In Spring 2025, Georgia Southwestern State University students in Dr. Susan Bragg's HIST 4900: Histories of Manhood course explored the complexities of changing ideas about gender and masculinity in American history. While surveying the current historical scholarship on gender during our class sessions, we decided as a group to focus our individualized research projects on local stories of Sumter County. These projects are preliminary but committed investigations into the meanings of manhood in an early 20th southern community. 

Sumter County emerged as part of Georgia’s cotton frontier in the 1830s, anchored by the county seat of Americus. Not surprisingly, slavery proved highly profitable in the region despite the relatively late development of the county. This meant that debates about race and opportunity profoundly shaped all aspects of Sumter County life, even long after the Civil War ended the institution of slavery. By the early 20th c., when our class projects begin, Jim Crow segregation was firmly embedded in the region.

Throughout this semester, a few key themes have emerged in the course of student work.  A number of the projects have paid attention to how experiences of boyhood reflect ongoing processes of learning about gender and race in Sumter County. Students have also become adept at paying close attention to changing vocabularies of gender, helping them to identify specific and sometimes surprising debates in the local press relating to gendered norms in our region. Finally, we have sought to use a gendered analysis to better understand familiar stories such as the popularity of baseball in Americus, experiences of war, and the history of Georgia Southwestern State University. As one student noted, these “small histories” can provide new perspective on traditional historical narratives.