes among its leading thinkers. A Sacred Circle is a thoroughly researched and carefully sourced book that proved more of an academic read for me because I made a lot of notes and often needed to refer back to earlier passages. Ultimately, I found the answers I wanted in this insightful book. Egregious though they were, the misguided genius of the Sacred Circle of five self-professed intellectuals that justified proslavery thought in the South, made sense only after having considered the well-developed arguments presented earlier in the book. I would recommend A Sacred Circle as an authoritative book on the topic of critical thought and culture in the ante-bellum South.