Scholarship list
Review
Accepted for publication 12/09/2025
The Journal of American folklore
Leverett Butts’ Heroes with a Hundred Names: Mythology and Folklore in the Early Fiction of Robert Penn Warren is a daring and insightful reading of Penn Warren’s use of mythological and folkloric materials in the four novels of his major phase, beginning with Night Rider in 1939 (Houghton Mifflin), and closing with Band of Angels in 1955 (Random House). The book reflects Butts’ deep immersion in Warren’s fiction; his grasp of Warren’s key themes and of Warren’s critique of the materialism and rootlessness of contemporary society; his sensitive understanding of the characters’ psychologies and moral predicaments; and the investment he shares with Warren in comparative mythology.
Review
Catholicism and American Borders in the Gothic Literary Imagination
Published Summer 2021
Religion & literature, 53, 2, 160 - 163
Review
Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War (Review)
Published 08/01/2018
Journal of Southern History, 84, 3, 747 - 749
Review of "Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War" By Philip F. Gura.
Review
Review of 'The Worlds of American Intellectual History'
Published 07/2018
Reviews in history, 2263
Review of The Worlds of American Intellectual History, edited by: Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O'Brien, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Review
Lincoln's Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion (Review)
Published 09/01/2016
Journal of American History, 103, 2, 486 - 487
Review of "Lincoln's Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion", by Louis P. Mansur.
Review
Published 01/01/2015
American Political Thought, 4, 1, 166 - 169
Review of "The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics" by Christopher Childers.
Review
Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman (Review)
Published 01/01/2015
Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 36, 1, 64 - 69
Review of Abraham Lincoln, Philosopher Statesman by Joseph R. Fornieri.
The title might give readers the wrong impression that the book concerns how Abraham Lincoln developed new concepts in political philosophy in the manner of Thomas Hobbes or Karl Marx. But the book in fact illuminates Lincoln’s thinking and acts by referring to concepts from Aristotle, Plato, and Thomas Aquinas. Lincoln is, as it were, what Plato would have called a philosopher king, not a modern philosopher who happens also to be a ruler.
Review
American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era by David W. Blight (review)
Published 2014
The Register - Kentucky Historical Society, 112, 2, 319 - 322
Review of "American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era" by David W. Blight.
Review
The New New South in Poetry: Daniel Cross Turner’s Southern Crossings
Published 2012
The Mississippi quarterly, 65, 4, 613 - 618
Review of "Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South" by Daniel Cross Turner.
Review
The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Review)
Published 09/01/2011
The Wordsworth Circle, 42, 4, 281 - 283
Review of "The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America" by Laura Dassow Walls.